Locals sometimes refer to Lewiston-Auburn as the “other L.A.,” a self-deprecating phrase that contrasts our perceived insignificance with the behemoth size, glitz and dynamism of Los Angeles.

Having traveled to California’s L.A. late last month, I can state categorically that Maine’s L-A has no reason to be defensive. If Lewiston-Auburn is viewed as a stagnant New England mill town struggling to re-invent itself, Los Angeles is the poster child for explosive, but shortsighted and often self-destructive, growth.

Some 10 million tourists flock to Los Angeles every year, but it’s a place perpetually on the verge of disaster. Inadequate public transport, gridlock, air pollution, sky-high prices, street crime, drugs, racial and ethnic tension, and a yawning gap between rich and poor are as much part of the cityscape as alluring attractions like Universal Studios, Hollywood or Rodeo Drive.

Perhaps Los Angeles’ most intractable problem is lack of water. Unlike Lewiston-Auburn, which receives over 40 inches of precipitation a year, Los Angeles averages 15 and often gets less than 10. Lawn watering is currently restricted to two days per week, and the Los Angeles River, which flows through a fixed concrete channel, is usually closer in size to Lewiston’s canals than to the Androscoggin.

The most obvious fallout from water scarcity is the increasing hazard of fire, particularly in the Los Angeles National Forest, a wooded mountain range running west to east, just north of the city. Fueled by dense, desiccated undergrowth and fanned by hot, dry desert winds, raging forest fires threaten not only isolated hillside homes but large communities in the valleys at the base of the mountains.

On August 30, while driving east from Los Angeles, we witnessed the outbreak of a huge fire on a ridge north of Pasadena, its smoke column so tall it resembled the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. That fire continues to burn, though less rapidly, and has already consumed 160,000 acres.
Despite the immense disparity in their size and the 3,000 miles separating them, L-A and L.A. have historical similarities. Due to geography and happenstance, however, they have taken very different paths over the past century and a half.

Both were launched by pioneering economic enterprises, and their fates were tied to water (the abundance of it in one and lack of it in the other).
Los Angeles actually started out as the smaller urban center. In 1850, two years after Mexico ceded California to the United States, Los Angeles was incorporated as a city and county seat with a population of 1,650 – much fewer than the 4,854 then living in Lewiston. L.A.’s populace reached 15,000 by 1881, a number still less than Lewiston’s 19,000 plus.

Today L.A.’s population has grown to nearly four million, crowded into just under 500 square miles, and L.A. County numbers almost 10 million. Add the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and that figure jumps to just under 13 million.

Lewiston’s population peaked around 1950 and now stands at approximately 35,000, while Auburn’s population is about 23,000. Androscoggin County contains a little over 100,000 people, spread over an area roughly the size of Los Angeles city.

Originally a ranching and farming area, Los Angeles first boomed in 1892, when the discovery of oil led to a “black gold” rush. By 1923, it was producing a quarter of the world’s petroleum.

In the early 1900s, the infant motion picture industry also located in Los Angeles, where plentiful sunshine and varied scenery created a natural outdoor backdrop desirable for popular Western films. (We visited the Santa Monica home and ranch of the era’s greatest movie star, cowboy humorist Will Rogers. Now a state park, it is threatened with closure due to California’s budget crisis).

By 1900, Los Angeles’ population had doubled to over 100,000 in just a decade. But water was too scarce to support more inhabitants until 1913, when William Mulholland completed an aqueduct from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the longest in the hemisphere (using controversial tactics dramatized in the movie “Chinatown”).

Most of L.A.’s water is still piped in from afar, but the supply has often been limited by droughts and outstripped by the area’s ballooning population. The rise of aircraft manufacturing during the 1930s and World War II, followed by post-war aerospace industries and radio and television broadcast production, led to decades of sustained economic growth.

Many returning veterans settled in L.A. after 1945, creating a sprawling suburban megalopolis that gobbled up citrus groves and ranches. By 1950, the city’s population numbered 1.9 million and the county’s more than 4.1 million.

Lewiston-Auburn’s boom began in 1847, when Boston capitalists led by Benjamin Bates decided to build a turn a rural community into a planned textile-manufacturing town, harnessing abundant water flow from the Androscoggin River and Lewiston Falls to power large mills.

Fabrics and shoes, the earliest mass produced products of the Industrial Revolution, were the engine of L-A’s economy from the 1850s right through the 1970s, when foreign competition and free trade began to drive companies out of business and belatedly forced the local economy to diversify. The area’s competitive advantage of readily available water power had already been lost by the late 1800s, when coal-fired steam, followed by electricity and oil, became principal energy sources for industry.

By the 1950s, L-A was smaller than many of the suburbs of Los Angeles, and its economy a fraction the size of the latter’s.

Nevertheless, “small” may seem very inviting after a visitor has been trapped for hours on a Los Angeles freeway, sweltered in 100-degree-plus heat, witnessed an Armageddon forest fire, struggled to find an affordable hotel or paid a 9.75 percent sales tax.

In short, if you’re hankering for the Los Angeles experience, watch a Hollywood movie or Burbank television show, but if you want a life, stay home and enjoy the “other L.A.”

Elliott L. Epstein, a local attorney, is founder and board president of
Museum L-A and an adjunct history instructor at Central Maine Community
College. He can be reached at [email protected]