Category: Los Angeles History

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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Early Los Angeles Fruit Orchards

It’s hard to imagine the agricultural landscape of the state of California before the mass cultivation of the orange or the wine grape, but I ran across an interesting 1855 article from the Daily Alta California that gives readers a glimpse of how these two crops were perceived in the mid-19th century before their mass cultivation. To be sure, southern California, as the…

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An L.A. Reading List

Now that I’ve returned to Los Angeles and will be working with historical maps, photographs, Sanborn atlases, and reference books related to Geography and GIS, I’m finally getting to some of the books on my reading list dedicated to the subject of Los Angeles. Ashley, Abel, and I visited the Calabasas Public Library today (thanks CPL!) and I got some…

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Historical image of LA's Red Car on the Fletcher Street Bridge.

Lost L.A.: The Abandoned Corralitas Streetcar Line

In the triangle-shaped neighborhood between the Silver Lake Reservoir, the Glendale Freeway, and the I-5 Freeway is a little piece of Los Angeles history that is lost, but not forgotten. The Corralitas Trail is a little-know urban hike that follows an abandoned Pacific Electric streetcar line that used to run between downtown Los Angeles and the city of Glendale. Before…

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Using Google Tools to Improve Findability and Access to UCLA’s Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

UCLA’s Young Research Library maintains a great collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the metropolitan Los Angeles area, including Venice, San Pedro, Culver City, and North Hollywood. From about the 1870s until the 1970s, the Sanborn Company was one of a few companies that specialized in producing fire insurance maps for the purpose of assessing fire risk and helping…

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