Tag: california history

Antecedents to San Francisco’s Dolores Park

In early August 1859, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approves the establishment of a Jewish Cemetery in the Mission District–the location is not yet determined. Congregations Emanu-El and Sherith Israel relocate their small Spring Valley Jewish cemetery to the recently surveyed and platted Mission lands. The old Spring Valley cemetery, located at the corner of today’s Gough and Vallejo streets, was…

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NBC Bay Area: Defunct San Francisco Reservoir to be Turned Into Park

Defunct San Francisco Reservoir to be Turned Into Park | NBC Bay Area. San Francisco’s newest neighborhood park will be atop of Russian Hill, located at the old San Francisco City Works Reservoir at Larkin and Francisco streets. The old San Francisco City Works operated a flume that delivered city water from Mountain Lake in the Presidio to two reservoirs…

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History of San Francisco’s Parks, Plazas, & Public Squares

The History of San Francisco’s Park & Plazas will be a series of articles exploring the history of San Francisco’s parks, plazas, and public squares. Why San Francisco? As a Bay Area resident from 2000-2008 I became very interested in the city of San Francisco as a historical subject. One of my research interests includes how changes in the built environment…

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The Fred Rochlin Collection

Fred Rochlin was a long-time architect in southern California who formed an architecture firm in 1952 with colleague Ephraim Baran. The Los Angeles-based Rochlin & Baran architecture firm specializes in (it’s still an operating firm) the design of hospitals, medical facilities, and, oddly enough, observatories. The Rochlin collection contains materials related to the architect’s post-retirement career as a monologist, performer, and…

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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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From the Reference Desk: Lompoc – Ye Olde Party Towne

I found the reference book cited below when looking in YRL’s reference collection for information about Santa Barbara sheriffs in the 1870s and 1880s. This is a bit of information about historical Lompoc that I just found amusing. Apparently Lompoc used to be a quite a raucous town in the late 19th century: “Lompoc was founded as a temperance colony,…

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The CFPRT and the Jay Frierman Collection

During this spring quarter I am working as a Fellow with UCLA’s CFPRT processing the papers and research of Jay Frierman. Frierman was a UCLA history and archaeology professor who conducted original archaeological surveys and excavations throughout the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s and southern California in the 1980s and 1990s. Interestingly enough, before Frierman was a UCLA…

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