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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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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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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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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…
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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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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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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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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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“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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“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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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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“LA230” Runs September 2011 – August 2012, Throughout Southern California
With a history spanning 230 years, Los Angeles will have no trouble finding ways to celebrate its rich heritage over the next 12 months. The LA Heritage Alliance, a network of over 200 heritage organizations throughout Southern California, is…
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L.A. as Subject's latest contribution to KCET's SoCal Focus blog features historical images of German-speaking exiles and émigrés who escaped war and persecution in Europe for the safety of Southern California:
In the 1930s and 1940s, as the horrors of Nazi Germany engulfed the European continent, Los Angeles became a…
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What did the Los Angeles Basin look like before Spanish colonization transformed it? KCET.org's SoCal Focus blog looks at Southern California's native landscape as well as L.A.'s enduring relationship with nature:
A series of recent news headlines have reminded us that our city—often associated with brown skies,…
