♪♪ -Today, Los Angeles is one of the largest cities in the United States and the world.

But less than 200 years ago, it was a small outpost of Mexico after it became independent from Spain following the Mexican War of Independence.

Although remote and underdeveloped, the New Frontier offered a promise of freedom, possibility, and escape.

-L.A.

's story really is a constant one of myth, escape, reinvention, and, really, right from the beginning.

The first explorers come into California as early as the 16th century.

You've got the Spanish extolling the virtues of what the landscape looked like, what the place looked like, and, really, that carries forth from there on in.

♪♪ -Soon, treasure seekers and railroad barons would open up the state.

They would be followed by gangsters, oil moguls, real-estate speculators, and movie titans.

-They're coming to find a new life, a better life, make their own way in the world.

But some of them are coming to escape -- escape justice, escape the past, escape the old European world.

-Blurring the line between legal and illegal, the newcomers pursued every opportunity with hunger and, with schemes and swindles, drove the growth of the city.

These high achievers left behind many of L.A.

's most notable landmarks, including grand buildings and museums.

Their tastes were, not surprisingly and more often than not, distinctly European.

While Los Angeles today is identified with the film industry, it was the forces of war, industrial revolution, real-estate speculation, agriculture, the rag trade, and the discovery of oil that fueled its growth, bringing together a myriad of people from vastly different places and backgrounds.

L.A.

has always enshrined twin ambitions and myths -- those of escape and success.

-And that myth, that escapism, becomes part of the story, in a way.

People tell those tales back further east.

They tell those tales back to the Old World, to Europe.

It becomes part of the foundational myth, if you like, of California.

There's something there to chase at the end of the world, as it were -- the Pacific Rim.

You can find a new existence.

You can reinvent yourself in the California wilderness.

-In this program, we explore Los Angeles today and trace its journey to how it became, in just over 100 years, one of the biggest and richest cities on the planet.

-It's never been reticent about endorsing the legends first.

It's the -- It's the old quote by the film director John Ford.

Uh, "If -- If the -- the myth gets in the way of the reality, print the myth."

-Will the dream keep on giving?

♪♪ ♪♪ Previously, before Spanish explorers crossed the desert from Mexico, the Los Angeles region, like much of the coast of California, was home to indigenous communities of Indians who were all but wiped out by the resulting wave of Mexican and then European immigration.

After the Civil War and the Gold Rush, the citrus industry and then the discovery of oil turned Los Angeles into a boomtown.

Then the building of an ingenious but controversial 200-mile-pipeline brought water from beyond the mountains and turned this barren region into a desert oasis, setting the scene for the city's dramatic expansion and transformation.

♪♪ ♪♪ Today, the downtown district of Los Angeles is one of the U.S.

's biggest central business districts.

It was only just after 1990 larger buildings were constructed along Broadway and Spring Street from 3rd to 9th Street in what is now called the Historic Core.

Banks and the new L.A.

Stock Exchange clustered around the Spring Street Financial District, sometimes referred to as "the Wall Street of the West."

Department stores came, too, and several grand hotels were built -- the Alexandria in 1906, the Rosslyn in 1911.

But the jewel was the Biltmore.

Built in 1923, this was the place to be seen, and, for the next 20 years, it hosted the Academy Awards in its grand ballrooms.

It's still here today, and all the stars of the day -- Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, and Jane Wyman -- were here.

Unlike other grand hotels of the era, the Biltmore and its heritage has been preserved and refurbished, its grand period features retained and celebrated.

Even the menus from its many events are on display in its historic corridor.

Despite the glamour, dinner was $1.50, and a martini, 5 cents.

♪♪ A block away from the Biltmore was Broadway, home to the nightlife, shopping, and entertainment district of the city, with over a dozen theater and movie palaces built before 1932.

With the expansion of the city west after the Second World War, the downtown area as an entertainment and shopping district faded.

100 years later, not that much has changed.

In fact, much of the downtown district lies neglected and run down, its streets now home to the poor and homeless.

♪♪ By 1920, the city's private and municipal rail lines were the most far-flung and most comprehensive in the world in mileage, even besting that of New York City.

Rail lines connected four counties with over 1,100 miles of track.

L.A., a cow town in the 1850s, would, in the space of 50 years, become a bigger city than San Francisco.

-In three decades, it increased its size 100%, 200%, 300%, and, already, it was the city, by the 1930s, that was rivaling its great neighbor to the north, San Francisco, for power and influence.

And by the war years, of course, it would overtake San Francisco, in essence.

-Meanwhile, on the other side of what is now known as the Hollywood Hills, another district was being developed by the real-estate men tapping into the fast-developing real-estate boom.

-If anything about the story and evolution of Los Angeles tells you that people are involved in greed, manipulation, scandal, mistrust, controversy, then it's real estate.

♪♪ -They called it Hollywoodland.

♪♪ The last letters have long since dropped off.

But just 30 years after the sign was erected, the area below the sign had become the center of a fast-developing global film industry.

-The myth is somewhat true in the story.

The "land" bit, the four letters at the end of "Hollywoodland," did literally fall off the mountainside, and you ended up just with "Hollywood."

Um, and it was only really in the postwar years, remember, um, that then, uh, the city's patrons again and the -- and the city council thought, "You know, actually, this is a landmark, isn't it?

This rather defines us," you know?

And, of course, the film studios themselves used the Hollywood sign to advertise and define themselves, so we'd better protect it and look after it.

♪♪ -Comedy makes us laugh in many different ways.

This is the earliest form of screen comedy -- slapstick.

♪♪ -Before World War I, films were made in several American cities.

This was the era of the silent movie.

But soon filmmakers tended to gravitate towards Southern California as the industry developed.

One of its earliest and most successful exponents was Charlie Chaplin, who was one of the first movie stars to make Hollywood his home.

♪♪ -Hollywood falls into a similar category from other industries that went out West.

Uh, it largely, uh, constructed itself and developed and evolved partly by accident, partly by happenstance, partly by certain people who had an imagination that could see something that, at the time, simply wasn't there.

-They were attracted by the warm climate and reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film their films outdoors year-round.

-Remember, the first people who came out to Los Angeles and to the West in the 1900s were really looking for only a semi-permanent location.

At that point, the film industry, as it was developing in the United States, had an East Coast hub, and it had a winter settlement in Florida, so the studios that were around in their infancy, most of which you wouldn't recognize today, those studios had bases in -- often in New Jersey, in fact, not in -- not necessarily in New York, but they had a winter location in Florida where they could go and film.

And, remember, at this point, all filming was done outside.

It wasn't done on soundstages.

You needed natural light and you needed good weather to film.

So the -- the natural next step was to find somewhere alternative to the East Coast.

As soon as filmmakers arrived in California, the prospects were endless.

You had mountains, you had desert, you had sea, you had scenery, you had greenery.

You had every possible combination that you might want.

You had 300 days a year where there were clear blue skies and perfect sunshine.

It was absolutely perfect to set up.

♪♪ -War damage contributed to the decline of the then-dominant European film industry in favor of the United States, where infrastructure was still intact.

The stronger early public health response to the 1918 flu epidemic by Los Angeles compared to other American cities reduced the number of cases there and resulted in a faster recovery, contributing to the increasing dominance of Hollywood over New York City.

But there was also an economic reason for the industry to move West.

-The East Coast film industry, by the turn of the 20th century, was largely in control of one group organization or, indeed, one man -- Thomas Edison.

Edison had patented the film equipment that, basically, cinema worked with in the early 20th century -- film stock as well as film equipment, film cameras, et cetera.

And those patents had to be paid to the Edison Company and Corporation.

Film studios couldn't avoid them, moviemaking companies couldn't avoid them, and it was a sort of closed shop, if you like.

They just didn't have the freedom to develop their own product, their own technology, their own equipment.

Edison had a strong controlling influence.

So, the idea, in one sense, was to escape that.

And the easiest way to escape was to go to the other side of the continent, go to the West Coast, try and, you know, think that Edison's lawyers wouldn't chase you and come after you to get payment for whatever it was that you were doing, uh, or whatever film stock or equipment you'd taken with you and just hope the problem would go away.

-As L.A.

boomed on the back of the film industry, more and more people were attracted to the city on the back of the images they saw, which fed into a growing Hollywood story.

-Look at movies like the Keystone Kops, Mack Sennett's famous Keystone Cops, from the 1910s and 1920s.

What's the -- What's basically the tagline, the narrative, of those stories?

Well, the Keystone Kops spend most of their time on fire engines and in police cars chasing 'round the city.

But what they're doing is and what they're showing is a nascent city in its very, um, building, in its very creation.

The city's changing around them year by year.

And what the audience is seeing on the cinema screen is something that's almost growing before their eyes, and they're thinking, "Well, why don't I live in a place like this, you know?

Why don't I live in somewhere that looks like Sunset Boulevard" as it was starting to -- to -- to change "or on Gower Street or Hollywood Boulevard or in Westwood or Hollywood?"

Um, and that's -- That was an immense attraction in its own way.

Los Angeles didn't look like the place you lived in, didn't look like anywhere else, and yet it was in the United States.

So why wouldn't you be attracted to go there?

And what was it about this place that was really exciting that people spent their time running around the streets and being chased by things and having these exciting adventures?

It was the perfect kind of environment.

-In the early 20th century, when the medium was new, many Jewish immigrants found employment in the U.S.

film industry With backgrounds in the garment industry in vaudeville, where they'd found jobs, they were able to make their mark in a brand-new business -- the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called "nickelodeons," after their admission price of a nickel.

Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers -- Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack -- had switched to the production side of the business.

Soon they were heads of a new kind of enterprise -- the movie studio.

-All of these people who would lead the major studios that people will know -- Warner Bros., Columbia, Universal, MGM -- all of them decided to relocate to Hollywood.

It became quite a cutthroat business very early on.

They all knew each other, and they all kind of hung out in the same circles, but they didn't really kind of, um, plot together.

They didn't really like each other in certain circumstances, either.

They were all looking to create their own little piece of sort of film-industry business, wealth, acumen, culture, et cetera.

But what they understood they needed was to create -- the universal thing they understood they needed to create -- was a movie culture.

-This is the most important piece of equipment in motion pictures -- the camera.

-And that singular vision was to create somewhere that was like California -- otherworldly, fantastical, a dream landscape, the sort of thing that would attract audiences into movie theaters and make them believe that the stars, the studios, the films were some incredible experience that they could be a part of for a small period of time but that existed in this other world which was largely inaccessible to them.

-Nearly everyone who comes to Hollywood inevitably visit this widely publicized intersection, hoping to brush shoulders with the movie stars.

-And that pervasive legend, that pervasive idea, that creation myth, if you like, of the studios, was absolutely critical to their success, because, again, it was kind of classless.

People were drawn to the theaters and drawn to watch movies and drawn to the big stars because they didn't come from what was perceived to be some kind of social or class elite system.

They were self-made.

If you were Charlie Chaplin or you were Laurel and Hardy or Harold Lloyd, you were everyman heroes.

Or if you were Clara Bow or Mary Pickford, you were girls that were picked out of a cast line and you became superstars, but you seemed as though you were just like ordinary people, and that was immensely attractive, and the studios knew that.

-They also set the stage for the industry's internationalism.

The industry is often accused of Americentric provincialism.

Other movie-makers arrived from Europe after World War I -- directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and actors like Rudolph Valentino and Marlene Dietrich.

They joined a homegrown supply of actors lured West from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries.

-It's a system, and you have to work within the confines of that system, and that system was about churning out what was often repetitive product -- what the masses would like.

Why did the moguls create such a system like that?

Why was that important to them?

Well, the repetition, of course, meant that you create an awful lot of product.

[ Rumbling ] ♪♪ [ Woman screams ] [ Man screams ] ♪♪ Remember, films went out into the market and people watched them barely for a week back in the studio-system era, the '30s to the 1960s.

Today you might be able to watch a film on a screen for months and months.

That simply wasn't true then.

And, of course, you'd never be able to see that film again, necessarily, unless it was revived, so you wouldn't have much of a chance.

But that meant there was a huge turnover, so you had to produce a lot of film.

♪♪ -King Baggot, one of the great early directors, with May Robson.

Binnie Barnes was one of Hollywood's glamour girls, the glamour that was in full flower at the world premiere of a new picture.

-The other imperative was that you were building, in this collection of films -- you were building an identity.

You were building a kind of WASPish -- white Anglo-Saxon Protestant -- identity that the moguls wished to be associated with.

They didn't want the film industry to be known as a Jewish industry that had emigrated out of Central or Eastern Europe.

♪♪ Even stories that weren't really set in America, so even, you know, stories that were old European fables or were adaptations of literature from outside the United States still played to this notion that there was a sort of WASP identity, a very American identity, at work here.

And the moguls wanted to be associated with that.

You know, they created a community that was very -- to put it in, you know, in simple terms -- very un-Jewish, in a way, in its cultural fabric and its social outlook and its political aspirations.

And for them, that was a means of becoming part of the American establishment, part of the American Dream.

-The studios these entrepreneurs founded grew into major enterprises.

They have had multiple owners since, but they're still here today -- giant lots housing the soundstages that put Hollywood on the map.

The golden years of Hollywood also saw the development of a style of architecture unique to L.A.

and Southern California.

-They entered into, if you like, a kind of architectural cultural idea of how Los Angeles should look.

Most Los Angeles housing is often thought of as low-slung, very low level, often on one floor.

But even where it wasn't, those houses were created in the Spanish Revival style.

It was almost bringing back into fashion a sense of Los Angeles' past that had actually never really been there in the first place.

Los Angeles had never had those buildings and never really quite had that Mexican-Spanish style, except for in some of its very traditional historic buildings -- the missions, for example.

But it was those missions that became the templar, if you like, not only for residences, it became the templar for the Hollywood studios.

Hollywood's buildings, if you go around, many of the studios look a little bit like the missions in the Spanish Revival style.

They have slate roofs.

They often have white walls.

They're often very low-slung and one-floor buildings.

So, they wanted to establish and create that kind of idea, even though there was not a, you know -- a huge amount of those buildings across Los Angeles.

Most of them were relics of the Spanish-Mexican period and the -- and the mission and pueblo thread of buildings that had helped Spanish rule in Alta California as it had been known in the 18th, 19th centuries.

♪♪ -Inspired by the decoration of the Arts and Crafts movement and the modernist Prairie-style designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, the California Craftsman home, with its low-pitched roofs, overhanging eaves, and large porches, helped cool the building during harsh, hot summers.

It also celebrated the wonders of man-made materials and was an aesthetic reaffirmation of the beauty of natural materials and forms and the marvels of what humans can make with their own hands.

-Right from the beginning, Los Angeles has never been afraid to simply raze things to the ground and rebuild something else and reinvent.

-This is Hollyhock House, in the heart of Hollywood, built in the 1920s for an American heiress by an architect who was to become America's most famous.

But in his early days, Los Angeles was the only place that Frank Lloyd Wright could get any work at all.

-Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.

particularly was a huge influence on the way that early to mid-20th-century Los Angeles architecture developed and changed.

He embodied, really, that Los Angeles notion of the future mixed with the past in some kind of architectural mishmash that doesn't look like anywhere else and yet seems identifiable with certain past elements and places.

So there's, again, Spanish Revivalist influence.

There's sci-fi futurism there.

There's Mayan, Central American, Mexican influence in some of it.

There's a kind of classical modernism in some of the buildings.

And you see that dotted around the Los Angeles landscape all -- all the time, very much.

And, of course, those buildings have become all the more famous for the fact that they've become their own film sets.

You know, that's -- that's if you like the sort of, uh, post-modernism of Los Angeles in its way.

These buildings that were made for, uh, clients, meant to be residences, have passed over into folklore as these postmodern apparitions, if you like, of the way Los Angeles is both supposed to look in the future and even, in some cases, adapts the guise of how it looked or supposedly looked in the past.

That's one of the -- you know, the strangest elements, particularly of Lloyd Wright's designs.

You know, they're brilliant, maddening, incredible, uh, futuristic, otherworldly.

But, at the same time, they have this recognizable quality that is purely Los Angeles.

-As the downtown district of L.A.

expanded west in the 1930s, another architectural style was en vogue -- Art Deco.

The height of its popularity, inspired and influenced by the discoveries of ancient temple sites in Egypt and Mexico, coincided with a boom, with large department stores and smaller cinemas exhibiting the style.

They are still prominent landmarks on L.A.

boulevards today.

With another nod to history, L.A.

also became home to the Coliseum, a giant sporting arena now home to a college football team called the Trojans.

To celebrate just half a century of growth from a small cow town to global metropolis, it hosted the 1932 Olympic Games.

♪♪ L.A.

wasn't always a city of roads and motorcars.

For a time, the world's most electric rail network existed here.

But unlike San Francisco, it got rid of it in the 1940s.

But some grand projects did survive.

Los Angeles' Union passenger terminal, Union Station, opened in May 1939, unifying passenger services amongst various local, regional, and long-distance passenger trains.

It was built on a grand scale and would be one of the last of the great railway stations built in the United States.

-John Parkinson, who was born in England but did come here in the Victorian era -- He ended up really contributing to the foundation of L.A.

as we know it now.

He built some of L.A.

's major civic buildings.

He was part of the team that designed City Hall.

He built the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

He built Bullocks Wilshire, the famous Art Deco department store, now the Southwestern University on Wilshire Boulevard.

He and his son designed Union Station that we're standing in now.

He is bringing something of an English influence in that he had a training dating right back to his teens in the crafts.

He really was someone who learned how to build, how to construct with an enormous level of detail.

He was also interested in the Beaux Arts tradition, which was a tradition of design that really emanated from Europe in the late 19th century.

But he brought all that with him to L.A., where, like so many of us that come to Los Angeles, he was utterly, I think, invigorated and -- and liberated by the sense of possibility and sense of freedom that existed here.

I think it's fair to say that Union Station is one of the most photographed buildings.

It's appeared in so many films.

I think there's a real kind of affection for this building, and I think people weren't going to let it ever completely disappear.

♪♪ Although L.A.

became less of a train city than it was when Union Station was built.

Nonetheless, there still have been users of the train system right up till now, and now what we're seeing is an expansion of the train system.

This was the last of the great American railway stations.

So this, in a way, is the sort of exclamation point at the end of an era of the great American rail.

♪♪ -Always central to L.A.

's growth story has been its migrants.

People have long come here from all over the world, but it hasn't always been an easy ride or plain sailing.

♪♪ Throughout it all, the largest source of migrants has been from south of the border, from Mexico.

-Migration of Mexican-origin people to Los Angeles and to California and the United States is really part of the largest mass migration of people ever to come to the United States.

And for Mexicans, in terms of the mass numbers, it begins in the early 1900s, around the turn of the century, but dramatically so with the Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, that creates chaos and warfare, civil war in Mexico, and unleashes, over the next 20 years, about 1/10 of the entire population of Mexico that comes to the United States, principally Texas and California, and by the 1920s, California is the favored destination for literally hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, and Los Angeles is the place they're coming to.

♪♪ -A large number of the workforce in California for the agricultural, um, development -- You know, they needed a cheap workforce, and they came down -- they came from Mexico and South America.

-L.A.

still operates the biggest port in America, underscoring its role as a gateway to the country.

But while L.A.

attracted migrants chasing dreams from across the country and the world, they didn't necessarily all find a pot of gold at the end.

The Chinese, who had been instrumental in building the railways in the 1860s, connecting California to the rest of the country, still suffered discrimination and persecution.

By the 1880s, the U.S.

government actually stopped any more Chinese entering the country.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was in place for 60 years, until 1943, halting Chinese immigration to the U.S.

-It was playing on a... a racist sensibility in America which was already so developed through slavery and the whole Black-white issue.

So then you add in the issue of the yellow, and so the United States government passed -- in the 1880s, passed -- the Chinese Exclusion Act, so no more Chinese were allowed to immigrate, and that's the only time they've ever excluded a group, but it was entirely on racial grounds, and, of course, that was mostly California.

So, you start with genocide, and then you move on to exclusion, and then, in World War II, you have, um, the Japanese being interned in camps.

So, California has a -- an uncomfortable racial history.

♪♪ -In South L.A., the Chinese could only be buried in separate cemeteries.

These cemeteries, like this one in Boyle Heights, are still here today, as are nearby Protestant cemeteries, which are largely whites only.

These cemeteries underscore the segregation that existed and sometimes remains in L.A.

's suburbs today.

♪♪ -There was not just segregation in housing and living, et cetera -- and jobs.

There was segregation in death.

♪♪ -The Chinese weren't the only migrants to be persecuted in L.A.

's story.

The city had once been part of Mexico, and Mexican immigration had been a constant ever since the city's founding, when the first settlers were, in fact, from Mexico.

But the Great Depression in the 1930s led to the biggest mass deportation in U.S.

history, when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were forcibly evicted from the country.

-Los Angeles -- it became the epicenter for that deportation.

Union Station -- they had -- The federal government, with local authorities, hired trains, the Union Pacific Railroad trains, the Southern Pacific Railroad trains to deport people back to Mexico.

It was a dark era for Mexican-origin people in Los Angeles during that period.

♪♪ -In 1924, the Japanese, many of whom lived in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo District, were to suffer a similar fate, with new arrivals prevented from entering the States when a new Exclusion Act was passed.

More than 30,000 lived here in Little Tokyo.

Then, with the outbreak of World War II, they were among more than 50,000 Japanese living in California who were interned.

-The residents of the new community set about developing a way of life as nearly normal as possible.

They issued their own newspaper, organized nursery schools, and some made camouflage nets for the United States Army.

-At the same time, Japanese-Americans were part of the U.S.

Army forces fighting in the Pacific War.

Hostility extended to the Mexican population during the war years, too, when it was felt that they weren't patriotic enough.

There were confrontations between Navy servicemen and Mexican youths.

-Some of the stereotypes of Mexicans as criminals, as bandits, et cetera, et cetera, get layered on top of one another, and during the war, during World War II, there had already been identified by the Los Angeles press a problem of Mexican-American youth.

-In June 1943, off-duty American sailors attacked Mexican youths dressed in the fashion of the time, known as zoot suits.

This became known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

-Now, the story goes there was an altercation between some Mexican-American men and their girlfriends and the sailors -- white sailors.

And the sailors were beat up.

As the story goes, they went back to their military base and they told them the Mexicans, especially the ones dressed in zoot suits, that particular style, popular across America for young men in the early 1940s, that "we have to seek revenge against these Mexican hoodlum gangsters."

And so they come into downtown Los Angeles by the taxiload, looking for Mexicans, and for five days and nights, as the the L.A.

Police Department stays back and says, "Let these sailors mop up these dirty Mexican gangsters," and all hell breaks loose.

♪♪ -L.A.

has long had an aviation pioneering history.

♪♪ In 1910, 200,000 people gathered at an airfield here to witness one of the world's first ever aircraft in flight, an event underwritten by the moguls Henry Huntington and William Randolph Hearst.

100 years ago, famous navigators such as Amelia Earhart set out on record-breaking journeys from here.

These pivotal events would help cement Los Angeles as the center of a burgeoning aviation and aerospace industry for decades to come.

-These workers are the lucky ones who see the finished product of their labor roll off the line.

Every hour of every day, they are witness to this awe-inspiring ceremony, this tremendous wedding of material and man-hours, this climax in the history of man's conquest of the air.

-Dozens of airports were set up with innovators believing this new mode of transport would already replace the recently arrived motor vehicle, and, over time, the city became home to some of the world's leading aircraft companies, such as Northrop, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas.

♪♪ The outbreak of World War II was to usher in another chapter in L.A.

's incredible growth story.

Los Angeles became the center of a major weapons-production industry, particularly focusing on aircraft manufacturing.

♪♪ -The defense industry has been critical to Los Angeles' economy almost from the start, really.

You know, World War II is often the catalyst, of course, you know, because then you have the momentum of a wartime industry that's got to produce aircraft and shipping and has got to have military -- a large military force.

So California had and Los Angeles particularly had very distinct advantages in that -- in that respect.

First of all, it had ports that would allow shipping to come in and out of it and therefore allow for the building of naval vessels, shipping -- commercial, military -- right from the beginning, 'cause it was a natural place to test this, have it.

You had great conditions for that.

-During World War II, the aircraft and defense industries needed workers, and in the space of less than four years, 350,000 Black Americans moved here from the Southern states.

They settled in South Central Los Angeles.

This was one of the largest internal migrations in U.S.

history.

Blacks encountered racism in L.A.

just as they did in the South.

In the Orange County, the Ku Klux Klan was active, known to Blacks as the White Terror.

-The KKK was very active in Orange County and in Los Angeles County during the 1920s and 1930s and going into the 1940s.

And so there you have, you know, literally tens of thousands of people who go to Klan rallies.

You've got 1,500 people who are membership of the Klan.

If you're looking at Orange County and Los Angeles County combined, you know, there were parades.

There were, uh, festivals.

There were, you know, all kinds of gatherings of memberships of the Klan.

And there also were -- You know, there's evidence of terror, as well, where people's houses were broken into, where people were physically assaulted.

The sheriff of L.A.

County, the police chief of L.A.

County were all members of the Klan.

It was -- L.A.

County, Orange County were rife with Klansmen, as, um, city council members, et cetera, et cetera.

It's a very interesting and upsetting story -- one that we don't often think of when we think of Los Angeles or Southern California, which is thought of typically as a Mecca of liberalism, a Mecca of opportunity.

♪♪ -Blacks were restricted to where they could live, owing to racially restrictive real-estate covenants that determined who could live where in the city.

-All these restrictive covenants were not just for Black people.

They were for Jewish people.

They were for Catholic people.

They were for Mexican-descended people, Central Americans.

They were for, you know, all kinds of people that were not white and Protestant.

-By the 1930s, Realtors, in part, through their power and authority and through the idea that they wanted to sell to certain groups of people, often people that had more money or who could often buy housing tracts that were that much more expensive in communities that were seen as that much more middle-class, acceptable, et cetera, the institution of housing covenants spread right across the city, and so that freedom of movement and choice that had been exercised right at the beginning of the 20th century had almost disappeared before World War II.

-Areas such as Beverly Hills, Thousand Oaks, and Bel-Air were white only.

These covenants, long gone, still impact on the cultural makeup of the city today and its distinct regions and neighborhoods.

South Central L.A.

is predominantly Black, while there's a big European population in the West Side suburbs.

The famous, or infamous, Compton was Hispanic and didn't become a Black neighborhood until after the covenants were lifted.

It's now largely a Hispanic neighborhood again.

Al Camillo grew up there.

-It was that little stipulation in a deed of sale that restricted particular people, and the Realtor and the owner could write in the names of people.

Could be Chinese, it could be Mexican, it could be Black, et cetera, et cetera.

And in a place like Compton and in Los Angeles in general, there were two groups -- three, really -- that -- that, um, were restricted.

You had an increasing number of African-Americans by the 1930s and 1940s, but Mexicans were the largest population.

So, it had a profound impact on where they could live, and so you see the emergence of what we call Mexican-American barrios, uh, are a result of that.

So, where I grew up in Compton, in the late 1940s, it had been, uh, a community that was the result of restrictive covenants used in Compton because there were two populations in the 1920s and 1930s that were placed on those restrictions.

They weren't African-Americans yet.

They were Mexicans and Japanese.

And, consequently, it meant that there was gonna be racial segregation.

-Immediately after the Second World War, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that this was unconstitutional.

You couldn't do this kind of thing.

And what did the real-estate industry do in Los Angeles?

They set about finding ways to circumvent that -- that law, and they used exactly that idea.

First Amendment, freedom of choice, should be the freedom to be able to sell to whomever they like.

So, really, it was freedom of a certain choice of people you liked, which was an odd way in which to kind of interpret the First Amendment to the Constitution.

But that's what they did.

-The predominantly liberal Democratic voters of Los Angeles continued to vote in favor of restrictive covenants for another decade, until the regulations were finally overturned in the 1970s.

Los Angeles today is America's most Asian city, and much of that identity can be attributed also to World War II.

-Most people who are gonna be shipped out, particularly for the Pacific Theater in World War II, would go from Los Angeles.

And when they came back, they would come back to California and most particularly in Los Angeles, and they never went away again.

The population grew again, uh, several times, uh, between 1941 and 1945.

♪♪ -The Philippines had been a U.S.

colony ever since the U.S.-Spanish War of 1898.

But after the bloody battle to liberate the country from Japan in World War II, more Filipinos came here, settling just north of the downtown district in an area still known as Filipinotown.

Then, in the 1950s, Koreans came in greater numbers after the Korean War.

L.A.

's Koreatown is the biggest Korean hub outside Korea.

-The Korean War of the 1950s, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and '70s produced many, many migrants who were escaping war, poverty, political persecution, and they were all offered -- of course, because of the nature of the United States' involvement, they were all offered refuge in the United States and principally -- not exclusively but principally -- in California and particularly in Los Angeles.

So, the Korean community of Los Angeles, for example, goes from very, very few, uh, people, very, very small communities, to becoming the third largest community in Los Angeles by the time you get to the 1980s and 1990s.

Only Chinese and Japanese residents and those communities will be larger than the Korean residents, for example.

♪♪ -In later American wars, natives from other Asian countries, notably Cambodia and Vietnam, settled here after the Vietnam War.

Diasporas from across the world also made it their home.

Los Angeles has the second biggest Jewish population of any city in the U.S., after New York, and the third biggest in the world.

Jewish immigration preceded World War II, but the Holocaust meant many Jews sought sanctuary here, including a large Orthodox population.

After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, many Iranian Jews joined them.

Iran's L.A.

diaspora is the world's biggest.

♪♪ Many Armenians made it their home after the genocide there 100 years ago, and they still vigorously celebrate their national day on the streets of Los Angeles.

-I'm here to support my Armenian cause.

It's -- We are marching for justice, to show to all world that we are here.

We demand our rights.

-For L.A.

's biggest immigrant group, migration to the state would hit its peak in the years after the war.

-The period from basically 1970 to 2010 was, by far, the largest mass migration of any immigrant group ever in the history of the United States.

How many?

It's been estimated as 20 million Mexican-origin people came and went, came and stayed.

If you're third- or fourth-, in some cases, fifth-, sixth-, seventh-generation Los Angelino, um, you can make a claim that this is your land and you were here or your relatives were here before the Americans annexed it after war in 1848, right?

And it became a state in 1850.

So, the idea of "This is our land and the Americans are foreigners" -- that first developed in the -- what we call the Chicano movement, the Mexican-American civil rights, of the 1960s.

-For Mexican immigrants, border issues are a constant in American history.

-100 years ago, one of the "ideas" of the Mexican problem in a place like Los Angeles in the 1920s is that "there are too many of them.

Um, yeah, they're workers, but their kids are going to our schools and they're speaking Spanish, and they're slowing down our children's, uh, ability to learn."

Those questions are surfaced over and over again with every large wave of Mexican immigrants that come to the United States and who settle in huge numbers in Los Angeles.

So, it is a broken record, if you will.

There are variations to the political and to the cultural and other dimensions of this, but it is one of those threads that goes through American history, Los Angeles history, over the last 100, 115 years.

If you took that population of both undocumented Mexican and Latino workers and low-wage workers who are Mexican-American citizens and other Latinos that are citizens, if you took them away, the economy of Los Angeles, one would arguably say the economy of so many parts of the Southwest and other parts of the country, would absolutely crumble.

So it's this disjuncture between what the people considered a problem yet fundamental to the workings of our economy, and those two things are still butting heads.

♪♪ -Like its migrants, L.A.

has continued to reinvent itself, always open to new ideas and pushing boundaries.

In love with the automobile, it built some of the country's first freeways.

♪♪ The modernist architectural trend, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, led to some of the world's most innovative architects designing buildings here.

♪♪ In the 1970s also came Googie, an architecture that said, "Look at me!," enshrined by the famous circular Capitol Records Building in the heart of Hollywood.

♪♪ -There are more swimming pools per square mile in this land of movie stars than any other place in America.

-Freedom is what California is all about.

You moved here to California to do away with your old life, to start life anew, and people would let you.

And in architecture, this was the only city that Frank Lloyd Wright could get a job for 20 years, in the teens, '20s, and '30s.

Um, nobody else would hire him.

But here people just said, "Sure.

Go ahead.

Do it.

You know, knock yourself out."

And, uh, there's that atmosphere that goes across the -- the culture, certainly through the movie industry, through lifestyles here in California, which allowed Googie to really take those ideas and take them as far as they possibly could.

-It's a trend that continues to push the boundaries.

More recently, the world-famous L.A.

architect Frank Gehry built this -- the L.A.

Disney Concert Hall.

Today there are two L.A.s -- one that belongs to those who have found and lived the dream and the L.A.

of those still searching for it.

L.A.

has the biggest homeless population in the United States.

-We are well over 1/3 of the homeless population in Los Angeles and only 8% of the population itself.

And so homelessness, incarceration, um, you know, poor schooling -- these are the kinds of endemic problems now that Black people are struggling with in Los Angeles.

-The disparity between the cost of living, what it takes to actually live at any feasible level in Los Angeles, and the income that you can earn from a variety of jobs at a particular level is more stark, more extreme than it is in almost any other part of the United States.

Today, the average house price in Los Angeles is somewhere in the region of $1.2 million.

The average income in Los Angeles is around about $70,000 a year, but the cost of living to live in Los Angeles is, on average, five times greater than it is in any other city in the United States.

-We have enormous wealth, we have enormous poverty, and how does a city come to grips with that and equalize that is really what I think politicians and other activists are really grappling with right now.

-Six days of rioting in a Negro section of Los Angeles left behind scenes reminiscent of war-torn cities.

More than 100 square blocks were decimated by fire and looters, and few buildings were left intact.

Firemen were harassed by snipers and brick-throwing hoodlums as they attempted to control the fires, many of which were left to burn themselves out.

-This has been the site of multiple racial conflicts that's ended in large amounts of violence, large numbers of persons being killed, and genocidal acts.

♪♪ -Nowadays aircraft come and go from the L.A.

airport every 40 seconds day and night, and they have long been attracted to the blue and clear skies above Los Angeles.

♪♪ High up on a hill overlooking the Downtown District is Griffith Park Observatory.

It's one of the city's most popular tourist destinations on account of these stupendous views.

But the location of the observatory here is no coincidence.

Southern California's fine climate and blue skies has long made it a central location for projects involving astronomy, space exploration, and rocket and missile testing.

This outdoor museum just north of L.A.

shows off what has been designed and built here.

-And the defense industry pump more money into California and Los Angeles in the later 20th century than it did most other states combined because all the scientific advancements were being done there.

The major companies were moving there.

For testing, development, the California desert -- absolutely perfect to do that -- perfect conditions for flying, perfect conditions to test how aeronautics, aerodynamics worked.

-Nowadays, the last space shuttle Endeavour stands pride of place in Los Angeles Science Museum.

It was tested, took off, and landed in the Southern California desert not far from here, attracted by the warm climate and reliable sunlight, which made it possible.

Los Angeles is today one of the most diverse and multicultural places on the planet, its bright lights and big sky remaining a magnet for people across the country and the world beyond.

-The California dream is still alive, yes.

Whether it's a reality or whether it's a myth is another thing, um, and separating out those two things remains -- always has been, probably always will be -- extremely difficult to do.

But the California dream is there somewhere, hidden away, still at work in Los Angeles today.

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