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They literally moved mountains to create Dodger Stadium. Between 1959 and 1962, an army of construction workers shifted eight-million cubic yards of earth and rock in the hills above downtown Los Angeles, refashioning the rugged terrain once known as the Stone Quarry Hills into a modern baseball palace.
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Entire towns have vanished from the Southland.
The street grid of Morocco once stretched across the same gilded real estate occupied today by Beverly Hills. The ruins of a town named Minneapolis lie beneath Atwater Village. The independent city of Tropico melded with Glendale.
In an earlier age, geographic names were…
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The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded the USC Libraries and the L.A. as Subject research alliance a grant to develop a residency program that will support archival education. The grant is part of the IMLS Laura Bush 21st-Century Librarian program, which funds training of early career…
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n 1912, Los Angeles considered an audacious plan to reshape its topography. A group calling itself the Bunker Hill Razing and Regrading Association proposed to pump water from the Pacific Ocean, pipe it 20 miles to the city center, and spray the seawater through high-pressure jets against a ridge of hills to the…
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Never mind that Tinseltown was five or even fifty miles away. By the mid-1920s, the Hollywood brand was so strong that communities across Southern California were affixing it to their names. Toluca became North Hollywood. Sherman became West Hollywood. And in distant Ventura County, Oxnard Beach became…
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Like some of the very people who drive on them, a few Los Angeles streets have achieved the height of fame. Sunset Boulevard lent its evocative name to Billy Wilder's classic film noir. Pasadena's Colorado Boulevard appears on millions of television screens each New Year's Day as the route of the Rose Parade. And to…
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Water, Power, and Technology: The Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1913-2013
Exhibit will run from September 9 through December 20, 2013 Honnold/Mudd Library, inside North Entrance (909) 607-3977
In November 1913, the City of Los Angeles completed construction of the first Los Angeles Aqueduct. In commemoration of the…
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Earlier this month, the Los Angeles City Historical Society (LACHS) honored LA as Subject with the J. Thomas Owen History Award. The award was given in recognition of LA as Subject's work in advocating for the region's archival collections held in institutions both large and small.
"Both the LA as Subject website and…
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Woodbury ranch superintendent Thomas Hoag had no idea the three-foot seedlings he was planting would someday become a major Yuletide attraction. It was 1885, and Hoag and his Chinese American ranch hands were building a driveway that climbed a steady grade from the Pasadena city limit up to the ranch house of Altadena…
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It would be more Scrooge than Santa to dwell on the fact that these candy-cane streetcars were designed to bolster two ailing business models, the downtown department store and the fixed-rail streetcar. After all, Angelenos loved the festive paint job. Anywhere from 50 to 100 people, many of them children, called the…
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It’s doubtful that any prayers were said on Cemetery Ravine’s behalf when earthmovers filled in and paved over the gully to create part of the Dodger Stadium parking lot.
Early maps of Los Angeles show Cemetery Ravine as one of several canyons draining the Elysian Hills just north of the city’s center. Though…
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Why does downtown Los Angeles' grid include a street with such a distinctively New York name? Broadway may be one of L.A.'s oldest streets -- laid out by surveyor Edward O. C. Ord in 1849 -- but until 1890, Angelenos knew it only as Fort Street.
Problems with pronunciation provided the impetus for the name change. By…
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J. Michael Walker, give an illustrated talk on my map, this Thursday, February 28, at 6:45pm, at the Los Feliz Public Library, as part of its tenth annual "Architecture & Beyond" series. J. Michael created a large-scale (23' wide by 5' high) "Literary Map of LA " that was exhibited at the Hammer Museum, in Los…
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Early photographs of Los Angeles surprise for many reasons, but often what's most striking is how empty the city looks. Open countryside surrounds familiar landmarks. Busy intersections appear as dusty crossroads.
Southern California entered the photographic record at the cusp of a dramatic transformation in the…