Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1906
" . . . this undistinguished townscape and its underlying flat topography were quite essential in producing the distinctively Angeleno ecologies that surround it on every side. In a sense it is a great service area feeding and supplying the foothills and beaches-across its flatness of instant track-laying ballast, the first five arms of the railroad system were spread with as little difficulty as toy trains on the living room carpet, and later the Pacific Electric inter-urban lines, and later still the freeways. The very first railroad of all in the area, the Wilmington line, ran down across the plains to the harbour, but it was the Long Beach line of the Pacific Electric with its spurs to Redondo and San Pedro and its entanglements with the Los Angeles Pacific (which it bought out in 1906) which really began the great internal network that used the plains to link downtown, the foothills, and the beaches into a single comprehensible whole.
"Watts was the very centre of all this action, a key junction and interchange between the long distance trunk routes, the inter-urbans and the street railways. . . . " p. 173