Los Angeles - City of Demons

Los Angeles was for years the most murderous city in America. Newspapers called it Los Diablos instead of Los Angeles. “Some think it odd that there has been no violent deaths during the two weeks that we have been here,” an agricultural surveyor wrote home in 1860. “May the Lord watch over me.” Governors in Sacramento completely ignored the region for the first three decades after California joined the union, apparently hoping everyone down south would just hack each other to pieces and disappear. Unbelievably, the first state-funded institution in Southern California did not open until 1882. It was not an opera house, nor a poor house, or university. It was…An insane asylum. Follow me as I take you on a journey from Terminal Island Federal Corrections Institute, past the shipping cranes of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the busiest port complex in the western hemisphere, and onward up the LA River to its radioactive headwaters in the Santa Susana Mountains, home to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, the site of the largest nuclear meltdown in United States history. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts & Spotify.Stay tuned for further audio episodes.Read the original Substack post here. Dumpster Fires is a reader-supported publication. Fan the flames of inspiration, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dumpster Fires at dumpsterfires.substack.com/subscribe