Recently in LA as Subject
The cluster of towers rising today from the remains of Bunker Hill belies the fact that, for decades, Los Angeles lacked a modern skyscraper.
Although the orange and the palm loom large in Southern California's iconography, another imported tree -- the eucalyptus -- has been almost as prominent a feature of the region's landscape.
In its 163-year journey from open pasture to urban park, Pershing Square has weathered nagging complaints and survived multiple, radical renovations.
Admired for its scenery and dreaded for its traffic -- as well as the landslides that occasionally render it impassable -- Pacific Coast Highway is perhaps Southern California's most iconic ribbon of asphalt.
Before light pollution transformed the night sky into a dull glow, Southern California's generally cloudless climate attracted some of the world's finest astronomers to the region.
Brentwood's Mandeville Canyon was once home to the California Botanic Garden, whose planners envisioned a vast, 800-acre natural playground. Today, among the gardens' only remnants are the aging trees that shade the neighborhood's multimillion-dollar homes.
The story of the Miracle Mile's stunning transformation from cow path to commercial artery is part of the larger narrative of L.A.'s decentralization, as electric railways and automobiles encouraged sprawl and drained the downtown retail district of its vitality.
Founded on March 30, 1912, Owensmouth -- renamed Canoga Park in 1931 -- represented one of L.A.'s first steps in a march that eventually transformed the San Fernando Valley from farmland to suburbia.
Although its tracks, signals, and power lines are all new, the Expo Line will trace a historic route through the city when it opens on April 28.
Southern California's photographic archives richly document the region's troubled relationship with the four classical elements.
In December L.A. announced that it would remove the railroad tracks running down Alameda Street between First and Seventh streets. Lying dormant for years, the rails represent one of the last remnants of Southern California's first railroad: the Los Angeles & San Pedro.
We asked the members of L.A. as Subject to search through their collections for one notable map that informs our understanding of Southern California.
What did the L.A. Basin look like before there was an L.A.? A team of scientists, geographers, and other researchers recently released a report that reconstructs the historical landscape of the Ballona Creek watershed.
A statue of Junípero Serra has represented California in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall since 1931, but over the past few decades scholars have come to view the Franciscan priest's mission-building project as a disaster for the state's native inhabitants.
Lost for decades, several historic landmarks from L.A.'s past will soon reappear thirty miles to the south at the Disney California Adventure theme park in Anaheim.
When a piece of L.A. history disappears, it's often lost forever, but in some rare cases, that history is only hidden, preserved by accident for later generations to rediscover.
Modern Los Angeles is a city without a center. In its early years, however, L.A. was built around a well-defined center, the Plaza, which remained its political, social, and commercial heart even as it grew from a Spanish colonial outpost into a booming Yankee city.
L.A.'s clashing street grids and the errant boulevards that defy them represent a palimpsest of past political and cultural influences on the Los Angeles cityscape.
From the 1850s until the early twentieth century, the area now known as Chinatown was home to L.A.'s first barrio: Sonoratown.
Santa Monica might today be crawling with semi-trailer trucks, cranes, and container ships had a late-19th-century political dispute ended differently.
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