Portion of the 1925 Rapid Transit Plan -- note that West Hollywood is still referred to by its original name, "Sherman," while another long-lost neighborhood, "Edendale," is also listed.
The L.A. Times' Bottleneck Blog, one of the best of the paper's blogs, turned me on to the MTA's cool Dorothy Peyton Grey Transportation Library, specifically its Metro Archives.
The library collection itself "contains over 20,000 photographs, films, audio tapes, hundreds of video tapes, and various ephemera, books, journals, and artifacts documenting the role of public transportation back to 1873, including all of the predecessor public transportation providers/agencies that operated in the Greater Los Angeles area." That includes a big chunk of info, maps and pictures that have been uploaded to the web.
Check out these shots from L.A.'s 1963 transit plan:
Exterior
System Map
Also, check out this 1954 Fortune article on proposals to build a Monorail in Los Angeles. (Some things never change -- the debate over whether a monorail still might make sense for L.A. rages on, at least in the comments section of this Bottleneck Blog post.)
I always find "what could have been" designs fascinating (as my recent posts on abandoned Civic Center and Ambassador Hotel plans can attest) and could probably spend hours poking around this site.
More maps -- including plans from 1925 to 2003 -- can be found here.
No comments:
Post a Comment