Los Angeles Facts

Los Angeles's original name from 1781 was 'El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula' - a 55-character mouthful that Spanish settlers thankfully shortened over time.

During the 1994 Northridge earthquake blackout in Los Angeles, emergency services received calls from concerned residents about strange silvery clouds in the sky. Many were seeing the Milky Way clearly for the first time in their lives.

A memorial tree was planted in Los Angeles' Griffith Park in honor of Beatles guitarist George Harrison. It was killed by an infestation of beetles.

Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant tile mason, spent 33 years building the Watts Towers in Los Angeles entirely by hand - no machines, no scaffolding, no bolts, no welds, no blueprints. His only tools were pipe-fitter pliers and a window-washer belt. The tallest spire reaches 99 feet. When he finished in 1954, he deeded the land to a neighbor, boarded a bus, and never came back.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour crawled through a Los Angeles neighborhood like a beached spaceship in 2012. Crews spent three days towing the retired orbiter 12 miles to a museum, felling about 400 trees to clear its wings. It paused outside Randy's Donuts, and a stock Toyota Tundra hauled the 150,000-pound shuttle across a freeway bridge as up to a million people watched.