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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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From 1955 until 2009, when most staff moved to a new administrative building a block away, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Parker Center was as a proud symbol of police modernization and a focal point for controversy. Last week Chief Charlie Beck padlocked its front doors, and the aging building now stands vacant.
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Imagine the Los Angeles River before its metamorphosis into a concrete flood control channel, and Mark Twain’s quip about falling into a California river and coming out “all dusty” might come to mind. But the historical record, including photos like the shown here, paints a much different picture.
Keep reading the…
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This installation highlights the work of local and award winning photographer Shelley Gazin and is featured in the "Light and Shadows: The Story of Iranian Jews" exhibit at the Fowler Museum.
"Becoming Persian: Photographs & Text Threads Illuminating the Iranian-Jewish Community" is a photographic study by Gazin…
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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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Along Highway 101 between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, cast metal bells spaced one or two miles apart mark what is supposedly a historic route through California: El Camino Real. Variously translated as "the royal road," or, more freely, "the king's highway," El Camino Real was indeed among the state's first…
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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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It was a spectacle no Angeleno had witnessed before: a caravan of fourteen Arabian camels ambling through the streets of Los Angeles. Arriving in town January 8, 1858, the humped and hoofed animals represented an ambitious U.S. government experiment to introduce the so-called “ship of the desert” to the arid lands of…
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Wrigley Field: baseball fans will forever associate the name with the Windy City. But for decades the City of Angels boasted a Wrigley Field of its own—the longtime home of the minor-league Los Angeles Angels.
Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field was, in fact, the first to bear the name. Though it had been open since 1914, Cubs…
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Like many of Los Angeles' first public parks, Eastlake (now Lincoln) Park began as unwanted land: a fifty-acre site rejected by a railroad and given to the city for free. But like its crosstown rival, Westlake (now MacArthur) Park, Eastlake soon grew into one of the city's most popular outdoor retreats.
Located…
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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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It lacks the native charm of the sycamore or oak. It wants for the palm's exotic appearance. It doesn't have the pepper tree's romantic associations with California's mission past. It never enjoyed, unlike the eucalyptus, the passionate advocacy of a forester like Abbot Kinney. But the fig tree -- and specifically the…
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Since 2002, Library Journal has recognized those who are changing libraries and the services they provide, “librarians and others in the library field who are doing extraordinary work to serve their users and to move libraries of all types and library services forward.” Now in its 137th year of publication, Library…
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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…
