Recently in History
Where We Are:
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.
Where We Are:
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?
Where We Are:
Looking at the "found photographs" in the Huntington's archive of Southern California Edison photographs and finding why the darkness is such chilling fun.
Where We Are:
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.
Where We Are:
The "undecorated shed" that was the mass-produced tract house changed the American landscape, with consequences that are still to be fully appreciated.
Where We Are:
| 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...
Where We Are:
It's summer. Ladies are lunching and window-shopping. Limousines are lined up on Wilshire Boulevard. Chauffeurs are idling in front of Perino's.
Where We Are:
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.
Where We Are:
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.
Where We Are:
Sheriff John is dead. So is Engineer Bill. What lasts is the imaginative life cultivated by afterschool TV.
Where We Are:
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.
Where We Are:
Down PCH, rambling in and out of memory and history, from Seal Beach to Huntington Beach
LA as Subject:
There was a time when, far from being a defining characteristic of the city's landscape, freeways were merely an experimental impulse of traffic engineers.
Where We Are:
The city's oldest Jewish congregation commits itself to the future by restoring a grand monument from its -- and the city's -- past.
Where We Are:
From the late 1930s through the 1990s, country western music and the hybrid culture from which it came defined much of white working class Los Angeles.
Where We Are:
Celebrations begin Sunday, June 10 for the rancho's new interpretive center and restoration project.
Where We Are:
The story of life at Los Alamitos threads from from Povuu'ngna to the present. It's inclusively retold in the rancho's new exhibits.
SoCal Focus is a daily 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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