♪♪ -Today, Los Angeles is one of the largest cities in the United States and the world.

But less than 200 years ago, it was a small outpost of Mexico after it became independent from Spain following the Mexican War of Independence.

Although remote and underdeveloped, the New Frontier offered a promise of freedom, possibility, and escape.

-L.A.

's story really is a constant one of myth, escape, reinvention, and, really, right from the beginning.

The first explorers come into California as early as the 16th century.

You've got the Spanish extolling the virtues of what the landscape looked like, what the place looked like, and, really, that carries forth from there on in.

♪♪ -Soon, treasure seekers and railroad barons would open up the state.

They would be followed by gangsters, oil moguls, real-estate speculators, and movie titans.

-They're coming to find a new life, a better life, make their own way in the world.

But some of them are coming to escape -- escape justice, escape the past, escape the old European world.

-Blurring the line between legal and illegal, the newcomers pursued every opportunity with hunger and, with schemes and swindles, drove the growth of the city.

These high achievers left behind many of L.A.

's most notable landmarks, including grand buildings and museums.

Their tastes were, not surprisingly and more often than not, distinctly European.

While Los Angeles today is identified with the film industry, it was the forces of war, industrial revolution, real-estate speculation, agriculture, the rag trade, and the discovery of oil that fueled its growth, bringing together a myriad of people from vastly different places and backgrounds.

L.A.

has always enshrined twin ambitions and myths -- those of escape and success.

-And that myth, that escapism, becomes part of the story, in a way.

People tell those tales back further east.

They tell those tales back to the Old World, to Europe.

It becomes part of the foundational myth, if you like, of California.

There's something there to chase at the end of the world, as it were -- the Pacific Rim.

You can find a new existence.

You can reinvent yourself in the California wilderness.

-In this program, we explore Los Angeles today and trace its journey to how it became, in just over 100 years, one of the biggest and richest cities on the planet.

-It's never been reticent about endorsing the legends first.

It's the -- It's the old quote by the film director John Ford.

Uh, "If -- If the -- the myth gets in the way of the reality, print the myth."

-Will the dream keep on giving?

♪♪ ♪♪ 300 years ago, most of what is now Southern California was, as it is today, a barren and inhospitable desert.

♪♪ It was through this beautiful and strangely inviting terrain that the first Spanish explorers and missionaries trekked from Mexico, which was then New Spain, in search of new lands and opportunities.

♪♪ When they reached the coast, they found more plentiful pastures, inhabited not by Apache and Comanche warriors of northern Mexico but by tribes who hunted and gathered and clothed themselves in richer, more forgiving landscapes.

♪♪ The Spanish built missions, the first of which were in the Los Angeles region, like the San Gabriel Mission here in today's Los Angeles suburbs, founded in 1778.

The evangelizing priest set about converting the natives to Christianity.

-The invasions, one might say, of the foreigners, was devastating, was very devastating, in the sense that the Catholic missions were there essentially to convert them, of course -- make them children of God, spurning them with the foot if they were particularly nasty people.

So what the Indians got was, in certain areas, like with the missions, food and some shelter, but what they paid for it was with their self-respect.

♪♪ -Today, little trace of the Indigenous population remains.

At this housing project in East L.A., the predominantly Latino population celebrates a pre-American past.

But among the murals is this one, which commemorates an isolated uprising by Indigenous tribes against the missions, led by an Indian woman, Toypurina.

The rebellion was quickly crushed.

-It's thought there were about 300,000 in California and lots and lots of villages around the area that's now the L.A.

region.

And I suppose, in...a very short word, they were wiped out.

One of the ways that they were wiped out was all of the the ways in which they survived economically were destroyed, but there was a much, much more deliberate policy to get rid of them.

-Soon, Los Angeles developed a small Mexican settlement of ranches of just a few hundred people.

The first settlers who made this possible, explorers such as Juan Bautista de Anza and evangelizing priests such as Junípero Serra, have largely been forgotten, but they were the first empire builders of many that were to follow in centuries to come.

-They wanted to convert the native.

They saw them as pagans and in desperate need of salvation.

Secondly, to pacify them, because, obviously, they didn't want to encounter violence against the settlers that were going to move in.

And then, eventually, to acculturate or absorb them so that they're not -- not just their religion but their language and their cultures, their clothing, their belief systems -- everything would be destroyed.

♪♪ -The Spanish established not only missions in their newly explored territory but also small settlements like this one in Santa Barbara.

What they built in L.A.

was much the same.

Like most urban centers in the Spanish Empire, the town grew in a gridlike street pattern around a central plaza which faced its first church.

But life for the local Indians was bleak.

-They were more or less sold a week at a time all through the year.

They would be bought for a week's time, and at the end of the week they would be paid, sort of.

Uh, $2 would go Heaven knows where.

They'd get a dollar, but they'd got the dollar in aguardiente, which is a type of distilled liquor.

One of the newspapers down there referred to Los Angeles Jail as a slave employment office.

They had no way to improve themselves, no pathway out of where they were.

-Today, the settlement of Olvera Street, not far from the original, sells Mexican trinkets.

Hidden behind the colorful tourist stalls and stands is one of the earliest buildings of the original pueblo.

-It's there that in, around that area, in 1781 that the pueblo, the town, the the Spanish-Mexican town of Los Angeles was founded.

And it was there that this community, uh, over time, through the Spanish period up to 1821, and then, when it becomes the Mexican era, when Mexico gets its independence from Spain from 1822 to 1848, start of the American period, that was Los Angeles.

That was Mexican Los Angeles.

♪♪ -That Spanish heritage has been a constant through two centuries of spectacular growth.

-The California state ballots are in both English and Spanish, so, in that sense, California as a state is quite happy to recognize that there is this strong historic influence.

♪♪ -L.A.

has always had a huge Hispanic population.

In 1848, Mexico, which had controlled the western states of America for just a quarter of a century, lost them in a brief war with the United States.

At the time, L.A.

was just a small cow town, spreading out slowly from its original pueblo by the L.A.

River.

-There's no real center, as far as anyone can tell, except where all the bars are, in this -- in this earlier period.

It does develop, but... it never really has the sophistication and the life of -- of Northern California.

It's pretty boring.

You know, what are you going to do?

There's nothing to do but drink.

And in the early days, there -- the only females, of course, tended to be the Indian women.

It was referred to as "cow counties," and Los Angeles referred to herself as the Queen of the Cow Counties.

♪♪ -The Gold Rush changed all that.

The population of what was now U.S.

territory California boomed as immigrants from the eastern states and Europe made their way west in search of fortunes and a better life.

♪♪ Throughout most of its history, most migration here has been from far beyond, from other parts of the country and the world.

-That's one thing that drew immigrants to California, is that there was a lot of employment necessary, and the wages were high to lure people in, especially after the Gold Rush.

Didn't have to worry during the Gold Rush because hundreds of thousands flowed into California.

♪♪ -Originally, the journey would take weeks by stagecoach or wagon train, a journey through the Wild West into the Promised Land taken by outfits such as Wells Fargo, the name today of one of the state's biggest banks.

♪♪ [ Train whistle blows ] The journey west became a flood with the coming of the railways.

The population would jump again, and most were still headed to the gold fields of Northern California.

But soon the new arrivals would drift south to the scrappy cow town that was L.A.

-♪ Oh, Lord ♪ ♪ Oh, Lord ♪ -They included the Afro-Americans from the enslaved southern states.

-♪ Oh, Lord ♪ -And remember, California, when it becomes part of the -- the Union in 1850, it is a non-slavery state, but Southern whites are bringing enslaved people with them to California when they come, and so there are many court cases that deal with, you know, Black people suing for their freedom.

There's this whole discussion about whether or not California should be divided into two states, one of them non-slave-holding, the other slave-holding.

Uh, there's always this notion that Southern California should break away and be, you know, the more conservative, um, state from Northern California.

All of that is coming, that push is coming, from many people who are coming to California from the American South.

-Black Americans escaping slavery were also among those seeking a better life in the West.

-These were not the areas where there was a lot of enslavement of Black people.

Of course, California came into the Union of the United States in 1850 as an anti-- uh, no-slavery state, um, and so, because of that in particular, Black people thought that it would be a better place for them to settle than those areas that had known Black slavery for such a long period of time and for most of the history of Black people in the country.

There were all-Black towns from Kansas West, um, including in California -- Allensworth, for example.

And so California and Los Angeles got good reviews, also, from those people who were moving to the West and settling into their own towns and their own communities.

♪♪ -In the early days, there were frequent skirmishes and banditry.

For a while, L.A.

was the most lawless city in America.

Many Indigenous Indians were slaughtered during this period.

-They became basically slave labor for the mines.

A lot of them were murdered just because they were on the lands that were wanted or else they were dragooned into working the mines and essentially working for the white-settler population.

And it's -- The numbers are really difficult to estimate because nobody quite counted how many people there were.

But it's estimated by modern historians that about 100,000 of the Indigenous population died during that period of the Gold Rush.

-Los Angeles County had, per capita, the largest numbers of murders in the entire state, even more than San Francisco at its wildest, when it was lawless and full of -- of drunken miners.

-The really disastrous -- um, the period of doom for the Indigenous population was once the Americans arrived, because what we're seeing is these cycles of conquest of this region by the different imperial powers, starting with the Portuguese, then the Spanish, then the Mexicans, and then, finally the Americans -- state-organized genocide.

So, the first governor, Governor Burnett, described Indians as wastrels, savage, useless, and an obstruction to proper development of the region, and the very first session of the California government passed an act which essentially was -- allowed open door for the killing of the Indigenous population.

It was called the Act for the Government Protection of Indians, but it was the exact opposite, and it gave the right to any white settler -- if someone misbehaved or was drunk or an Indian person as they saw them, as called them, then they could be arrested and they could be enslaved and the children could be captured.

So, there was a period of time when it was literally open field on Indigenous populations, and there was even a bounty from 1851 to 1869.

There was a bounty so that if you killed an Indian, you got a reward.

And Governor Burnett built up an arsenal and allowed local vigilante groups literally to hunt down the Indigenous populations.

♪♪ -After the Gold Rush, Northern California, centered around San Francisco and Sacramento, began developing civic institutions and mercantile industries while Los Angeles remained very much a frontier town.

-Three times in the 1850s, uh, delegations -- petitions from Southern California's -- were sent to Washington saying they'd quite like to separate and have their own country, known as Central California.

Was California going to be a free state with no slavery, or was it going to be a slave state?

And this was a real difficulty because there were rather a number of people who thought, after all, they already had slaves, didn't they -- the Indians -- that a slave state would be rather a good thing.

♪♪ -Many of the early migrants were from the southern states, escaping the ravages of Civil War.

♪♪ -Then after the Civil War, masses more of Southerners came because there were all these displaced people from the South, and they came to California because by then everyone knew it was the Golden State, where you could remake yourself and become a new man, um, from what you had been before.

So they came via Texas and flowed into the southern counties, and there was a period when the southern counties had almost a larger population than the north, and the north had a lot more opportunity.

♪♪ -There was a great migration of Southern whites at the same time that there was a great migration of Southern Blacks because the South is a place -- It's beginning to be -- become more industrialized after the Civil War and after Reconstruction, but it was thought of as a place that there were not a lot of opportunities for people, particularly after the Civil War.

So poor whites, um, particularly moved to the West, moved to Chicago, moved to, you know, um, St.

Louis, moved to California, moved to Los Angeles, moved to San Francisco, moved to Orange County.

We had large -- Thousands and thousands of Southern whites moved to the region, along with the large numbers of Black people who moved here, as well, and those Southern whites had really, um, impact on the politics, the policing, um, the kinds of institutions that were established in Southern California.

♪♪ -But over time, many of the migrants and treasure seekers arriving in L.A.

came not from the pre-Civil War slave states of the South but from everywhere else.

-Peru and Mexico, families coming up from Mexico and Chile.

There were a lot from Chile.

But the word spread, and they came from Australia, they came from China, they came from Germany, they came from England.

They came, of course, from the East of the United States.

And the population went from about 30,000 to over 300,000 in not that many years, in fact.

♪♪ -Many were European, and a notable number made their fortunes here.

Railroad baron Henry Huntington was a High Victorian, evidenced by his art collection bequeathed to the museum that now bears his name.

-When the railroads finally came to California, it advertised sunshine all year 'round.

It advertised citrus groves.

It advertised these Edenic kind of places where you could buy a piece of land, build your own Spanish Revival house, uh, farm, become involved in the new businesses that were starting to be set up on the West Coast, and you'd have a perfect life from there on in.

And some of that was sort of real because you could do those things, but, at the same time, for many people who came West, of course, that dream was a facade, to some degree.

It never quite worked out for some the way it did.

That's why California but Los Angeles in particular has a lot of haves and a huge number of have-nots.

♪♪ -European industrialists like Huntington came to rely on Chinese workers to help build their grand projects, in particular the railways, where their engineering skills were much appreciated, useful, and in short supply.

These Chinese workers, or coolies, like the so-called powder monkeys, worked for less and would do the tough and dirty jobs, too.

The powder monkeys would lay dynamite in cliff faces and blast a passage through the Rocky Mountains so track could be laid through.

The Chinese would suffer terrible persecution.

The attacks weren't just confined to the gold fields.

L.A., too, developed a sizable Chinese community.

It was located near the original pueblo, in an area which is now Union Station.

But in 1871, there was a massacre of the Chinese here.

81 Chinese were killed.

-California was -- was built on, you know, racist ideas if you've got a policy of genocide and you actually pay to have, um -- you give bounties to have native people killed.

But then, you know, this is obviously followed by attitudes to the Chinese, because that was another very important labor force coming in from the West, and rather than coming over the moun-- over from the East for, like, the Gold Rush, and providing a cheap labor force in the cities and, in particular, when -- for building the railroads, the -- It was called coolie labor because it was seen as a way of essentially undercutting the wages of more local populations, mostly the Irish.

♪♪ -The next of L.A.

's many booms would also mine California's precious natural resources.

The climate was perfect for growing citrus fruits.

-It was when they discovered that oranges would grow there and then, even more important, lemons.

And so the fruit culture of Southern California was incredibly lucrative and incredibly important, and especially once the railways were going, of course, you could send it all over the country.

-The Spanish missionaries had already planted grapevines, too.

Their missions required wine for their masses.

-When the Spanish-Mexican missionaries established 21 missions up the coast of California, you needed wine for the mass, and, therefore, every one of these missions planted grapes, and part of the reason they converted and encouraged the Indians to stay by is they needed the laborers.

Viticulture, as it would be called, became an important part of the whole agricultural industry, and this actually started in sort of the 18th but really in the 19th century.

Los Angeles had -- That area, in fact, was one of the very earliest pioneers in growing grapes and making wine.

♪♪ -Citrus fruits, too, were introduced into California by the padres as early as the 1760s.

The first recorded citrus orchard was planted 50 years later, here at the San Gabriel Mission, east of Los Angeles.

In the early years, citrus were mainly grown in the missions, but in 1841, the first commercial orchard was established near what is now the center of downtown Los Angeles.

By 1870, the citrus industry had expanded further.

It was the successful introduction of a Brazilian orange that thrived in the Southern Californian climate that did it.

From 90,000 trees in 1875, it grew to approximately 2 million trees just 10 years later and 5 million trees by the turn of the century.

For the new railways, citrus was big business.

Tons of oranges and lemons would leave here to be exported across America.

Citrus corporations would be established.

Despite the genocide of the Indigenous, later marketing campaigns selling the citrus would mine the state's historic past and its Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican heritage and themes.

♪♪ But today, rusted train lines and discarded locomotives are among the surviving relics of the citrus golden age.

♪♪ But L.A.

was still a small town.

It had a population of only 11,000 by 1880, with the business district centered along Main Street between the plaza and 1st Street as it is today.

♪♪ The next boom that drove growth in Los Angeles also came from its land.

This time it was to be found underneath it.

Local Indian tribes had long reported seeing a black, gooey liquid lying in the ground or just below it.

♪♪ -The Spanish explorers from the 16th century all the way through to the 19th century constantly reported finding this, uh, black pitch tar, as they often called it, not really knowing what it was.

Anglo settlement produced people who were able to access this, some of it just flowing straight out of the ground, and in accessing it, one of the things they started to do was learn that it could act as fuel for certain things that they -- they were using already, just as the Gold Rush had done in the early part of the 19th century, so there was a rush to find natural resources in the later 19th century, and Los Angeles -- people didn't know it at the time -- the Los Angeles Basin was basically set on a underground oil field that had millions and millions and millions of barrels, potentially, at its disposal that people started literally digging with their hands for.

-This man, Edward Doheny, a wandering prospector from an immigrant Irish Catholic family, found out that there were local reserves of natural asphalt which, in places, came to the surface.

Doheny obtained a lease, dug a well with picks, shovels, and devised a drilling system.

When completed in 1893, Doheny would become America's first oil tycoon.

His success set off a petroleum boom in Southern California and made him a fortune.

♪♪ -Doheny came from, you know, a small background.

He'd -- He'd -- He'd, um, uh, self-educated, went out West, had no real knowledge of the West himself at all when he arrived in, uh -- in California.

Uh, he had a couple of partners who worked with him, had absolutely no idea how oil worked or the oil industry or indeed any kind of manufacturing or industrial base.

Uh, he literally set to by digging wells in the center of what was -- Los Angeles was a small community at that point, you know.

It was barely 10,000, 20,000 people before the turn of the century.

Uh, but Doheny spotted where the oil was flooding upwards and thought that he could dig wells and begin to pump it out, uh, and construct, uh, primitive oil derricks that would begin to, uh -- to pull the oil forward.

And from that moment, he realized -- very few other people were on the scene -- he realized he had a captive audience here.

The city wanted to expand.

The patrons in the city wanted development.

Wealth was the way in which to attract people to Los Angeles.

Doheny had all that in -- at his disposal with the discovery of oil, and, later, he would become a patron of the city.

So, you know, there are a number of buildings, facilities, parts of universities that are named after him.

He becomes one of the archetypal, as they're known, boosters of Los Angeles.

♪♪ -The fossil fuel industry played a huge role in Los Angeles' early development.

This was the Wild West of oil extraction with an abundance of easily accessible oil, minimal regulation, and no understanding of the health or environmental impacts, which created a true free-for-all.

The center of the booming industry was to be found here in L.A.

's southern suburbs, in a place still known today as Signal Hill, so named as it's a few hundred feet above the surrounding town of Long Beach.

Because of this height, it was used for centuries by the local Tongva Indians for signal fires that would be seen throughout the surrounding area.

It had become part of the first large rancho grant to be allotted under Spanish rule in Alta California, but Signal Hill changed forever when oil was discovered.

The hill would soon become part of the Long Beach Oil Field, one of the most productive oil fields in the world.

In June 1921, a well operated by Royal Dutch Shell erupted.

The gas pressure was so great that the gush rose 35 meters into the air.

Soon Signal Hill was covered with over 100 oil derricks and became, because of its prickly appearance at a distance, known as Porcupine Hill.

-Underlying much of Southern California, including even the waters inshore, are petroleum deposits which make this one of the great oil-producing areas of the world.

♪♪ -By 1930, California was producing nearly 1/4 of the world's oil output, and its population had grown to 1.2 million.

♪♪ Los Angeles remains the largest urban oil field in the country.

Thousands of active oil wells in the greater L.A.

area are located amongst a dense population of more than 10 million people.

Though conventional oil reserves have dwindled, drilling in L.A.

still remains pervasive.

Oil rigs dot the city but are often hidden from sight through the use of tall fences, clandestine structures, or by drilling in Los Angeles' often overlooked low-income neighborhoods.

Other fortunes were made in L.A.

's oil boom, and these self-made oil millionaires were among the first in what was to become L.A.

's own self-made elite.

-The elite that begins to foment itself, that begins to kind of construct itself at the end of the 19th century and the first couple of decades of the 20th century have no lineage, really.

It's an almost classless elite.

They've come from different backgrounds, largely without privilege or access in many ways, and they've made their fortunes.

So, it was an elite founded, really, on a blank piece of paper, and because it was such, for a long time, they had the ear of both the political elite that were starting to forge the foundations and institutions of Los Angeles and of California, and they had the ear of the general populace because they thought these people were the kind of heroes of their future.

These were the people who were going to make that dream Paradise for them.

And, in a way, they did.

♪♪ -Hancock Park, a leafy, well-to-do suburb in the heart of Hollywood, was named after this man.

Major Henry Hancock, who took a lease on the land which is now La Brea Tar Pits.

His ranch was situated right at the top of a giant oil field.

The oil pits are still here today, and you can see the oil lying on the surface and methane gases bubbling in a water-filled crater, formerly an oil-drilling site.

Hancock and his family made a fortune from the discovery of oil here, and a museum on the site tells the incredible story.

Whilst drilling for oil, workers found thousands of dinosaur bones from prehistoric creatures which became stuck and succumbed to the tar pits tens of thousands of years ago.

Their gruesome end yielded one of the biggest dinosaur finds, the largest in an urban area.

Hundreds of creatures, such as the giant Columbian mammoth and bear, were uncovered here at the museum.

On the site, paleontologists catalog continuing discoveries.

♪♪ Just up the road from the tar pits is L.A.

Farmers Market.

It's hard to believe that this popular shopping and food destination was once also an oil field.

The Gilmore Oil Company was founded by Arthur Fremont Gilmore after he struck oil on his dairy farm in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles around 1903.

The A.F.

Gilmore Oil Company initially sold the petroleum and tar for lubrication and paving, but Gilmore saw the potential of the automobile and started refining the crude oil into gasoline.

It was initially sold from a horse-drawn tanker at the corner of La Brea Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, and this became the site of the first Gilmore Gasoline Station.

His son, Earl Bell Gilmore, took over the family business and expanded its distribution network, which, at its peak, operated over 3,000 gas stations on the West Coast.

On the Farmers Market site today, there is a re-creation of the Gilmore station.

Gilmore promoted the company in flamboyant style with much advertising, creating the branding for Red Lion Gasoline with the slogan "Roar with Gilmore."

He turned the site here into a racetrack, the Gilmore Stadium, which initially hosted midget car racing.

Gilmore eventually merged his company into what was to become the Mobil Oil Corporation.

The original farmers market was established on the site in 1934, and this still exists today as a major attraction, with the Gilmore gas station sitting proudly at its entrance.

♪♪ When L.A.

's population exploded in the latter years of the 19th century, with it came feverish land speculation.

While in 1880 there were 11,000 people here, 15 years later, it would increase tenfold to 100,000.

♪♪ This is the Los Angeles River running through the center of the city.

Today it's a giant concrete chasm after it was concreted over following a devastating flood in the 1930s.

But in L.A.

's first hundred years, it supplied much of the water for this still small settlement.

-The L.A.

River was really the central tributary upon which Los Angeles could build itself in the first place.

You know, that was from -- from whence irrigation and from whence you could build outlying communities that, actually, you could service because you could get running water coming off the L.A.

River.

So it was very important in its -- in its first incarnation.

-Today in downtown L.A., among the many government buildings is the colossal headquarters of a major player in Los Angeles history, the Department of Water and Power.

Despite being surrounded by arid desert regions, Los Angeles had sufficient water in the early days of settlement.

But 100 years later, at the dawn of the 20th century, it was clear more would be needed if the city and county was going to continue to expand.

William Mulholland was an Irish-American self-taught civil engineer who, as the new century beckoned, had become head of the predecessor of the LADWP.

-If Edward Doheny brought the wealth and the future prosperity to Los Angeles, William Mulholland brought Los Angeles survival and a future, because there was no way you could survive for any elongated period in the Los Angeles Basin and in Southern California if you didn't have access to water.

♪♪ -L.A.

may have been surrounded by desert, but hundreds of miles north, on the other side of the Sierra Madre Mountains, there were plentiful supplies of water.

-In actual fact, when he made his claim in the early 20th century that Los Angeles had, in effect, no real chances and prospect of survival for many decades hence unless it imported more water, what, of course, he was already doing was, once again, creating something of a myth.

It wasn't strictly true.

Los Angeles in its present incarnation and with the population as it was at the turn of the 20th century probably could have survived for a fair amount of time with the water it had at its disposal.

But Mulholland just had a bigger, much more ambitious plan for Southern California, and that ambitious plan was to pipe water all the way from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and pipe it all the way into the Los Angeles neighborhood and Los Angeles area.

-It was Mulholland who designed and supervised the building of this, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile-long system to move water from the Owens Valley on the other side of the mountains to the San Fernando Valley.

-Mulholland came just as an ordinary engineer.

He had a Scotch-Irish background.

He'd moved out West.

Um, he was very capable.

Uh, he knew a lot about, um, uh, damming engineering.

He knew a lot about kind of the way in which water and natural resources were laid out on the -- on the land and underneath it.

So, he knew how to build things that would lead to better irrigation, dam projects, uh, moving water around very, very difficult terrain.

So he had an idea in his mind from very early on as to how to build a pipeline that would run right out of the Owens Valley, on the edge of the Sierra Nevadas, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, which was on the edge of Los Angeles at the time.

So, Mulholland knew, you know -- It wasn't a pipe dream, so to speak.

Mulholland knew what he wanted to do.

He just wanted -- He had to convince the -- the wider authorities, those with money, those with power and influence, that it could be done, that he could build it, and he did.

♪♪ -Building the aqueduct was controversial, but it allowed Los Angeles to grow into the largest city in California.

The construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct effectively eliminated the Owens Valley as a viable farming community and eventually devastated the Owens Lake ecosystem.

A group labeled the San Fernando Syndicate included Fred Eaton, Mulholland, Harrison Otis, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times, Henry Huntington, the executive of the Pacific Electric Railroad, and other wealthy individuals.

This group bought land in the San Fernando Valley, allegedly based on inside knowledge that the Los Angeles Aqueduct would soon be irrigated and encourage development.

They were, of course, right.

-The San Fernando Valley wasn't a part of Los Angeles.

So what did the city do?

It incorporated the San Fernando Valley into the city and completely bypassed the voters and the citizens.

Mulholland and Eaton were responsible for all of that.

They bought up land in the Owens Valley, claiming that it was worthless to the residents and people who owned it up there.

"It's just cheap.

You won't need it.

We'll give it to you for a song.

You'll be fine.

It'll be okay."

Of course, it was immensely valuable once they started building the -- the, uh -- the pipeline for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and those people lost money and Mulholland and Eaton made money for themselves as well as for the City of Los Angeles, and the tale became a-a tall one.

It went down in -- in myth itself.

It became part of the story of Los Angeles and of course much later gets passed off into the culture and art and representation of Los Angeles.

Writers like Raymond Chandler, Upton Sinclair used the Mulholland water story as an idea of the way in which Los Angeles has created almost this artificial history, almost this artificial landscape for itself, very famously in the film "Chinatown," Roman Polanski's film, which, again, is more or less about the Mulholland story.

There's a city hall meeting where they're deciding whether the water will be pumped and come along to Los Angeles, and one of the officials says, "We are a desert community."

And that was exactly right.

Los Angeles, without Mulholland and Eaton, would have just been a desert community.

With it, with the water and with their vision, it became one of the great metropolises of the world.

♪♪ -From 1909 to 1928, the City of Los Angeles grew from 61 square miles to 440 square miles.

This was largely due to the aqueduct and the city's charter, which stated that the City of Los Angeles could not sell or provide surplus water to any area outside the city.

Outlying areas relied on wells and creeks for water, and as they dried up, the people in those areas realized that if they were going to be able to continue irrigating their farms and provide themselves with domestic water, they would have to annex themselves to the City of Los Angeles.

Today, the reservoirs of Los Angeles still remain under the jurisdiction of the city's water and power colossus, holding the bountiful supplies of the precious liquid that breathed new life into the city.

♪♪ Growth was so rapid that it appeared as if the City of Los Angeles would eventually assume the size of an entire county.

♪♪ The aqueduct's water provided developers with the resources to quickly develop the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles through World War II and beyond.

♪♪ Hollywood studios, including Universal, Warner Bros., and Disney, would all establish their headquarters here.

Nowadays, tourist buses are common along the picturesque Mulholland Drive, which separates the old L.A.

on the other side of the mountains from the newer San Fernando Valley.

Tourists take photos of the valley below and the film community that Mulholland's vision helped create.

♪♪ On the other side of the mountain is a modest memorial to the Irishman born into poverty there.

But, ironically, the William Mulholland Memorial Fountain, built in 1940 in Los Feliz, hasn't worked and has been without water for several years because of a lack of spare parts.

♪♪ Next time, Los Angeles' exceptional climate attracts a brand-new industry and, with it, filmmakers from New York and Eastern states.

Hollywood is born, and clear blue skies also make it a perfect testing ground for aircraft, rockets, and space exploration.

Attracting migrants from across the world, it will become, in just a few decades, one of the world's biggest cities.

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