Looking from Wall Street between 8th and 9th Streets, 1932
Los
Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner, PC 17, California Historical Society
They are Los Angeles’s history keepers.
They research, organize, store, repair, and care for historical artifacts and
make them available to us online, at exhibitions, through publications, or in
their homes. This summer, from August 5 to August 27, the California Historical
Society celebrates Los Angeles’s history keepers with an exhibition at the
historic El Pueblo National Monument.
A series of blogs brings our online
visitors a sample of objects in the exhibition. Here we feature the work of
Anton Wagner, who visited Los Angeles from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
Wagner’s ancestors resided in Los Angeles since 1890 and were actively involved
in the city’s affairs.
Los Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner
History Keeper: California Historical Society
In 1932 a young German PhD student
arrived in Los Angeles. Anton Wagner wanted to determine how this American city
and its environs had become a booming metropolis of two million people from a
small, dusty mid-nineteenth-century town.
Mission San Fernando, Date Palms, Adobe
Wall, 1932
Los
Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner, PC 17, California Historical Society
During his penetrating investigation,
Wagner researched the region’s history, critically examined its geography,
interviewed its civic and business leaders, and covered the area of greater Los
Angeles on foot. His comprehensive and illuminating study—most likely the first
to present the geographical-historical development of an American
metropolis—was published in Germany in 1935. The book—translated as Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Form
of the Southern California Metropolis—contains only a small number of the
400-plus photographs Wagner took to help document his findings.
Cover (left) and Interior Page, Map of the Greater
Los Angeles Area (right)
Anton Wagner, Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in
Südkalifornien (Leipzig: Bibliographisces Institut, 1935)
In today’s downtown Los Angeles, Wagner
would find 8th and Wall Streets the center of the commercial flower
market—nothing like the residential bungalows he captured in the panorama above.
But to him, it was not just the character of the landscape that had made Los
Angeles an “insatiable city,” it was also the people. The two were inextricably
linked. Still, could he have imagined, while traversing the city in the early
1930s, the phenomenal growth that would occur by the close of the decade, when
the population increased by more than a quarter million?
Anton Wagner, Looking across Pershing Square from 6th and
Olive Streets, 1932
California
Historical Society
Pershing Square TodayCourtesy
http://happeningindtla.com/listings/pershing-square/
History Keeper: California Historical Society
The California Historical
Society holds one of the state’s top historical
collections, revealing California’s social, cultural,
economic, and political history and development through books and pamphlets,
manuscripts, newspapers and periodicals, photographs, fine arts, costumes,
prints and drawings, maps, and ephemera. At our headquarters in San Francisco and our
outposts at the University of Southern California and the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, we hold millions of items in
trust for the people of California.
Exploring Anton Wagner
Anton Wagner’s photographs will be available online through the CHS
website this Fall. On October 15, CHS archivists will speak about Wagner’s work
at the LA as Subject Archives Bazaar at the University of Southern California. Over the next two years, the California
Historical Society, with partner organizations, will explore the relevance of
Wagner’s work to the study of American metropolises today and his legacy to Los
Angeles.
_______________________________________________________________________________
An exhibition by the California Historical
Society and LA as Subject
Presented in partnership with El Pueblo Historical Monument
and the El Pueblo Park Association
August 5–27, 2016
El Tranquilo Gallery & Information
Center
634 N. Main Street (entrance on Olvera
Street, W-19)
El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, Los Angeles, California
Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 am–3:00 pm
Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm
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