110 Fun Facts About Los Angeles

The traditional full name of Los Angeles honours the Queen of the Angels, a title of which figure?

The Virgin Mary: Franciscan Juan Crespí named the river here for Our Lady of the Angels in 1769, and the pueblo founded beside it on 4 September 1781 took its name from the river.

Which mountain range, home to Mount Wilson Observatory, rises north of Los Angeles?

The San Gabriel Mountains wall off the Los Angeles basin to the north; from Mount Wilson in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble's work with the 100-inch telescope revealed that the universe is expanding.

Los Angeles ranks where among US cities by population?

It passed the previous number two for the spot in early 1984, and only New York City is larger.

Which city did Los Angeles overtake in the 1980s to become the second-largest in the United States?

Chicago already had more than a million people in 1890; Los Angeles, still a city of only about 100,000 in 1900, grew past it during the 1980s and has stayed ahead since.

Which Indigenous people lived in villages across the Los Angeles basin before the Spanish arrived?

The Tongva had their largest village, Yaanga, near where downtown now stands; the Spanish pueblo of 1781 was planted beside it and drew on its people for forced labour.

Which explorer led the first European voyage along the Los Angeles coast in 1542, claiming California for Spain?

Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo reached Santa Catalina Island and the nearby mainland in October 1542, yet Spain sent no settlers for more than two centuries, until Portolá's overland march of 1769.

The Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in 1913, carries water from which river in the eastern Sierra?

The Owens River, 233 miles to the north, feeds the aqueduct; draining its valley to supply the city set off the long fight known as the California water wars.

Which engineer built the Los Angeles Aqueduct and later saw the St. Francis Dam collapse in 1928?

William Mulholland, the self-taught chief engineer, delivered the aqueduct in 1913; the 1928 St. Francis Dam failure killed more than 400 people and ended his career, though Mulholland Drive keeps his name.

Why did the town of Hollywood vote to merge into Los Angeles in 1910?

To secure water: incorporated only in 1903, Hollywood gave up its independence after seven years to tap the bigger city's supply and sewers, a year before its first film studio opened.

The Hollywood Sign was erected in 1923 to advertise what?

The sign advertised Hollywoodland, a housing development in the hills above Beachwood Canyon; it originally read HOLLYWOODLAND, and the last four letters came down when the sign was restored in 1949.

The Hollywood Sign stands on the slope of which Los Angeles peak?

Mount Lee carries the letters on its slope; on New Year's Day 1976 a prankster draped them to read HOLLYWEED, marking the day California's relaxed marijuana law took effect.

Which magazine founder donated the final $900,000 in 2010 to save the land around the Hollywood Sign?

Hugh Hefner, Playboy's founder, gave the last $900,000 of the $12.5 million needed to keep the ridge beside the sign free of houses; in 1978 he had hosted the fundraiser that paid to rebuild the sign.

Why has admission to Griffith Observatory been free since it opened in 1935?

The donor's will is the reason: Griffith J. Griffith died in 1919 leaving money for the observatory on condition it be free to all; he had already given the city 3,015 acres for Griffith Park in 1896.

A bust of which actor stands on the grounds of Griffith Observatory because of a 1955 film shot there?

James Dean starred in Rebel Without a Cause, which staged its knife fight and its finale at the observatory in 1955; his bronze bust stands on the west lawn, and La La Land revisited the site in 2016.

Which director's biblical epic The King of Kings opened Grauman's Chinese Theatre in May 1927?

Cecil B. DeMille's silent life of Jesus premiered there on 18 May 1927 behind a live stage prologue devised by Sid Grauman, in what the theatre calls the most spectacular opening in film history.

Which company paid $5 million in 2013 for the naming rights to Grauman's Chinese Theatre?

TCL, the television maker, paid more than $5 million in January 2013 for a ten-year deal that helped fund a refit of the 1927 picture palace, which reopened that year as an IMAX theatre.

Which singing cowboy is the only person with a star in all five original categories of the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

Gene Autry earned stars for film, television, radio, recording and live performance; a sixth category, sports entertainment, has since been added, so his sweep now covers only the original five.

The Packers beat which team in the first Super Bowl at the LA Coliseum in January 1967?

The Kansas City Chiefs lost 35–10 to Green Bay before 61,946 fans, with about a third of the Coliseum's seats unsold: the first Super Bowl is the only one that failed to sell out.

A crowd of 115,300 at the Coliseum set a Guinness World Record for attendance at what kind of event?

A baseball game: the Dodgers drew 115,300 to a March 2008 exhibition against the Boston Red Sox, marking 50 years in Los Angeles; they had played at the Coliseum from 1958 to 1961 while their own ballpark was built.

The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles from which city before the 1958 season?

The Brooklyn Dodgers left Ebbets Field after the 1957 season, as the Giants quit New York for San Francisco; the name is short for Trolley Dodgers, coined in the 1890s for a borough criss-crossed by streetcar lines.

The Dodgers' ballpark, opened in 1962, was built on top of which historic Los Angeles neighbourhood?

The ballpark rose on Chavez Ravine, where a Mexican American community had been cleared in the 1950s for a public-housing project that was never built; it opened in April 1962 with 56,000 seats.

Which Dodgers pitcher became the first player to win the Cy Young Award and Rookie of the Year together, in 1981?

Fernando Valenzuela, a 20-year-old left-hander from Sonora, won both awards in 1981, when his screwball sparked Fernandomania and the Dodgers won the World Series.

The Lakers' name, odd in Los Angeles, was inspired by the nickname of which state?

The team took its name in Minneapolis from Minnesota's boast of being the land of ten thousand lakes; owner Bob Short moved the Lakers to Los Angeles in 1960 and kept the name.

The Clippers relocated to Los Angeles in 1984 from which other California city?

San Diego was home to the Clippers from 1978 until 1984, when Donald Sterling, a Los Angeles property mogul who had bought the team in 1981, moved it to his own city to share a market with the Lakers.

The Raiders spent 13 seasons at the Los Angeles Coliseum before moving back to which city in 1995?

Oakland got its Raiders back after 13 seasons that brought Los Angeles its first Super Bowl title, in January 1984; the Rams left for St. Louis in 1995 too, and the NFL stayed away until 2016.

In which stadium did the Rams win Super Bowl LVI in 2022 on their home field?

SoFi Stadium opened in Inglewood in 2020, four years after the Rams came home from 21 seasons in St. Louis; their 23–20 win over the Cincinnati Bengals on 13 February 2022 gave Los Angeles its first Super Bowl title since the Raiders'.

The mascot of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was Sam, what kind of animal?

A bald eagle: organisers first chose a bear, California's emblem, but Moscow had used one in 1980, so Disney artist Bob Moore drew America's national bird instead.

The concrete channel of the Los Angeles River hosts the climactic drag race in which film?

Grease ran its Thunder Road race down the river's concrete bed between the First and Seventh Street bridges; the Army Corps of Engineers began lining the channel after the devastating floods of 1938.

The Los Angeles River runs from Canoga Park to its mouth in which city?

Long Beach is where the river meets the Pacific, beside the port, after crossing the San Fernando Valley and downtown; most of its course runs in the concrete channel begun after the floods of 1938.

The 1940 Arroyo Seco Parkway, the West's first freeway, linked Los Angeles to which city?

The parkway's last Los Angeles stretch was dedicated on 30 December 1940, just in time to carry crowds to Pasadena for the Rose Parade; signs called it the Pasadena Freeway from 1954 until the old name returned in 2010.

What does the X in the airport code LAX stand for?

Nothing: when airport codes grew from two letters to three in 1947, LA simply gained a filler X; the field had opened in 1928 as Mines Field, on land that had grown wheat, barley and lima beans.

LAX's flying-saucer Theme Building of 1961 exemplifies which architectural style?

Googie, named after Googie's coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard, gave Southern California its space-age coffee shops, motels and gas stations; the Theme Building's crossed arches are the style on a grand scale.

Sinai and Olivet are the two cars of which Bunker Hill funicular, reputed to be the world's shortest railway?

Angels Flight has carried riders up Bunker Hill since 1901 in two counterbalanced cars named for biblical mountains; it sat in storage for 27 years before reopening half a block south in 1996.

Los Angeles City Hall's tower concrete was mixed with sand from every California county and water from what?

Water from the 21 missions and sand from all 58 counties went into the tower's concrete; the 454-foot tower was a rare exception to a 150-foot height limit that kept the rest of Los Angeles low until the late 1950s.

The 1893 Bradbury Building was J. F. Sebastian's apartment in which film?

Blade Runner (1982) set Sebastian's derelict apartment in the Bradbury's skylit iron atrium; mining millionaire Lewis Bradbury first commissioned architect Sumner Hunt, then handed the job to George Wyman to complete.

Italian immigrant Simon Rodia spent 33 years hand-building his folk-art towers in which Los Angeles neighbourhood?

Watts: Rodia raised the towers single-handed between 1921 and 1954, using simple hand tools and pressing glass, shells and broken pottery into the wet mortar.

The Getty Center, opened in 1997 in Brentwood, was designed by which architect?

Richard Meier chose Italian travertine for the hilltop campus because stone speaks of permanence; visitors ride up from the car park on a driverless tram, added to ease neighbours' fears about traffic.

Which famous Van Gogh painting hangs at the Getty Center?

Irises, painted at the Saint-Rémy asylum in 1889, has hung at the Getty since 1990, after a 1987 auction sale at $53.9 million fell through; the museum's other site is the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades.

What had to be done in 2005 to some panels of Gehry's stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall?

The offending panels were lightly sanded in 2005 to kill the glare and heat the mirror polish was bouncing onto neighbouring apartments and the sidewalk; Lillian Disney's $50 million gift in 1987 had started the project.

The Hollywood Bowl, opened in 1922, is the summer home of which ensemble?

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has played its summer season at the Bowl since the venue opened in 1922; the Beatles' 1964 and 1965 concerts there became a live album released in 1977.

Los Angeles restaurants Philippe the Original and Cole's both claim to have invented which sandwich?

The French dip: Philippe Mathieu's story has him accidentally dropping a roll into a pan of meat drippings in 1918, while Cole's says it dipped bread for a customer with bad gums; both opened in 1908.

Roy Choi's Kogi truck, launched in Los Angeles in 2008, paired Korean barbecue with what?

Tacos: the Kogi truck drew flash crowds by announcing each stop on Twitter, which led Newsweek to call it 'America's first viral eatery'.

In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark eats doughnuts inside the giant sign of which Inglewood shop?

Randy's Donuts opened as part of the Big Donut Drive-In chain and was renamed in the 1970s for the new owner's son, Randy Eskow; the 32-foot doughnut on its roof has since appeared in countless films and videos.

Developer Abbot Kinney opened which Los Angeles beach neighbourhood as a seaside resort in 1905?

Venice, billed as 'Venice of America', opened in 1905 on canals Kinney dug through coastal marsh; most of them were filled in for roads in 1929, soon after the town joined Los Angeles.

Which city was laid out by oil prospectors whose wells on a former bean ranch came up dry?

Beverly Hills: Burton Green's Amalgamated Oil Company bought the ranch in 1900, drilled without success, and turned to selling lots instead, naming the town after Beverly Farms in Massachusetts.

The oldest surviving house in Los Angeles, the 1818 Avila Adobe, stands on which street?

Olvera Street grew up around the adobe: Christine Sterling campaigned to save the condemned house in the 1920s, and her Mexican-style marketplace opened beside it on Easter Sunday 1930.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots began after a jury acquitted four police officers in the beating of which man?

Rodney King's beating by LAPD officers in March 1991 was caught on videotape; when the acquittals of 29 April 1992 set off days of rioting that killed more than 50 people, King went on television to plead for calm.

The magnitude 6.7 earthquake that struck Los Angeles before dawn on January 17, 1994, is named for which neighbourhood?

Northridge gave the quake its name, though the epicentre was later placed in neighbouring Reseda; it struck on a blind thrust fault nobody had mapped, killing about 60 people and dropping freeway bridges.

The only human remains found in the La Brea Tar Pits belong to a woman who died roughly how many years ago?

About 10,000 years: La Brea Woman, found in 1914, died as a young adult; a dog long thought to have been buried with her was later radiocarbon-dated and proved thousands of years younger.

In 1871 a mob of about 500 killed at least 17 people in Los Angeles's small community of immigrants from which country?

China: the mob stormed the Chinese quarter on 24 October 1871 and hanged or shot its victims within hours; eight rioters were convicted, but every conviction was overturned on a technicality.

Which prospector struck oil near downtown Los Angeles in 1892, setting off the city's first oil boom?

Edward Doheny and his partner Charles Canfield hit oil in 1892 after deepening a hand-dug shaft with a sharpened eucalyptus trunk; by 1895 the field was the top producer in California.

In 1840, Jean-Louis Vignes made the first recorded shipment out of Los Angeles of which product?

California wine: Vignes's El Aliso vineyard sent casks north by sea in 1840; the Bordeaux-born vintner had bought 104 acres beside the river in 1831, decades before citrus made the region famous.

A 1908 Los Angeles ordinance is often credited as America's first citywide law of what kind?

Zoning: the 1908 Residence District Ordinance barred laundries, machine shops and other industry from residential areas across the city, eight years before New York's better-known comprehensive code of 1916.

Phineas Banning's 1869 line, the first railroad in Los Angeles, was named the Los Angeles and what Railroad?

The Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad reached the harbour at Wilmington, the port town Phineas Banning had founded, in October 1869; he sold the line to the Southern Pacific a few years later.

Mexico's Congress named Los Angeles the capital of Alta California in 1835, a title then held by which town?

Monterey stayed the seat of government anyway: the 1835 decree raised Los Angeles from pueblo to city and named it capital, but the town only became the working capital in 1845, under Governor Pío Pico.

The Santa Monica Pier's Looff Hippodrome was built in 1916 to house what kind of attraction?

A carousel: carver Charles Looff built the hall for his own merry-go-round, and the 1922 machine that replaced it still turns there on 44 hand-carved horses; Paul Newman's grifter ran it in The Sting.

How many settlers, known as Los Pobladores, founded the pueblo of Los Angeles?

44 settlers in 11 families, recruited in Sonora and Sinaloa, walked north with Governor Felipe de Neve to found the pueblo; the Portolá expedition with Juan Crespí had reached the site in August 1769.

The 1847 capitulation that ended the fighting in California was signed at a ranch house in which Los Angeles pass?

Cahuenga Pass: Andrés Pico and John C. Frémont signed the Capitulation of Cahuenga there on 13 January 1847, on terms that let the Californios hand over their artillery and simply go home.

Who was elected Los Angeles's first African American mayor in 1973, serving five terms?

Tom Bradley, a former LAPD lieutenant, lost a racially charged race to incumbent Sam Yorty in 1969, beat him in the 1973 rematch, and stayed for 20 years, the longest mayoralty in the city's history.

Where in Los Angeles did a weather station record 121 °F on September 6, 2020?

Woodland Hills, at the Pierce College weather station in the west San Fernando Valley, hit 121 °F that day, the highest reading ever taken in Los Angeles County; the inland Valley regularly runs hotter than the coastal basin.

Early filmmakers moved to Hollywood partly to dodge camera patents enforced from New Jersey by which famous inventor?

Thomas Edison's trust struggled to enforce its patents so far from home. The independents who moved west controlled up to a third of the American film market.

Whose Hollywood Walk of Fame star is mounted on a wall because he asked that his name not be walked upon?

Muhammad Ali shares his name with the Islamic prophet, so his star hangs upright. The committee justified honouring a boxer by ruling that boxing is a form of live performance.

Which animals, bought for a 1920s film shoot and taken to Santa Catalina Island, have roamed there ever since?

Bison numbered about 30 on the island by 1938. Nobody is sure which silent western they were bought for, and one account says the filming happened in Yellowstone and only surplus animals reached Catalina.

What kind of animal was P-22, who crossed two Los Angeles freeways to live alone in Griffith Park?

A mountain lion is often killed crossing Los Angeles freeways, which made his trek across two of them famous. He was captured and euthanised in 2022 after injuries consistent with a car strike.

The first message on ARPANET, forerunner of the internet, was sent in 1969 from which California campus?

UCLA student Charley Kline typed the word login, but the system crashed after two letters. The first message ever sent across the network was therefore just lo.

Gunners fired over 1,400 shells into the night sky in the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles, later blamed on what?

A weather balloon sent up at 1 am started the shooting, the coast artillery's own association concluded in 1949. Within hours the Navy Secretary had called the raid a false alarm.

Which retired Space Shuttle was hauled 12 miles through Los Angeles streets in 2012 to the California Science Center?

Endeavour needed more than 400 street trees removed to squeeze through. The Science Center replanted two for every one that came down.

Which historic highway, nicknamed the Mother Road, has its symbolic western end at the Santa Monica Pier?

Route 66 never officially reached the pier. Its real terminus was a plain junction at Lincoln and Olympic Boulevards in Santa Monica, where it met another highway.

Which salad, a signature dish of the Hollywood Brown Derby restaurant, is named after the restaurant's owner?

Cobb salad honours Robert Cobb, though stories differ on whether he or his chef first put one together. One version even credits a different chef and dates it to the year the restaurant opened.

Which fast-food chain opened California's first drive-thru hamburger stand in suburban Baldwin Park in 1948?

In-N-Out was founded by Harry and Esther Snyder, whose two-way speaker system let drivers order without leaving the car.

Which cartoon character was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1978 to mark his 50th anniversary?

Mickey Mouse was the first fictional character added after the Walk opened. Lassie had beaten him to the pavement, though, with a star in place from the unveiling in 1960.

Which record label's 1956 Hollywood tower, designed by Welton Becket, resembles a stack of discs on a turntable?

Capitol got the look by coincidence, since the client's identity was kept secret during the design. The rooftop light blinks the word Hollywood in Morse code.

Griffith J. Griffith, who gave Los Angeles the land for Griffith Park, was later jailed for shooting whom?

His wife survived the 1903 shooting but lost her right eye. The judge blamed alcoholic insanity and sent Griffith to San Quentin for two years.

Which Ice Age animal, found at the La Brea Tar Pits, is the official state fossil of California?

The saber-toothed cat fell for a predator trap: animals stuck in the asphalt lured in carnivores, which got stuck too. Large carnivores long made up most of the mammals excavated.

American servicemen attacked Mexican American youths in 1943 Los Angeles riots named after which flamboyant garment?

The zoot suit used so much fabric that attackers called it unpatriotic during wartime rationing. They stripped the outfits from the youths who wore them.

Elizabeth Short, found murdered in Leimert Park in 1947, became known in the newspapers by which nickname?

The Black Dahlia may echo The Blue Dahlia, a film noir released the year before she died. Her murder is one of the oldest unsolved cases in Los Angeles County.

Which film composer wrote the Olympic Fanfare and Theme for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles?

John Williams won a Grammy for the piece the following year. Its first recording was played by an orchestra of Los Angeles-area musicians.

Which country led a boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles that kept most Eastern Bloc teams away?

The USSR could not hold every ally to the line: Romania defied the boycott, and its team got a standing ovation at the opening ceremony.

Fox Plaza, a then-new Century City skyscraper, played Nakatomi Plaza in which 1988 action film?

Die Hard was filmed there while the tower was under construction. Ronald Reagan later kept his offices on its 34th floor after leaving the White House.

Chris Burden's Urban Light, a much-photographed 2008 installation outside LACMA, is a grid of 202 restored what?

Street lamps from between the world wars make up the piece. Burden began buying them in 2000 with no artwork in mind and kept collecting for seven years.

Which astronomer used Mount Wilson Observatory, above Los Angeles, to show that the universe is expanding?

Edwin Hubble first proved from the same mountaintop that the universe extends beyond the Milky Way, using observations made in 1922 and 1923. Only then did he show it was growing.

The original Chinatown of Los Angeles was demolished to make room for which transport landmark, opened in 1939?

Union Station displaced Old Chinatown, and two rival replacements opened in 1938. New Chinatown survived, while the competing China City lasted only ten years.

Which Los Angeles private detective did Raymond Chandler introduce in his 1939 novel The Big Sleep?

Philip Marlowe had been tried out under other names, such as Carmady and John Dalmas, in pulp magazine stories before Chandler gave him a novel of his own.

Which celebrity chef opened his first restaurant, Spago, on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood in 1982?

Wolfgang Puck was born in Austria and had been cooking at Ma Maison. Its recipes filled his first cookbook, published shortly before Spago opened.

Which rooster-logo hot sauce in a green-capped bottle comes from a company founded in Los Angeles's Chinatown in 1980?

Sriracha maker David Tran, a Vietnamese-born immigrant, started Huy Fong Foods on Spring Street in Chinatown. The company later moved out to Irwindale.

Which architect designed Hollyhock House, which in 2019 became the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in Los Angeles?

Frank Lloyd Wright built it for the heiress Aline Barnsdall, who had wanted a whole theatre complex on the site. The name comes from the hollyhock motifs worked into the design.

A 1906 revival on Azusa Street in Los Angeles became the main catalyst for which worldwide Christian movement?

Pentecostalism spread from meetings led by the preacher Seymour, a son of freed slaves. The church that invited him to the city for a month had barred him after his first Sunday.

The Z-Boys of 1970s Santa Monica reinvented which sport by riding in drained backyard swimming pools?

Skateboarding moved into empty pools because a drought in 1976 and 1977 led homeowners to drain them. The team had started out surfing for the Zephyr shop.

Which Sunset Strip nightclub, opened in 1964, hired the Doors as its house band?

Whisky a Go Go put its DJ in a cage hung beside the stage, and the dancers it went on to hire helped popularise go-go dancing.

Which dry winds, occasionally called the devil winds, fan many of Southern California's most destructive wildfires?

Santa Ana winds begin as cool, dry air over the Great Basin. They heat up by compression on the way to the coast, which is why they arrive hot.

The Getty Villa, J. Paul Getty's museum of antiquities near Malibu, is modelled on a villa in which ancient Roman town?

Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri was the model, with details borrowed from other ancient sites. Getty never saw the result: the museum opened in 1974 and he died in 1976 without visiting.

Which Gainsborough portrait did railroad magnate Henry Huntington buy in 1921 for his estate near Los Angeles?

The Blue Boy drew 90,000 people to a farewell showing at the National Gallery in London before it sailed. It went back there on loan exactly a century after it left.

Which birds became local celebrities around 1970 by living wild beneath a Hollywood Freeway off-ramp?

Chickens from an overturned poultry truck are the usual story, though nobody knows for certain how they got there. By 1976 the flock numbered about 50 Rhode Island Reds.

Ted Ngoy, who built a Southern California doughnut chain after training at Winchell's, was a refugee from which country?

Cambodia had made Ngoy an army major and embassy attaché before he fled. He learned the trade through a minority hiring scheme, then named the shops he bought Christy's.

A quarry tunnel in Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park, was the entrance to which hero's lair on 1960s television?

Batman drove out of a cave left behind when the quarry closed in the late 1920s. It had supplied crushed rock for paving the streets of Los Angeles.

A stone sarcophagus at the Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades holds a portion of which world figure's ashes?

Mahatma Gandhi's ashes rest in a 1,000-year-old Chinese sarcophagus. The yogi Paramahansa Yogananda built the peace memorial after acquiring the lakeside property in 1949.

Los Angeles City Hall appeared as the home of which fictional newspaper in the 1950s series Adventures of Superman?

The Daily Planet moved into the building after the show's first season. An image of the same tower has been on Los Angeles police badges since 1940.

What disaster in April 1986 destroyed a fifth of the collection at the Los Angeles Central Library?

An arson fire hit a building that had been cited for years over fire and safety hazards. The blaze became the catalyst for a renovation the city had long debated.

Pacific Electric, the world's largest electric railway system in the 1920s, was nicknamed for its cars of which colour?

Red cars doubled as a sales tool. Founder Henry Huntington saw the railway as a way to help his real estate ventures, and the real money lay in developing land along the lines.

Which word do Southern Californians put before a freeway's number, a habit Northern Californians do not share?

The word dates from the 1940s, when new freeways went by names such as the Hollywood Freeway. When numbers replaced the names decades later, the article stayed put.

Which 1982 Frank Zappa single, featuring his teenage daughter Moon, sent up the slang of suburban Los Angeles teenagers?

Valley Girl backfired as satire. Zappa meant to lampoon the teenagers, but after its release far more people began talking that way, whether ironically or not.

Which nickname for Los Angeles doubles as slang for a state of mind out of touch with reality?

La-La Land blends the initials LA with an expression for a dreamland. A 2016 film musical borrowed the nickname for its story of dreamers chasing careers in the city.

Which nickname did Los Angeles media give the July 2011 weekend when a stretch of Interstate 405 was closed?

Carmageddon fizzled: after a massive city media campaign, traffic was lighter than normal across a wide area. A later closure of the same road, in 2014, was branded Jamzilla.

June Gloom, the Southern California nickname for grey early-summer mornings, is caused by which weather feature?

The marine layer brings low cloud in overnight, and it usually clears by early afternoon. It turns up in other months too, hence May Gray, No-Sky July and Fogust.

Which slang word meaning very or lots of marks a Californian as a northerner, not an Angeleno?

Hella may have started in Oakland in the 1970s. Californians place a language border between north and south on it, while dude, bro and like count as southern exports.

Which nickname, often shortened to its initials, covers the Riverside and San Bernardino area east of Los Angeles?

Inland Empire replaced an older name, the Orange Empire, which honoured the region's citrus groves. Developers probably pushed the new term, in print by 1914, to promote the area.

Which term from Los Angeles traffic reports, coined in the 1950s, means an unplanned lane closure of 30 minutes or more?

SigAlert comes from Loyd Sigmon, known as Sig, the radio executive who invented a system of automated traffic broadcasts. The Highway Patrol later gave the word its official meaning.

In the old folk belief known as earthquake weather, what are conditions like just before a quake strikes?

Hot and calm days took the blame because Aristotle thought quakes came from winds trapped in underground caves. A geologist has called the idea one of the commonest pseudoscientific ways of predicting them.

Drivers leaving Los Angeles northbound on Interstate 5 climb the Tejon Pass, better known by which nickname?

The Grapevine takes its name from wild grapes. Lieutenant Fages, chasing military deserters over the pass in 1772, called the canyon beyond it the Canyon of the Grapes.

The oldest surviving outlet of which fast-food chain is a 1953 walk-up stand in Downey, Los Angeles County?

McDonald's founding brothers franchised the stand themselves, before Ray Kroc was involved with the company. It has kept the original Golden Arches design.