It was a heck of an after-school project for a mother and daughter: do an informal photo survey of Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to the ocean. Mother Marlene was a Michigan native who’d come to L.A. in the late 1950s and loved everything about the city, especially the architecture. Daughter Annie liked the architecture too, and loved using her mom’s Minolta camera. Together, they spent about a dozen Tuesday afternoons in 1978-9 walking Wilshire; Marlene taking notes and Annie taking pictures. The result was over 1,000 Kodachrome slides, documenting L.A.’s iconic street from its great landmarks to its empty lots.
(The slides) gathered dust in the Laskey garage for years. Then Annie learned about LAPL’s photo collection and determined to sort, label, and donate the slides. Enlisting the help of Shannon Simonds and Eric Lynxwiler, friends she’d met through the Los Angeles Conservancy’s tour program, the slides were put in order, indexed, and finally donated to LAPL in 2010.
Faced with the budget cuts, the city’s Bureau of Street Services has all but eliminated regular median maintenance... Rick Coca, a spokesman for Councilman Jose Huizar, said that medians strips maintained by outside contractors have continued to be cleaned up. It’s the medians once tended by city employees that have been left without care.
Meanwhile, Councilman Tom LaBonge, who represents portions of Atwater and Silver Lake, introduced a City Council motion to use street improvement money to pay city contractors to maintain the Highland Avenue median near Hancock Park and is working with the Department of Public Works to work on other medians in his district.
Councilman Eric Garcetti, who represents Echo Park and Silver Lake, introduced a motion last month to help pay for the maintenance of 2.6-million square feet of medians citywide.
"Without proper maintenance, these medians can become overgrown, litter-strewn eyesores that can drag down an entire neighborhood," he said.
Audience members will travel to the age of luxury liners as historian Bruce Vancil gives an illustrated lecture on dining at sea. Characterizing the dining experience by time period and class, Vancil will examine the trends and fashions aboard passenger steamships – ranging from simple survival during the crossing to lavish demonstrations of wealth and opulence.
A reception with themed refreshments will follow the talk at approximately 11:30.
From my half-assed sleuthing at the Central Library, the reason why Vermont Ave and New Hampshire Ave in L.A. are backwards in relation to the states is due to the fact that the streets weren't named at the same time.
Vermont is a very old street in L.A. terms. It first shows up in 1866. New Hampshire wasn't built and named until 1887, when it was part of one of the developments that sprung up in Southern California during Real Estate Boom I.
Next year at the Central Library, I plan to follow up on my Sepulveda trip with a journey down Western Avenue. Unlike Sepulveda, this should have slightly better scenery and fewer trucks.
There's the mysterious "Mesmer City," shown in 1924 as prosperously thriving between Culver City and Mar Vista. It turns out the detailed map was a subdivision promoter's dreamy depiction of what life could be like at homesites "in the direction of Los Angeles' growth toward the ocean."
That growth eventually arrived, but Mesmer City didn't.
A 1903 road map showing owners of the city's 1,600 automobiles where dirt roads were safe enough to drive at 8 mph is included. With an eye toward more sales, cartographer Henry Rueger labeled his creation "Rueger's Automobile and Miners Road Map" so he could tap into the vein of potential local prospectors and speculators.
One of Hollywood's first movie star maps is there -- John Tyler's 1945 "Guide Thru Starland" that pinpoints the homes of Harold Lloyd, Groucho Marx, Walter Pidgeon and dozens of their peers.
I've got my camera ready and, more importantly, a hand clicker to count the number of traffic signals along the way. Would you care to enter a guess in how many there will be?
Pedestrian crosswalks count as regular interesections with a signal. Stop signs and rail crossings don't.
As the city faces the biggest financial crisis in decades, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is completing his 2008-09 budget for approval by City Council. And unless the public speaks up now, the LA Public Library, already barred from buying new books since a February spending freeze, will soon begin charging a prohibitive $1-per-book loan fee for any book requested from another branch. With the launch of the SaveLAPL website, thousands of Library users are first learning about the threat and telling Mayor Villaraigosa they want him to keep the Library free.
Out of this first round of voting, which lasts until February 25, we’ll narrow the field to 32 (to be announced in the April issue and on the web site), then 16 (May), 8 (June), the final four (July), and then one winner (August, in our Best of LA issue). Each month readers will be able to vote anew, and find out the results in the magazine and on the web site.
