Does size matter?

Los Angeles was sold to 20th century America as the city of sunshine, health and happiness -- the favored place of suburbs, swimming pools, tans and movie stars. But if you needed one number to encapsulate the extravagant promise of L.A., you cited the city's population and marveled at its phenomenal rate of growth. That number was the measure of what we wanted to be and how much this place was desired. It was the one number that defined us.

The number of Angelenos was everywhere in boomtown Los Angeles -- on postcards to send back to "the folks" in Wichita and Buffalo, in brochures from the Chamber of Commerce and, most prominently, in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. Cartoons in newspapers showed the shapely figure of a prodigiously growing senorita, in each decade from the 1880s doubling or tripling in size. Like a prize heifer at the county fair, the city was obsessively measured by its many booster organizations because size mattered to builders; to suppliers of water, electricity and natural gas; and to the industries that located plants here to make tires, automobiles and steel.

It mattered that L.A.'s population outstripped every other major city on the West Coast. It mattered most that Los Angeles in 1930, at 1,231,370 residents, was twice the size of San Francisco, the city's historic rival. From 1900 to 1930, Los Angeles grew by 1,300%.

The potency of the city's sales pitch, its happy climate and the liberating newness of everything in Los Angeles propelled the growth of the number through the Depression and into the postwar decades. Between 1930 and 1960, the city's population doubled in size again, to 2,481,595.

Los Angeles then had a disciplined class of boosters made up of plant managers, bankers, insurance executives and large landowners (including the Chandler family, former owners of The Times). They capitalized on the city's history of resistance to organized labor, its weak government and its well-oiled machine of suburban development to make Los Angeles the unrivaled alternative to New York. For all its faults, L.A. was supposed to be the metropolis of tomorrow -- big, optimistic and firmly middle class in character.

The number of Angelenos in the city -- now an estimated 3,834,340 -- does not excite that kind of pride and wonder anymore. In recent years, the city's population has hardly grown at all. From 2000 to 2007, Los Angeles grew an estimated 3.8% (just slightly ahead of San Diego but well behind Pasadena). Old rival San Francisco's population actually fell 1.5%. Between mid-2006 and mid-2007, the population of Los Angeles went up by only 0.3% -- by 10,832 -- according to census estimates issued July 10.