Illustration of just 2,166 people, 9,997,834 shy of Los Angeles County's 10 million people. Los Angeles Almanac image.
With a population of about 10 million people, Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the United States. Not only is this is a lot of people for a single U.S. county, but is, in fact, a larger population than that of 40 of the 50 U.S. states (or 144 of 235 countries in the world*). We tried finding a way to illustrate what 10 million people might look like in a single image, but the best we could come up with (we ran out of time and computing power) was the image above, showing a mere 2,166 people. Try to imagine this image multiplied 4,617 times in order to arrive at an image of 10 million people.
So, we thought of finding images of a lot more than 2,166 people. We decided to use one that many Angelenos are already familiar with - Dodger Stadium. Of course, Dodger Stadium doesn’t accommodate 10 million spectators at one time, but it can seat 56,000 people. That, however, still doesn't come anywhere close to 10 million people.
Game day at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, 2012. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress.
If you do the math to see how many Dodger Stadiums it would take to seat all 10 million people residing in Los Angeles County.
We came up with 179. 179 Dodger Stadiums.
Imagine that.
179 Dodger Stadiums imagined across the Los Angeles County landscape, surrounding Downtown Los Angeles. Credit: Los Angeles Almanac-created image from an image by 12019 at Pixabay.com.
* If Los Angeles County were a separate country on its own, its population, according to recent U.S. Census estimates, would place it within the top one hundred most populous countries in the world. It would have a population just slightly smaller than that of Sweden and more than that of either Honduras, Austria, or Israel.
If every Los Angeles County resident were to gather into a tightly-packed crowd (about 18 by 18 inches per person - tight, but not suffocating anyone), they would fill the land area of Marina del Rey. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that the entire world's population of 7.9 billion people (January 2023), using the same dimensions per person, could be comfortably packed within 638 square miles. That would be approximately the combined area of the cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, Torrance, Burbank, Santa Monica and Carson.
