Recently in History
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The homely sugar beet begat development in both Los Angeles and Orange counties at the turn of the 20th century. The city of Los Alamitos began with sugar, but celebrating the beet isn't entirely sweet.
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At the Vineyard junction between Venice and downtown in 1913, a Pacific Electric trolley slammed into two stalled trains. For one survivor, "The sights we saw ... were sickening and horrible."
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The new permanent exhibition "Becoming Los Angeles" opens on Sunday at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park. I had a small part in the press preview on Wednesday and got to say a few words about what "becoming" might mean to Angeleños.
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1849 taught California a harsh lesson about the permanent costs of a boom-and-bust culture. Governor Brown seems to have forgotten what the Gold Rush gave us.
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Getting to Terminal Island and the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach once has more than a little terror, weirdness, and even tragedy.
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Once a corporate record of how Southern California was electrified, the Edison collection at the Huntington Library is now something more -- time machine, site of enigmas, and zone of investigation of the city's modern dichotomies.
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Architect Richard Neutra explored domesticated modernity in his mid-20th Century homes. House-proud collectors today pay a premium to own one. Now you can build your own "new" Neutra. But why?
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Looking at the "found photographs" in the Huntington's archive of Southern California Edison photographs and finding why the darkness is such chilling fun.
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Many of the images were taken by by G. Haven Bishop whose work, almost entirely unknown today, has the subtlety and richness of Julius Shulman's photographs.
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The "undecorated shed" that was the mass-produced tract house changed the American landscape, with consequences that are still to be fully appreciated.
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| Image from the author's collection Bill Deverell handed me a book the other day, with the recommendation that the author had put together a good story. The book is Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of...
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It's summer. Ladies are lunching and window-shopping. Limousines are lined up on Wilshire Boulevard. Chauffeurs are idling in front of Perino's.
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How long, like a dull echo, does a killing reverberate? For a death in an onion field in Kern County, it's been fifty years.
History:
It was officially a centennial ceremony, but to call it a celebration would have been taking it too far.
Where We Are:
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is getting a new permanent exhibition ready. It will help us understand how we became Los Angeles.
History:
With streetcars likely returning to downtown L.A. after a five-decade absence, take a look back at the city's very first streetcars -- diminutive, horse-drawn vehicles that spawned L.A.'s first suburbs.
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A letter found at the swap meet gives a young visitor's vivid account of Mount Wilson's observatories during the first months of World War II.
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Sheriff John is dead. So is Engineer Bill. What lasts is the imaginative life cultivated by afterschool TV.
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September is the cruelest month, suggesting autumn but delivering a month of hot days. You can buy relief or remember when the basin bred its own air conditioning.
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Down PCH, rambling in and out of memory and history, from Seal Beach to Huntington Beach
SoCal Focus is a blog about the people, places, and issues in and around Southern California.
I Am Los Angeles: Strings of Success
Sasha is content just to be living his life on his own terms, doing something he thoroughly enjoys: building and playing guitars.
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