Los Angeles is rich in iconic things—places, people, fictional characters, and innovations —objects and personalities that are recognized throughout the world.

Sixty years ago, Lee Shippey, a Los Angeles Times journalist, wrote that Los Angeles “is a sprawling hodgepodge of beauty and ugli- ness, of adobe and chromium steel, of cos- mopolitanism mixed with a hundred kinds of smalltownishness, of striding progress and incredible backwardness, of irresistible forces of change confronting seemingly impassible obstacles of changelessness.”

Indeed, L.A. remains a region of contradiction, a land of diversity and sameness, of the profound and the trite, of glamour and vulgarity, of the genuine and the fake, of astonishing success and troubling disappointment. Los Angeles is an urban and suburban—even rural—region that has caught the imagination of people around the world for all that L.A. is and much for what L.A. is not. Los Angeles remains a place envied and scorned, a land of iconic images known almost everywhere, a model of what a metropolis can become—and what a metropolitan community must strive to avoid.