"Los Angeles is a city that should not exist" is how Paul Haddad begins Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles. The book chronicles how a sleepy town became one of the world's most iconic cities, thanks to six visionary leaders. Streets and libraries throughout the city are now named after them. Haddad explores their lives, achievements, and flaws.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Steve Chiotakis: These are six very powerful people. What did you discover that surprised you the most?
Paul Haddad: When I was conceiving this book, and as an LA native and a writer, I'm always interested in: How did we get here? How did the city get to be 468 square miles? And how was it that there's such growth between the 1890s and 1932? That’s when my book ends because that was the years of the Summer Games, the Olympics, when the city achieved pretty much the square mileage that it has now.
This gang of six, as I call them, were responsible for much of its growth, including Henry Huntington, Moses Sherman. The other ones are, of course, Harry Chandler and General Otis. Chandler and Otis were the powers of information as publishers of the LA Times. They also owned a lot of real estate. And Phineas Banning was the father of Los Angeles harbor. So together, these oligarchs all were pretty much the prime movers of Los Angeles.
Let’s talk about Banning and his impact on Wilmington. He cut a trail all the way from Utah right?
Banning was from Delaware, and he named Wilmington after his hometown, and also established routes in San Pedro. And really what he did was create the first really good wagon trail between the harbor and Los Angeles, and then the first railroad in Southern California in 1869 that went from the harbor to Los Angeles. So he created the whole shoestring strip, as we call it, which helped increase trade and make LA a trading destination.
Tell us about Henry Huntington, the man for whom the library and the museum and the gardens are named after.
Huntington famously created the red line trolley system. It’s the greatest streetcar system in the world, and was created in Los Angeles in the early 1900s. ... And it was almost as if everything he did in his life was a means to an end, just so he could create this paradise, this utopia, for himself and for the public later in life.
Some controversies happened during their era? Like Harry Chandler from the LA Times pushing eugenics.
Chandler probably was the most influential of the six men I talk about in the book — because he used The LA Times as a way to push his agenda. And he had the power of information. His newspaper pushed eugenics and forced sterilization for people of color, which was from the Human Betterment Society that Chandler was a part of. This was really the 1930s, so he became almost a gatekeeper for who was allowed into paradise.