How Car Dealers Shaped Los Angeles and the Auto Industry Early Dealership Service Department, Ralph Hamlin Collection, Seaver Center as featured in Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City 1900–1930. Recently retired GLANCDA Director Darryl Holter of Felix Chevrolet has a book out that discusses the origins and early years of retail automotive here in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is widely recognized as the capital of automotive culture. The city — surrounded by miles of superhighways, crushing smog and traffic — is an originating point for global trends, and a place for automotive groups to connect individually and collaborate collectively. Just how and why did LA become a city of cars? The well-researched and illustrated book, Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City 1900–1930 by Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee seeks to answer that question. In the book, Holter states that a combination of key factors were the catalyst of LA’s automotive obsession. Unlike other large cities in the U.S., a majority of LA’s colonization and industrialization, began late in the 19th century, concurrent with the expansion of the automobile. “Both came of age at the same time, they sort of grew up together, and their relationship was intertwined,” Holter explains. The mild climate of Southern California allowed cars to be used year-round — this was a boon for dealers and an attractive market attribute for consumers in the early years of automobiles. And, unlike New York or Chicago, where trains cut across the city as well as commuting to the outskirts of town, the fixed rail system in LA was set up mainly to move people back and forth from work in the center of town to their residences in the suburbs. The car offered the freedom to travel at will. The varied geography of Los Angeles — inland valleys, coastal plains, low mountains, steep passes and a long seacoast — and the residential and commercial development of it, lent itself to the car and vice versa. “The automobile allowed people to go farther away from the center, higher into the hills, closer to the desert, closer to the 20
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