"... Other cities experienced booms, whose migrants settled gradually and came from neighboring regions, but Los Angeles, the most advertised city in America, experienced constant booms, drawing migrants from all corners of the country, and at such an incredible rate, that each boom, to accommodate the influx, inflicted destructive erasures on self and city. If the city ever knew what it was, it kept forgetting. ... Los Angeles had always been home to America’s largest nonindigenous population, and perhaps for that reason, it could be argued, was America’s most American city, but the combined impact of alienated migrants and the Great Depression initiated a peculiar strain of isolation that cast a cloud over the city once promised to be Eden on earth. Short on work, dislodged from their families, their communities, their traditions, Angelenos of the thirties were uncommonly lonely. Exiles all, they were, in addition, geographically isolated from one another by a sprawling metropolis built nonsensically on a scramble of unnumbered streets and boulevards. ..."
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