Author: chris

Hidden Landmarks in Altadena’s Farnsworth Park

Originally called Altadena Park in the early 1930s, the park was renamed Farnsworth Park in 1934 after General Charles Farnsworth, an Army officer who lived in Altadena in the 1930s during his retirement. (“Park to be Named for Gen. Farnsworth,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1934, p. A1). The park’s historical two-story cultural center is built in the arts and…

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The History of the CSUN Map Library

When I started at the CSUN Map Library in 2015, I quickly discovered that there was very little organizational memory within the library, a unit whose history could be traced back to the very earliest days of the campus. In 2015 there was only one other staff member, and he had been there only since about 2010 or 2011. So…

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Los Angeles Historical Street Names Index

I’ll be introducing a new historical street names index on my website dedicated to the lost and changed street names of Los Angeles County. The index will serve as an online research tool and will be populated with data from published scholarly resources, like atlases or historical maps, or from original scholarly research. The index will be added to periodically,…

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The Gazetteer of Lost San Francisco: Spring Valley

A guide to the lost place names and geographies of San Francisco Spring Valley was an outlying suburb of early San Francisco that developed along the western slopes of Russian Hill in the 1840s and 1850s. Located in what would today be the Cow Hollow neighborhood, Spring Valley was comprised of two distinct settlements: Washerwoman’s Lagoon, a small spring-fed body of water known as far…

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San Francisco’s Lost Cemeteries & Pioneer Burial Grounds

North Beach Burial Ground c.1846-c.1855 Also known as the Powell Street Cemetery, the North Beach Burial Ground was one of the city’s first unofficial burial grounds. Around the mid-1840s people began using the block bounded by Chestnut, Stockton, Lombard, and Powell streets as a burial ground for the early pioneers and Argonauts of San Francisco. According to the Annals of San Francisco…

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San Francisco Historical Street Names Index [Updated]Sticky

I have recently migrated the San Francisco Historical Street Names Index away from Google Fusion Tables since the index, at the moment, lacks a spatial component. The data, however, is still available online as an interactive index through a simple Google Spreadsheet view. The spreadsheet allows users to filter, sort, and view the historical data in a much simpler and…

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California Map Society Fall Meeting

The California Map Society’s Fall Meeting took place in the Cal State Fullerton Pollack Library, bringing together researchers, librarians, and cartographers to discuss interesting map and cartographic projects: Matt Zebrowski, cartographer with the UCLA Geography Department, discussed the department’s large Fairchild and Spence air photo collections; Charlie Frye, Chief Cartographer at ESRI, discussed his project using GIS to conduct genealogical research on…

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