Jan. 17, 1959: Matt Weinstock invented the “Only in L.A.” column while he was at the L.A. Mirror. In this edition, Weinstock is cataloging some L.A.-bashing:

It is a city without the power to assert its own identity; a city with nothing unexpendable in it, nothing which, vanished, would cause a civilized man at the other end of the world to weep . . . I have the impression of a Technicolor slum . . . a dance macabre of uproarious stucco fonts . . . a honky-tonk of exclamations . . . It is nobody’s city; it is only a place with more ‘housing units,’ it seems, than there are hills in the world . . . I felt, in Los Angeles, that I did not need to notice anything. Could anything really remarkable happen where ‘everything is okay?’

Weinstock’s column originally appeared in the L.A. Mirror in 1959 and was republished on latimes.com in 2009. It is available via Archive.org..