Introduction
Providing an overview of Los Angeles is like trying to describe platypus. While all of its various parts seem to work pretty well together, they don’t necessarily seem to have any connection to each other.
While New York and Chicago are primarily large metropolitan areas with outlying burghs or suburbia, Los Angeles is a sprawling collection of individual communities -- each with its unique appeals and envi-ronments. When you consider that the city starts at the beach on the west and ends in the mountains to the east, it's not surprising how many other geographic and ethnic diversities you find in between.
Whether a visitor is interested in beach-bumming, fine dining, star watching, rodeo drive shopping, mu-seums or amusement parks, he or she will find all of the above in LA. The bad news is all of those attrac-tions are a little spread out, so you’ll have to spend some time behind the wheel. The good news, if Los Angeles doesn’t have it, you probably don’t want it.
Culturally, Los Angeles is the world’s most ethnically diverse city. Studies have shown that there isn’t a segment of the world’s ethnic or religious not represented somewhere in LA. In fact, Los Angeles is the largest Korean population outside of Seoul, the largest Filipino population outside Manila, the largest Japanese population outside of Japan, the largest Asian population in the United States and the second largest Iranian population in the world.
Fast Facts
The City of Los Angeles spreads out for an amazing 4,000 square miles from the Pacific Ocean, claiming more than 10 million residents in more than 3.2 million homes.
While Southern California as a region includes everything from Ventura and Thousand Oaks in the north to Orange County in the south, Los Angeles proper includes the San Fernando Valley to the north down to the seaside communities such as Manhattan Beach and Rancho Palos Verdes.
LA is home to the busiest freeway intersection in the world where the 405 and 10 freeways mingle. For-tunately, 500-plus miles of those freeways keep LA’s various neighborhoods interconnected.