Southern California and Gambling

It became clear that Southern California would be different.

Yet it was also evident that the Pacific Coast had nor relinquished its role as most representative fragment of United States culture.

Southern California distilled American culture in part because its society was made up of people from all corners of the nation.

Boom-town conditions perpetuated the nineteenth-century trait of acquisitiveness that had characterized Gold Rush and Gilded Age, while advances in technology brought all that was modern to bear on life in Los Angeles.

In 1928, one observer labeled Los Angeles the 'Great American Mirror'. Los Angeles balanced its cultural charm, mature discrimination, intellectual activities.

Scheming and speculating in their own special 'diggings', Southern Californians retained for the Golden State its heritage as a residence for fast and sharp people.

Gambling in Southern California developed in stages roughly analogous to earlier phases in San Francisco. Gaming at first flourished conspicuously in downtown Los Angeles on a street known as Calle de los Negros or 'Nigger Alley', during the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Although the gambling saloons had somewhat more of an Hispanic accent because of the larger population of Mexicans in the population, they offered betting as openly and commercially as it had been provided by the grand gaming halls in early San Francisco.

Dealers, importing American games into the changing pueblo, were mostly regarded as legitimate businessmen.

Only with the beginnings of large-scale growth in Southern California did residents turn against the public business of betting.

As promoters advertised the town as a healthful and clean-living community, and as Midwesterners poured into the Los Angeles basin, wide-open gaming became less acceptable.

The city approved an ordinance closing all gambling houses in 1889. Angelenos' increasing vigilance drove betting under cover into illegal clubs and into permissive little suburbs like Vernon, 'the tiny sin city of the 1910s', where the practice survived well into the twentieth century.

Citizens outlawed public and commercial gaming because it contradicted their vision of the progressive and virtuous city that Los Angeles would become.

But they simultaneously embraced a pattern of metropolitan development that hinged upon Californians' gambling outlook on the future.

Angelenos speculated feverishly in economic bursts that became the essence of growth in Southern California.

The first real-estate boom peaked in 1887 after railroads slashed fares to the Coast and stepped up their promotion of Los Angeles.

Dubious dealings created short-lived paper fortunes for many local investors, but the boom broke in 1888 and took many participants with it.