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Modern Los Angeles is a city without a center. Nodes of power, prestige, and commerce dot the landscape, even if the skyscrapers of Bunker Hill mischievously invite the viewer to locate the city's center there. In its early years, however, Los Angeles was built around a well-defined center, the Plaza, which remained…
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On Saturday February 4 the first joint meeting between LA as Subject (LAAS) and the Los Angeles Heritage Alliance (LAHA) took place at the historic Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga. Attendees were welcomed by Sherri Smith, President of the Little Landers Historical Society. The Little Landers Historical Society…
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“My five-year tenure in the majors was one of satisfaction and gratification at having conquered the biggest challenge in my life and in some measure opening the door for black umpires. I feel proud having been an umpire in the big leagues not because I was the first black man but because major league umpires are…
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When a piece of Los Angeles history disappears, it's often lost forever - preserved only in our collective memory and in the region's photographic archives. But in some rare cases, that history is only hidden, preserved by accident for later generations to rediscover.
Today, the façade of downtown's historic Clifton's…
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Evicted from City Hall lawns and other public spaces, protestors from across the country plan to "occupy" this Monday's Rose Parade by staging their own procession that will follow the final flower-encrusted float. Though the focus of their ire is wealth inequality across the United States and not necessarily…
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It was nearly seventy years ago that a Japanese submarine shelled the Santa Barbara coast—the last recorded attack on a Southern California land target. In 1955, the U.S. Army installed a ring of Nike anti-aircraft missiles to defend the Los Angeles area, but by the 1974 the system had been dismantled.
In…
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As architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Hawthorne is an authoritative observer of Southern California’s urban environment. Throughout the year on the Times’ Culture Monster blog he has engaged in an ambitious reassessment of 25 classic books about Los Angeles…
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Most of us associate archives with the two-dimensional primary source documents of history: manuscripts, photographs, films, and their digital counterparts. Occasionally, three-dimensional objects find their way into archives; often these objects, known in the library world as realia, are bundled with the papers that…
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In Southern California, nostalgia abounds for two funicular railways that, in decades past, transported tourists and locals alike up some of the region's steep escarpments.
From 1893 to 1938, the Great Incline portion of the Mount Lowe Scenic Railway ascended the mountains north of Pasadena, reaching grades…
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A new exhibit at the Los Angeles Central Library features 34 historical maps from the Los Angeles Public Library's 100-year-old map collection. As the City Grew: Historical Maps of Los Angeles is on display through November 4, 2012 in the Central Library's First Floor Galleries.
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If they look closely enough, visitors to the Los Angeles Public Library's new maps exhibit may notice a geographic incongruity. On older maps of the city, the neighborhood northeast of downtown and across the river from the Elysian Hills bears the name "East Los Angeles." That area--today known as Lincoln…
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Exposition Park is known today for football games, dinosaur exhibits, and its sunken rose garden. But as its original name—Agricultural Park—suggests, the park's history reveals a time when farming in Los Angeles was not limited to rooftop skid row gardens and relicts like Compton's Richland…
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L.A. as Subject's latest contribution to KCET's SoCal Focus blog looks at a series of hills near Los Angeles' historic core that have disappeared over the years:
Los Angeles is not a city short on hills. The Hollywood Sign, one of the city's most iconic structures, gazes down at the city from its perch on Mount Lee.…
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If you close your eyes and imagine a typical Southern California landscape, chances are that you've pictured at least one palm tree, if not several, rising from the ground. But despite the diversity and ubiquity of palms in the Los Angeles area, only one species—Washingtonia filifera, the California fan palm—is native…
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On Tuesday, the City of West Hollywood celebrated its 27th anniversary as an independent city. Although the municipality is one of the youngest in Los Angeles County, the town from which the city sprang—originally a settlement for railroad workers—dates back to 1896.
West Hollywood owes its existence to one of Southern…
