Historical Timeline of Los Angeles
Arts & Culture Points of Interest Los Angeles
Discover Los Angeles
From the ancient La Brea Tar Pits to new museums and hotel openings, read on for a timeline of the incredible history of Los Angeles.
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Discover Los Angeles
From the ancient La Brea Tar Pits to the latest hotels and cultural attractions, read on for a timeline of the incredible history of Los Angeles.

Circa 38,000 BC - Los Angeles has been pulling in visitors for tens of thousands of years, as a future fossil is trapped inside what are now the La Brea Tar Pits.

Circa 8000 BC - Chumash people settle the Los Angeles basin.

Circa 300 BC - The Tataviam (later Fernandeno) people inhabit what is now the San Fernando Valley.

Circa 500 AD - Tongva Indians settle in the Los Angeles basin. Some accounts say they displaced the Chumash. By the 16th century, the region’s main village will be called Yang-Na, near present-day Los Angeles City Hall.

1542 - Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo navigates the coast of California. He calls present-day San Pedro Bay the “Bay of Smokes.”

1602 - Sebastian Vizcaino of Spain explores the California coast and meets some of the locals.

1769 - Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola explores the area to open up a land route to the port of Monterey and establishes the first Spanish settlement in the area. The settlers name the local river Rio de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula (River of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula).

1771 - Father Junipero Serra establishes the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, later moved to the present-day city of San Gabriel.

1874 - Los Angeles gets its first streetcar. It’s horse-drawn. The first electric streetcars will debut in 1887.

1876 - Cathedral of Saint Vibiana opens.

1877 - Thanks to new refrigerated boxcar technology, California oranges cause a sensation in St. Louis. Agriculture begins to replace ranching as the mainstay of the local economy.

1878 - Los Angeles County Bar Association is established.

1880s - Citrus, wine grapes and other fruits and vegetables are grown in the Los Angeles area. The area of present-day Beverly Hills is largely bean fields, Hollywood is fig orchards.

1880s - Westlake Park is built, later renamed MacArthur Park after the World War II general.

1880 - Founding of the University of Southern California. Its sports teams are known as the Methodists or the Wesleyans until 1912, when a columnist wrote that they “fought like Trojans.” The name sticks.

1880 - The first Chinatown is established, centered on Alameda and Macy Streets (now Cesar Chavez Avenue). Today the area is the site of Union Station.

1881 - The Los Angeles Times debuts as the Los Angeles Daily Times. The Times would later go on to become one of the most distinguished daily newspapers in the U.S. by the latter half of the 20th century, winning 45 Pulitzer Prizes since 1942.

1881 - The Southern Pacific Railroad links Los Angeles directly with the eastern United States for the first time.

1881 - Los Angeles has its first recorded snowfall.

1883 - Los Angeles gets its first conservatory of music.

1885 - The Santa Fe Railroad opens a second line linking Los Angeles with the rest of the nation.

1886 - Harvey Henderson Wilcox purchases 160 acres of land west of the Cahuenga Pass for a planned residential community. He names it Hollywood, after the estate of an acquaintance of his wife, Daeida.

1886 - The price of a train ticket between Kansas City and Los Angeles falls to one dollar, prompting another population boom.

1889 - USC and St. Vincent’s College play the first college football game in Los Angeles.

1890 - Los Angeles population: 50,000 (a new record in the history of LA).

1890 - The official flag of Los Angeles is designed.

1892 - Edward Doheny discovers oil at “Greasy Gulch,“ near Westlake Park. Soon oil is discovered all over the Los Angeles area.

1939 - Union Station opens in Downtown L.A. Its style combines Mission, Spanish Colonial and Streamline Moderne motifs, to dramatic effect. To make way for Union Station, Chinatown moves to its present location at the former Little Italy.

1939 - Raymond Chandler publishes The Big Sleep, the first of his detective novels set in Los Angeles.

1939 - MGM Studios takes viewers over the rainbow, with the release of The Wizard of Oz.

1939 - Pink's Hot Dogs is founded by Paul and Betty Pink as a pushcart near the corner of La Brea and Melrose. The family later opens their current location on La Brea in 1946.

1940 - The Hollywood Palladium opens with a dance featuring Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra and band vocalist Frank Sinatra.

1940 - The Arroyo Seco Parkway opens on the right-of-way between Downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena, becoming the nation’s first controlled limited access highway (aka a freeway). Today the LA area has 27 interconnecting freeways, and the East L.A. Interchange is the busiest in the world.

WWII - Shipbuilding becomes the primary business of the Port of Los Angeles, employing some 90,000 workers. One-third of U.S. warplanes are manufactured in Los Angeles, underscoring the region's dominance in manufacturing and aerospace for decades to come.

1942 - Los Angeles gives the world its first parking meter.

1944 - Bing Crosby’s recording of “San Fernando Valley” reaches No. 1 on the charts, no doubt prompting plenty of GIs to move here after the war.

1944 - Peak of ridership of the Pacific Electric Railway (red car) streetcars, with 109 million riders on more than 1,150 miles of track in four counties.

1946 - The Cleveland Rams football team moves to Los Angeles and become the Los Angeles Rams. Under executive Pete Rozelle (later commissioner of the National Football League), the Rams will become the first team to capitalize on television.

1947 - The telephone area code 213 is assigned to Los Angeles.

1956 - The Capitol Records building in Hollywood, distinctively shaped like a stack of 45-rpm disks, becomes the first circular office tower and an emblematic symbol to the entertainment industry in Los Angeles.

1957 - Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin of the Los Angeles-based toy company Wham-O create a durable plastic ring they call the Hula Hoop. It sells over 100 million in the next two years.

1958 - Television station KTLA becomes the first to use a news helicopter.

1958 - The former Brooklyn Dodgers play for the first time as the Los Angeles Dodgers, becoming the first Major League Baseball team west of Missouri.

1958 - USC establishes the first schools in the United States for Cinema-Television, Gerontology and Urban Planning & Development. The cinema-television department would later come to rank as the No.1 film school in the U.S., consistently producing Academy Award winners or nominees year after year.

1959 - Los Angeles-based toy company Mattel debuts Barbie on March 9. That makes her a Pisces.

1960 - Los Angeles population: 2,479,015, surpassing Philadelphia as third in the nation. More than 6 million people live in Los Angeles County.

1960 - The Minneapolis Lakers basketball team moves to Los Angeles and is renamed the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most successful teams in the history of the NBA, with 16 NBA championships. Legendary Lakers will include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, Jerry West, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.

1960 - The Hollywood Walk of Fame opens with a star dedicated to Joanne Woodward embedded in the sidewalk.

1960 - Los Angeles hosts the national convention of the Democratic Party. John F. Kennedy is nominated to run for president.

1967 - The first-ever AFL-NFL World Championship Game, aka Super Bowl I takes place at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The NFL champion Green Bay Packers defeated the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs 35-10.

1967 - The Mark Taper Forum opens at the Music Center. It will be instrumental in the launch of successful new plays including Angels in America.

1967 - A peaceful demonstration takes place at The Black Cat in Silver Lake. A plaque mounted on the exterior of bar declares it as "the site of the first documented LGBTQ civil rights demonstration in the nation." The demonstration that’s commemorated by the plaque stemmed from police raids that took place on New Year’s Eve 1967 at The Black Cat and other gay bars in the area.

1967 - The "Fabulous" Forum opens in Inglewood. The LA Kings play their first games here, as well as the "Showtime" era Lakers. The venue was renamed Kia Forum in 2022.

1967 - The Queen Mary is officially retired from service and sails to Long Beach, where she remains permanently moored as a tourist attraction, hotel and special events venue.

1968 - The Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is founded by George Drury Smith. Beyond Baroque is regarded as one of the most successful and influential grassroots incubators of literary art in the country.

1969 - The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) is founded in Downtown LA. FIDM has grown to four campuses in California with a student body of 4,200 and nearly 70,000 graduates worldwide.

1969 - The Los Angeles LGBT Center is founded. Today the Center provides services for more LGBT people than any other organization in the world, offering programs, services, and global advocacy that span four categories: Health, Social Services and Housing, Culture and Education, Leadership and Advocacy.

1970 - The first permitted gay parade in the world takes place on Hollywood Boulevard.

1971 - The Los Angeles Convention Center opens in Downtown LA. The LACC was designed by architect Charles Luckman, who had previously partnered with William Pereira on LA landmarks such as CBS Television City and the master plan for LAX. Luckman's own firm designed the Theme Building at LAX and The Forum.

1971 - Magic Mountain opens in Santa Clarita. Now known as Six Flags Magic Mountain, the 262-acre theme park is known as the "Thrill Capital of the World" - its 19 roller coasters is currently the world record for most roller coasters in an amusement park.

1972 - The famed Memphis label Stax Records presents the Wattstax music festival at the Coliseum. Often dubbed the “Black Woodstock,” Wattstax features performances from the label’s roster of legendary music acts, including Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Albert King, Rufus and Carla Thomas, the Bar-Kays and many more.

1972 - The South Bay Bike Trail is constructed, linking Pacific Palisades with Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey and other beach cities, and turning the beach into even more of a recreation destination.

1973 - Tom Bradley becomes mayor of Los Angeles, the second African-American mayor of a major United States city. He will serve as mayor for the next two decades and helps guide Los Angeles to become a world city.

1973 - Jewel’s Catch One opens in Arlington Heights on the border of Koreatown. Now called Catch One, the nightclub was the first exclusively gay and lesbian disco for African-Americans in the country. During the club's 40-year run, owner Jewel-Thais Williams welcomed legends like Rick James, Madonna and the "Queen of Disco," Sylvester.

1974 - The J. Paul Getty Museum moves to a recreated Roman villa on a hill overlooking the ocean in Pacific Palisades.

1974 - Nude sunbathing at Venice Beach gets national attention, before the Los Angeles City Council votes to outlaw it.

1974 - Chinatown is released. The Oscar-winning neo-noir features one of the greatest quotes in movie history: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

1975 - The George C. Page Museum opens adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.

1975 – Jaws, a film by a young director named Steven Spielberg, inaugurates the age of the modern blockbuster.

1975 - Establishment of the Southern California Air Quality Management District. Air quality in the Los Angeles basin has improved steadily since, with ozone levels down to about one-third their 1975 levels.

1976 - The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites opens in Downtown LA. The 35-story hotel features the rotating Bona Vista Lounge on the 34th floor. Its glass elevators appeared in True Lies and In the Line of Fire.

1976 - Painting of the Great Wall of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, the world’s longest mural at 2,500 feet. Los Angeles is the mural capital of the world, with over 1,500 wall paintings around the city.

1977 - The California African American Museum is founded. The first African American museum of art, history, and culture fully supported by a state, CAAM began formal operations in 1981 and moved to its permanent home at Exposition Park in 1984. The new facility’s inaugural exhibition was "The Black Olympians 1904-1984," timed to coincide with the '84 Summer Olympics.

1977 - Star Wars opens on May 25 and breaks box office records. Today "May the 4th" is celebrated as "Star Wars Day."

1978 - The Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area is established. At over 153,000 acres, it is the world’s largest urban national park.