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Surfers. Palatial estates. Soul-crushing traffic. Pacific Coast Highway treats motorists to many iconic Southern California views and experiences. But two distinctively shaped rocks have been missing from the Pacific Palisades shoreline for decades, victims of the scenic highway's development.
For as long as Southern…
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Nominations for the L.A. as Subject (LAAS) Executive Committee members are now being accepted. There are 5 seats that need to be filled for the incoming 2013-2015 Executive Committee term, including the Executive Committee Chairperson. Please send your nominations for Executive Committee members and/or chair directly…
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From CicLAvia to a new comprehensive bike plan, Los Angeles has been imagining new ways to get around the city on two wheels. But perhaps nothing today matches the ambition behind a Pasadena millionaire’s turn-of-the-20th-century scheme: a bicycle freeway connecting the Crown City to Los Angeles.
Southern California was…
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Without the handwritten caption reading "Part of Los Angeles," it might be difficult to place the above drawing -- generally considered to be the oldest extant drawing of the city. The Los Angeles that William Rich Hutton saw when he first arrived on July 7, 1847, is virtually unrecognizable today.
Hutton came to Los…
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Widely considered the earliest photograph of Los Angeles, the origin story of this image remains something of a mystery. Who took the photo, and when? Though the image and the historical record offer clues, they provide no definitive answers. What we do know is that some day in the late 1850s or early 1860s, a…
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Los Angeles remembers its Red Cars with an almost mythic reverence. Replicas of the Pacific Electric Railway’s red-liveried trolleys now transport tourists through a Disney theme park, while Angelenos swap wistful stories about the streetcar that would take you to the beach, deep into the Inland Empire, or all the way…
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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…
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Decades before Walt Disney moved his studio there and dreamed up Tomorrowland, Burbank glimpsed another man’s futuristic vision in 1910, when a colorful inventor named Joseph Fawkes built an experimental monorail, the Aerial Swallow.
Keep reading the full post at Los Angeles magazine's City Think blog.
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Established in 1856, St. Vincent Medical Center is the oldest medical institution in Los Angeles and celebrated operating for 157 years on January 6, 2013. The hospital’s sisters have collected more than a century of hospital photos, medical records and artifacts to create a conservancy to share the hospital’s rich…
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Orange County was more farmland than suburb—a landscape of orange groves and cow pastures rather than tract houses and fairytale castles—when Walter Knott opened his first roadside produce stand in 1923. The dusty highway passing through Knott’s berry farm was fast becoming the principal route between Los Angeles and…
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Los Angeles history comes alive at the 8th-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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Glance at an old map of the Hollywood area like the one above and two things stand out. First, the land is remarkably empty. There are few roads and even fewer structures. Second, two separate towns appear where we would expect one: Hollywood, destined for stardom, and Colegrove, destined for obscurity. What happened to…
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The year was 1892, and Catalina Island was in foreclosure.
Its owner, George Shatto, had envisioned a resort town on the island but had built few tourist amenities apart from the three-story Hotel Metropole. When the island finally slipped from Shatto's hands, its new owners purchased it for just $280,000.
Today,…
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In 1929, dynamite forever changed the look of Catalina’s Avalon Bay. Long one of Catalina’s most prominent landmarks, Sugar Loaf Rock was a volcanic monolith rising some 50 feet above the harbor where Avalon’s iconic Casino building stands today. Early 20th-century guidebooks described the Sugar Loaf as Avalon’s…
