Los Angeles is, like some incurable disease, a balefully organic phenomenon. Its streets are forever nibbling and probing further into its perimeter hills, twisting like rising water ever higher, ever deeper into their canyons, and sometimes bursting through to the deserts beyond. If the city could be prised out of its setting, one feels, it would be like a dried mat of some bacterial mould, every bump, every corner exactly shaped to its landscape.
Jan Morris, “Los Angeles”