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With his stalwart dam of concrete and steel in place, William Mulholland began flooding the meadowlands of Ivanhoe Canyon in November 1907. The waters rose, sedges drowned, and red-winged blackbirds fluttered away in search of undisturbed wetlands. Within a few months, Mulholland had created Silver Lake.
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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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Cloaked in mystery and until modern times available only to the elite, the orange has been known as the fruit of the gods, the food of emperors, a token of gratitude, and the symbol of health, wealth, and love. The dream of California since its discovery by Europeans has been that it is a place of plenty, of potential,…
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Join the Allendale Branch Library as it hosts “An Afternoon with Megan Marshall” on Saturday, May 30, 2015, at 2:00 p.m. A graduate of Pasadena’s Allendale Elementary and Blair High School (1971), Marshall returns to her hometown for a discussion, reading, and book signing at the Allendale Branch Library, 1130 S.…
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In just one month's time, over 70 exhibitors will fill the halls of the USC Doheny Library to celebrate and showcase the artifacts, images, and primary sources that tell the history of Los Angeles.
Click here to learn more about the 10th Annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar.
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It seems logical enough -- Western Avenue, as the oft-repeated explanation goes, is so named because it once formed Los Angeles' western boundary. But is there any truth to this just-so story?
Some streets did once mark L.A.'s western city limit. Most notably, West Boulevard's name dates to 1915, when the city's…
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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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Created in 1967, the CSUF University Archives and Special Collections (UA&SC) section preserves and provides access to sixty-six special collections, including the institutional history of California State University, Fullerton. These special materials form a very important augmentation to the general holdings of…
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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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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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As twilight faded over Pasadena on September 9, 1894, an artificial sun flickered to life for the first time. High above town in the San Gabriel Mountains stood a wonder of the new electric age: a 60-inch General Electric searchlight, by many accounts the largest in the world. This massive projector first dazzled…
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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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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…
