{"id":237403,"date":"2026-03-26T11:15:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T11:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/237403\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T11:15:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T11:15:17","slug":"smoglandia-we-havent-always-been-smoggy-but-were-built-that-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/237403\/","title":{"rendered":"Smoglandia: We haven’t always been smoggy, but we’re built that way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"smoglandia-dropcap-i.png\" <\/p>\n

It\u2019s late July in 1943. Over the radio, Bing Crosby is crooning, Bob Hope is joking, and news of the war \u2014 against Hitler, against Japan \u2014 keeps sizzling and crackling across the dial.<\/p>\n

But here in Southern California, something more is in the air: a dense, motionless tsunami of something foul and inexplicable. Grown men are crying and mopping their eyes. Women\u2019s throats are sore, and their eyes are an unflattering shade of red.<\/p>\n

For hours, sometimes days, even, people can\u2019t see more than a few feet ahead of them. Cops directing traffic can\u2019t tell whether the stoplights are red or green, and neither can the drivers.<\/p>\n

Remember that in 1943, we were at war. Just the year before, in February 1942, a Japanese submarine had shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, and the very next night, L.A. was ordered into a blackout. Jittery Angelenos sat in the dark, rattled by sounds of sirens and antiaircraft fire. That turned out to be just a citywide case of nerves.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t the Japanese this time, either. That choking siege in July was the worst but not the first attack by an enemy that Los Angeles would be fighting long after World War II was over.<\/p>\n

Smog.<\/p>\n

\"smoglandia <\/a> <\/p>\n

Smoglandia is a four-part series on L.A.\u2019s historic battle with smog.<\/p>\n

Back in \u201943, L.A. didn\u2019t really have a name for it. \u201cSmog\u201d is a turn-of-the-century portmanteau word mashing together \u201csmoke\u201d and \u201cfog\u201d to describe the sooty, sulfurous air of the London of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.<\/p>\n

But as we would find out, our smog \u2014 photochemical smog \u2014 made the air taste like poison and look like something you\u2019d put out with the garbage. And its recipe was a killer combo of the two things we love so much: cars, and sunlight.<\/p>\n

For a long time, we wouldn\u2019t realize how much damage it was doing. Smog compromised the health of kids and the sickly and the elderly. It changed the look of movies. It chewed through rubber tires and engine hoses. It wiped out billions in agricultural crops, killing off whole fields of spinach in a half-day. It messed with our glamorous aviation industry; once, it skewed the odds at a beauty pageant because the planes flying contestants in from around Southern California to the Glendale airport couldn\u2019t land in the smog.<\/p>\n

Smog is why, even today, when you put gas in your tank, there\u2019s that rubber condom thingamajig around the gas nozzle, to keep gas fumes from turning into pollution \u2026 and it\u2019s also why you pay more for that gas.<\/p>\n

\u201cSmoglandia\u201d \u2014 another mashing of words \u2014 is big, bigger than the borders of any city or county here. And smog isn\u2019t gone, not by a long shot, but \u2014 with regulation and technology and psychology \u2014 we have beaten it to something of a standstill.<\/p>\n

If you weren\u2019t here 30 or 40 years ago, you don\u2019t remember a time when a gray-brown curtain descended over the San Gabriel Mountains and you couldn\u2019t see them for months \u2014 literally months \u2014 at a time.<\/p>\n

And it would take years to solve the what-is-it and who-done-it of smog but until then, the fabled Wonder City of the West was left wondering what the hell was happening to it.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

\u201cWeep some more, my lady\u201d appeared to be Los Angeles\u2019 theme song in February 1953 due to smog. <\/p>\n

(R.L. Oliver \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

The role of topography in L.A\u2019.s smog<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve heard these words without maybe giving them another thought: the Los Angeles basin. Basin. Our beautiful encircling topography of mountains and hills is a bowl ready-made by ancient plate tectonics to be filled with smoke and smog.<\/p>\n

We started to do that about 13,500 years ago, when humans showed up here in considerable numbers. There is evidence that these early Angelenos used fire as a tool \u2014 to protect themselves from the huge Ice Age wolves and fanged cats whose fossils fill the La Brea Tar Pits, and to burn and clear land for growing and to drive game.<\/p>\n

Then hit the fast-forward button, all the way to October 1542, when sailors aboard a Spanish ship captained by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo laid eyes on the coast of L.A. The ship\u2019s log summary made note of \u201ca large bay, which they named \u2018the Bay of the Smokes,\u2019 on account of the many smokes they saw there.\u201d<\/p>\n

In truth, ever since we\u2019ve built towns and cities, we\u2019ve made smog \u2014 whatever you call it.<\/p>\n

The ancient Romans burned so much wood and other fuel \u2014 for cooking, for agriculture and industry, even for the vestal virgins\u2019 eternal flame \u2014 that modern scientists conclude it would have lowered the climate of Europe by as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius, or, as the Romans would say, point-V degrees.<\/p>\n

L.A.\u2019s smog changed just about everything around us \u2014 even the crystalline light that the Chamber of Commerce bragged about, that enticed people to come here.<\/p>\n

In 1931, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein was spending his first winter at Caltech, and he wrote to a friend, \u201cHere in Pasadena, it is like Paradise. Always sunshine and clear air \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The day the light in L.A. changed forever<\/p>\n

Ten years later, the air around Pasadena was telling a different story. Helen Pashgian is a renowned artist, a pioneer in California\u2019s light and space art movement since the 1960s, and her installations challenge the way we interact with light.<\/p>\n

She grew up in Altadena, in that pre-smog air, and she\u2019s one of the few Angelenos who can recall the pre-smog era, when the air was limpid, and even from 20 miles inland or more, you really could see to Catalina, and the mountains looked as clear as if they were just at the end of your street.<\/p>\n

And to her artist\u2019s eye, that magical light was pure and brilliant in \u2026 \u201ca certain kind of cool light.\u201d She was in elementary school when the war began, and Los Angeles sprouted factories for the war effort and, as we would soon learn, a manufacturer of ugly air.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would see a line of this yellowish, pinkish haze,\u201d Pashgian remembered. \u201cWe\u2019d never seen that before. And everyone noticed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Altadena schoolgirl was witnessing the Big Bang of L.A. smog.<\/p>\n

And this new air, \u201cI think there was a smell to it \u2026 it just smelled dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"1947 <\/p>\n

For so many decades, people who moved to L.A. had come for its beauties. Now they were coming for the war work, in defense plants and factories.<\/p>\n

And then, this horrific, mysterious smog shows up. The country was at war with enemies it could see \u2014 soldiers, tanks, bombers \u2014 but where could L.A. put up a fight against an enemy it couldn\u2019t identify?<\/p>\n

Identifying a source for the smog<\/p>\n

It looked first to an old frenemy, the oil business.<\/p>\n

To understand what happened, you have to recognize the marriage of convenience between L.A. and the oil business. You probably know it already \u2014 you\u2019ve seen oil pumpjacks laboring away in nutty places, like on the La Cienega Boulevard shortcut through Baldwin Hills to the airport.<\/p>\n

That all got started on Nov. 4, 1892, when a hopeful Angeleno named Edward Doheny took a eucalyptus log and sharpened it like a No. 2 pencil, and went chonking away at a patch of dirt in Echo Park \u2014 and struck oil.<\/p>\n

Well, you couldn\u2019t stop the drilling after that. Between downtown and Venice Beach, thousands of homeowners uprooted their orange trees and put oil derricks right in their backyards. Signal Hill near Long Beach was pin-cushioned with so many oil rigs that one writer said it looked like \u201can aroused porcupine.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the oil biz, with its lakes and streams of spilled oil, also made some Angelenos sick. And now, to fuel the war effort, the big smokestacks on those big oil refineries were sending out big black plumes of gunk \u2014 and that had to be creating the smog, right?<\/p>\n

Chip Jacobs knows the story well. A few years back, he co-wrote a book called \u201cSmogtown, the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was, he said, \u201ca lot of negativity against the oil companies and refiners \u2026 and they felt scapegoated for air pollution before we\u2019d even done any chemical analysis because the natural public inclination was, well, it must be the black smoke we\u2019re seeing coming out of a refiner, or it must be out of a factory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Official L.A., anxious to mollify angry and frightened Angelenos, dropped the hammer on a plant near downtown L.A. It manufactured butadiene, a chemical needed to make artificial rubber, because the world\u2019s natural rubber supply was mostly in the hands of the enemy.<\/p>\n

The plant was shut down for a time, but just like a murder mystery where the killings continue after the suspect is behind bars, the smog just kept on coming. And L.A. still had a mess on its hands.<\/p>\n

All of L.A. believed, and official L.A. passionately hoped, that once the war was over and all those smokestacks shut down, the smog would vanish too. But the war ended, and the smog didn\u2019t, and L.A. wiped its weepy red eyes and demanded some solutions, dammit. The brown, greasy, bleach-flavored clouds were taking something with them, something of the paradise spirit. The economy, the outdoors, our culture, and our pride in this place \u2014 the plague of smog didn\u2019t just change our character, it became a character in our lives, and a miserable one too.<\/p>\n

And then someone rode in with some answers \u2014 not a man in a white hat, like a movie hero, but a man in a white lab coat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s late July in 1943. Over the radio, Bing Crosby is crooning, Bob Hope is joking, and news…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[20769,107136,107135,107134,8268,2303,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,8390,107124,1009,315,2664,8843,72],"class_list":["post-237403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-air","tag-antiaircraft-fire","tag-defense-plant","tag-enemy","tag-eye","tag-l-a","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-oil","tag-smog","tag-southern-california","tag-time","tag-war","tag-way","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}