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Lost LA

Red Gold: The Demise of California's Redwood Forest

In the course of its relentless growth, Los Angeles paved over its local prairies and drained its wetlands. But the city’s ecological destruction extended far beyond Southern California. Take the once-mighty temperate rainforests of California’s redwood coast. Only five percent of the state’s old-growth redwood forests now remain – a fact for which Los Angeles deserves a great deal of blame. In the early 20th century, the port of Los Angeles was a leading importer of redwood lumber, the choice building material for the residential structures of Angelenos who saw little connection to the city’s adobe past. Today, beneath the painted clapboard of Angelino Heights’ Victorian mansions, stand skeletons of redwood timber.

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pacific rim
26:50
Americans have long looked at the California shore and seen the end of the continent. Instead, this episode interprets that sandy edge as the beginning of a Pacific world.
coded geographies
25:06
See how the many restrictions many Angelenos had to navigate, exposing Los Angeles as a place of coded segregation and resistance.
press image for lost la season 2
23:50
Los Angeles is often identified with Hollywood, but there's more to the entertainment industry than its facade of movie stars and blockbuster films.
Steel frame of building being erected
25:32
Wood, iron, steel, concrete -- these are the materials that gave form to Los Angeles and shaped its identity in the national imagination. This episode also questions the cultural legacy and environmental costs of the city's relentless growth.
Calle de los Negros, Los Angeles, 1871
26:12
Long before Hollywood imagined the Wild West, Los Angeles was a real frontier town of gunslingers, lynch mobs, and smoke-belching locomotives.
Pio Pico
26:50
American history has long been told as a triumphant march westward from the Atlantic coast, but in southern California, our history stretches back further in time.
Reshaping L.A.
28:32
In this episode, "Lost LA" examines how the modern metropolis has reshaped its own topography. The program explores downtown L.A.'s lost hills and tunnels, as well as the vanished canals of Venice Beach.
Before the Dodgers
20:57
In this episode, "Lost LA" explores the various ways Southern California's inhabitants have used the hills around Dodger Stadium.
Wild L.A.
23:28
In this episode, Lost L.A. explores the complicated relationship between the city and its natural environment.
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