Some photos of vintage LA to set the mood for Jack Shakely's Los Angeles: Drawn by Committee:

In 1920 Los Angeles was a city of a half million people, smaller than Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, St. Louis, or Detroit. By 1945 there were three million of us and everything had changed. People scattered everywhere for good jobs and affordable housing — El Segundo, Torrance, the San Fernando Valley — and people started referring to themselves as Southern Californians, rather than Los Angelinos (the capitalized “Southern” was insisted upon by legendary LA Times owner Harry Chandler, and it stuck). After the war, we even changed the way we pronounced our city. Old-timers called it “Las Angle-less,” as if it had no corners. “Las Angeles” was how out-of-towners pronounced it, and since we became a city of out-of-towners, “Las Angeles” won out (with the exception of announcers on Univision, nobody has ever pronounced our first name right).

Read the whole thing.

Images from the Vintage Los Angeles Facebook group.