Millard Sheets, Mural
Painting Depicting the Founding of Los Angeles, c. 1931–39
California
Historical Society Collections at USC Libraries
On September
4, 1781, forty-four Hispanic men, women, and children of Native American,
African, and European descent departed from Mission San Gabriel Arcángel accompanied by two
mission priests and four soldiers. Los Pobladores (the settlers) walked nine
miles to a location on the banks of the Porciúncula (Los Angeles
River). There they established El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles (the town
of the Queen of the Angels).
Every year since 1981, the City of Los Angeles commemorates this
official founding by recreating the journey of Los Pobladores along the
historic route they traveled two hundred years earlier. On Saturday, August 27,
2016, walkers and bikers celebrate the city’s 235th birthday. Their journey
begins at Mission San Gabriel and culminates at El Pueblo Historical Monument, a
44-acre park in downtown Los Angeles near the site of Los Pobladores’ original
destination.
This year, as part of the city’s founding celebration, the
California Historical Society and LA as Subject present the exhibition “History
Keepers: Traversing Los Angeles” at El Tranquilo Gallery on Olvera Street, El
Pueblo. In this exhibition, unique and curious objects from around the region bring our multifaceted
city to us. Each tells a story about
Los Angeles—how we move through the city and how the city moves through us.
Telling Los Angeles’ History through Artifacts
Featuring
objects and images that depict landscapes; urban planning and architecture;
travel, tourism, and mapping; airways, railways, roadways, and freeways;
tunnels, canals, and bridges; cityscapes and streetscapes, “History Keepers:
Traversing Los Angeles” is a cornucopia of the region’s geographical,
environmental, cultural, and historical landscape. Should we ever forget or
lose sight of our past, we need only return to these primary source materials
to discover again where we came from and perhaps even where we are going.
Knife and
Trunk of Tiburcio Vásquez, c. mid-1800s
San
Fernando Valley Historical Society
In the mid-1800s the legendary, controversial Tiburcio Vásquez—son of
a prominent Californio family—traversed the passes and foothills of the state,
robbing and terrorizing inhabitants and romancing others. Remembered for his
womanizing and crimes purportedly committed in the name of justice for his
people, the bandido/outlaw—and folk hero to some—traveled with this trunk
packed with his personal effects. This knife is all that remains of its
contents.
Anton Wagner, Looking from Wall
Street between 8th and 9th Streets, 1932
California Historical Society
In 1932 a 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. 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.
Lantern Slide, c.
1890–1950
Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum
Like other forms of
“armchair travel,” viewers of magic lantern images were transported to
destinations around Los Angeles without ever leaving their seats. Long before
Technicolor or Kodachrome, they gathered in darkened spaces and saw Los Angeles
in vibrant, even surreal, color. It was a trick accomplished with limelight, lenses, and
hand-tinted glass slides, but to a nineteenth-century audience it might as well
have been magic. Indeed, the projector responsible for these proto-cinematic
effects came to be known as the magic lantern.
Copter Tested as Traffic Director,
1953
Los Angeles
Times Photographic Archives, UCLA Library
Special Collections
Accidents, traffic jams, and car chases
are accepted realities for modern Angelenos. As we drive across the city, we
often rely on reports from helicopters to alert us to traffic conditions. In
this photographic print published in the Los Angeles Times on December 9, 1953, Los Angeles Police
Chief William H. Parker and pilot Joe Mashman hover over the Civic Center. They
are testing out the helicopter’s potential use by the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD) in directing city traffic—particularly, as the accompanying
caption notes, “along the freeways.”
“Sunset Junction” Footage, 1927
Automobile Club of Southern California
Archives
Click on the link above to view rare footage by Auto
Club of Southern California engineer Ernest East of the junction of Sunset and
Santa Monica Boulevards in 1927. As the film shows, traversing the city’s streets afoot and by car in
the early years of the automotive age was not for the timid.
Klaus Staeck, Und Neues Leben Blüht Aus Den Ruinen
(And New Life Blossoms from the
Ruins), 1980
Center for
the Study of Political Graphics
This poster features an image of Los
Angeles’s Four-Level Interchange, connecting the 101 and 110 Freeways, in
northern downtown Los Angeles. Officially the Bill Keene Memorial Interchange,
it is the first stack interchange ever built. Since the 1950s it has become an
iconic international symbol of modern urban development, calling attention to
the way urbanization and car culture around the world too often result in
destruction of neighborhoods, pollution, and other threats to the environment.
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 & Visitor
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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