Inventing Paradise

The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles

By: Paul Haddad

Narrated by: Paul Haddad

Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles traces the improbable rise of Los Angeles through the prism of six visionaries who had outsize influence on the city’s growth: Phineas Banning, Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Harry Chandler, William Mulholland, and Moses Sherman.

In the late 1870s, Los Angeles was a violent, dusty, 29-square-mile pueblo with a few thousand souls, largely unchanged since its founding in 1781. By 1930, its size had swelled to within 96% of its current 468 square miles, housing a staggering 1.2 million people. In just 50 years, L.A. had joined the ranks of other world-class cities.

In the tradition of Mike Davis’s classic work City of Quartz, Paul Haddad (Freewaytopia and 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A.) debunks many myths about the City of Angels with a wildly entertaining narrative that sheds new light on the fascinating birth of modern Los Angeles. Power came from a select few, whose triumphs, scandals, and correspondence are well documented in Inventing Paradise, along with other little-known facts about L.A. history, including:

• How Los Angeles Times chief Harry Chandler pushed eugenics and endorsed “white spots”
• Henry Huntington’s and Moses Sherman’s trolley systems and the extortion-type practices that led to their expansion
• When Los Angeles was so desperate for water, it hired a miracle worker who promised rain
• How L.A.’s power elite peddled the lie that the Owens River used to flow into Los Angeles and rightfully belonged to the city
• When Los Angeles annexed a city in which monkeys cast votes
• How Venice, California, was not the first Venice, California
• William Mulholland’s game-changing construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which raised the city’s population ceiling from 250,000 to 2.5 million

Haddad also covers the heavy costs that came with creating paradise in such a short period of time, including car dependency, environmental problems, and deep-seated inequities between wealthy white Angelenos and people of color due to racist policies. All have left an imprint on present-day Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is a city that should not exist—and yet it does. Through Inventing Paradise, Haddad shows listeners that Los Angeles is not a paradise found, but a paradise that was willed into existence, owing to the collective vision of these six Gilded Era-born tycoons.

©2024 Paul Haddad (P)2024 Santa Monica Press

Critic reviews

“Paul Haddad’s Inventing Paradise is an enthralling, deeply researched account of the leaders of industry who built a small, agrarian riverside village into one of America’s largest, strangest, most alluring cities. This is a story of speculation, trickery, and greed as well as earnest, almost realized visions of a true and accessible Utopia. The research is astounding, the writing propulsive, heartfelt, and even funny. Like the best histories, this work is about who and where we are, not only recounting the past but also illuminating the future.”—Jeff Hobbs, author, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (L.A. Times Book Prize winner)

“Paul Haddad has written a delightful and immersive account of the formative years of a great American city. With a novelist’s sense of voice and detail and a historian’s command of the national context, Haddad reminds us that no element of contemporary Los Angeles was pre-ordained—and invites us to reflect on the ways that the past shapes the places we call home.”—Henry Grabar, author, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“Inventing Paradise interweaves the lives of the city builders who are remembered in the names of Los Angeles’s streets and neighborhoods—Chandler, Huntington, Sherman, Mulholland, and more—to reveal how and why L.A. grew into today’s wacky sprawl of neighborhoods, canyons, and beachfront. Paul Haddad’s captivating account describes how the city’s boundaries, never planned out but assembled piece by piece over decades, formed from the hubris and greed of these men, who found their sun-warmed paradise between the mountains and the Pacific and grew audacious dreams into fortunes.”—Kevin Roderick, editor and publisher, L.A. Observed