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On July 4, 1847, roughly 700 U.S. troops congregated on a hill overlooking the recently captured ciudad to celebrate the Los Angeles' first American Independence Day. Californio forces under Andres Pico had surrendered just months before, and as the war raged on far to the south, the troops constituted an occupying…
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Among the charms of the monthly Downtown Art Walk is strolling through a rare historic L.A. neighborhood spared from the bulldozer. At this month's Art Walk, a new exhibition of photography from the George Mann Archives allows participants to discover a neighborhood to which fate and development have not been as kind:…
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With a renovation of the Tom Bradley International Terminal underway, and with Metro considering a fixed-rail transit connection, change is again afoot at Los Angeles International Airport -- the transportation hub that has hardly stood still since it emerged from the bean fields of Westchester in the late…
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The Sierra Madre Historical Archives collects, preserves, and provides access to a variety of materials that tell the Sierra Madre story: photographs, slides, postcards, scrapbooks, city directories, maps, letters, periodicals, posters, works of art, sound recordings, moving images, and ephemera. The archives collection…
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“Touring Yosemite”
Now through December 22, come "tour" Yosemite through books, photographs, drawings, ephemera and other, mostly 19th century, primary source materials. See how visitors traveled to Yosemite. See where they stayed and what they did and saw. See how they reflected upon their experiences after leaving…
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The Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University, has opened to researchers an extensive collection documenting Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American history in Los Angeles. This is the Venegas Family Papers, which consist of correspondence, photographs,…
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Dormant since spring, the Santa Ana winds howled back to life this week throughout the L.A. area. Triggering allergies, fraying nerves, and alarming fire-prone communities, the winds have long been a fact of life in Southern California -- the unadvertised price residents pay for the region's otherwise idyllic weather.…
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As a city that hosted such masters of the novel as Faulkner and Fitzgerald, provided sanctuary to European titans like Mann and Brecht, and produced its own homegrown stars like Raymond Chandler and Bret Easton Ellis, Los Angeles is no stranger to literary greatness. But the poet who -- according to at least one…
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Los Angeles history comes alive at the 7th-annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar. Organized by L.A. as Subject and presented by the USC Libraries, the annual event celebrates the diversity of Southern California’s history. For scholarly researchers, journalists, history buffs, and those simply interested in exploring the…
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Today, the Santa Monica (I-10) Freeway is an indelible marker across the Los Angeles landscape, a mini-equator that delineates boundaries between cultural and historical hemispheres of the city. Southern Californians depend on the freeway as a vital link between the Westside and downtown Los Angeles and as a…
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“Touring Yosemite”
Now through December 22, come "tour" Yosemite through books, photographs, drawings, ephemera and other, mostly 19th century, primary source materials. See how visitors traveled to Yosemite. See where they stayed and what they did and saw. See how they reflected upon their experiences after leaving…
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As any hike through the mountains will confirm, different geographies govern wild and urban areas. In the wild, peaks, ridges, and watercourses help us navigate, and as we move through the landscape it's difficult to miss how geologic uplift and erosion have shaped the land. But in the city, a different set of features…
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Perceptions may be changing with the gradual return to Los Angeles of fixed rail transit, but from today's vantage point, the city's freeways almost seem like an inevitable feature of the landscape. As "Saturday Night Live" recently parodied, for many of us freeways are the region's primary geographical reference…
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Quoting John E. Fisher of the L.A. Department of Transportation, the L.A. City Nerd recently shared this interesting fact on Facebook: in 1924, the downtown L.A. intersection of Seventh Street and Broadway was the busiest in the world with 504,000 people crossing those streets each day.
The chaotic scenes captured in…
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As Southern Californians tune into the infamously delayed coverage of London's 2012 Olympic games, many will inevitably think back to the Los Angeles games of 1984, and a few may even remember the games' first appearance here in 1932. Though short-lived, Los Angeles' two turns in the Olympic spotlight loom large in…
