Cover of Los Angeles Today

After the Thirteenth Annual Convention in Los Angeles in 1922, the Fifty-third Convention in 1962, the Ninety-ninth Convention will come back this year to Los Angeles for the third time. The Rotary club of Los Angeles, founded in 1909, is the fifth oldest of over 32,000 Rotary clubs in the world, and, with nearly six hundred members, is one of the largest. Time to look back!

Los Angeles Business Center and Inner Harbor

Los Angeles Today is a lovely colorful brochure by the Los Angeles Chamber of commerce, which extended a cordial invitation to every Rotarian to attend the Thirteenth Annual Convention of The International Association of Rotary Clubs in 1922. It gave the visitors a detailed insight into Los Angeles of 1922, including climatic conditions compiled from the records of the U. S. Weather Bureau station, established in 1877. Only eleven days in the year without sunshine – and snow has never fallen in measurable quantities! Also from the brochure: Los Angeles, the “City of the Angels”, has the sonorous Spanish title “Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles”*. The city increased its population within 35 years from 11,000 to 690,000 in 1922. Los Angeles was founded on September 4, 1781, by a small band of pobladores, or colonists, who had been recruited in the Mexican States of Sinaloa and Sonora, and brought here under command of a government officer, to found an agricultural colony, for the purpose of raising produce for the soldiers and presidios. They were a mixed class, composed of one European, seventy-two Spanish-Americans, seven Indians, twenty-two Mulattoes and thirty-nine Mestizos. As recently as 1831, fifty years after the founding of the pueblo, the population was only 770. Up to 1897, Los Angeles had not a single paved street.

Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce

[Today, Los Angeles is inhabited by nearly four million “Angelinos” and is the second largest city in the United States – and you will hardly find an unpaved street!]

*Actually, the original name was “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula”.

The Progrees of Los Angeles by Figures