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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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Underground passageways hold the power to excite--especially when they're hidden underneath a busy city soaked in sunshine. News reports have explored the miles of pedestrian tunnels still buried beneath the civic center. Action films and car commercials often feature images of automobiles speeding through the Second…
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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 the annual…
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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 earlier times,…
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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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The Archives Bazaar Pre-Program is a series of events celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Los Angeles Archives Bazaar and the 20th anniversary of LA a Subject. All events are free and open to the public!
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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 as steep…
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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 Heights--is…
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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 Farms.
Agricultural Park…
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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 architecture and urbanism, written…
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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…
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The Mayflower may have landed on the opposite coast, but Southern Californians have long marked the fourth Thursday in November with a Thanksgiving feast. As Southern California celebrates Thanksgiving Day 2011, join us for a look through historical images at Thanksgiving celebrations of the past and learn about some…
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L.A. as Subject recently contributed its second post to KCET's new SoCal Focus blog, featuring visual artifacts from member archives related to Jerry Brown's first tenure as governor, which lasted from 1975 to 1983. An excerpt:
On January 3, Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown, Jr. was sworn in as California's 39th governor,…
