In the early 20th century, there was no better example of a classic American downtown than Los Angeles. Since World War II, Los Angeles's Historic Core has been passively preserved with most of its historic buildings left intact. Recent renovations of the area for residential use and the construction of Disney Hall and the Staples Center are shining a new spotlight on its many pre-1930s Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and Spanish Baroque buildings.
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
The Historic Core of Los Angeles boasts a team of distinguished contributing authors including Curtis C. Roseman, professor emeritus of geography at USC; Ruth Wallach, head of the Architecture and Fine Arts Library at USC; Dace Taube, the Regional History Collection librarian for Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections at USC; Linda McCann, project director of the Los Angeles Comprehensive Bibliographic Database at USC; and Geoffrey DeVerteuil, assistant professor of geography at the University of Manitoba specializing in urban geography. The bulk of the images in this book come from the Regional History Collection of the USC libraries, including archives from the California Historical Society, the Los Angeles Examiner, and the Dick Whittington collection.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
sad tale of decay,
By
This review is from: The Historic Core of Los Angeles (Images of America: California) (Paperback)
A sense of loss and fallen grandeur pervades this book. It chronicles the core neighbourhood of downtown Los Angeles. This area, centred on Main Street, saw its glory before World War 2. Very upscale, with ornately carved stoneworks on many buildings. Fancy hotels clustered together. All this revolved around the rail networks and the proximity to Union Station, which was completed in the 1930s. The many detailed photos attest to the vibrancy and upscale nature of that time and place. You might wistfully peer into these photos, looking for a vanished milieu.
Alas, the book goes on to tell what happened after the war. As autos became far more common and convenient than trains, Los Angeles grew immensely outwards, into far flung suburbs. New fancy shopping centres and hotels arose elsewhere, no longer needing to be close to railway lines. We see a 60 year decline in the core. Once posh hotels for the wealthy degenerated into single resident only (SRO) flophouses. The core became Skid Row. Littered with junkies and homeless. Exacerbated by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 90s. The one benefit, if it may be called that, is that the sheer depression of the area has acted to scare away developers tempted to tear down the buildings. If you go today to some of the streets shown in the book's photos, and look upward, the skyline is largely how it was in the 1930s. The authors suggest that now, in the early Naughties, the core might be turning around. Maybe.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Los Angeles In The Early *1900s*!,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Historic Core of Los Angeles (Images of America: California) (Paperback)
Although I was looking for photographs of Los Angeles during the 60s and 70s, THE HISTORIC CORE OF LOS ANGELES book was a pretty good find. It's packed with black & white photographs of downtown Los Angeles, some from the late 1800s -- but the concentration is on the early to mid 1900s, and provides detailed captions for each one.
I wish the book was a little bit larger, so I could see more details in the pictures, but it's nothing that a magnifying glass couldn't fix. Each chapter is devoted to a section of downtown LA like Main Street, Broadway, Hill Street etc., and has an introduction to them so readers will gain an understanding of what the area was like back then and how it transformed from being a rural and residential neighborhood to the bustling city that it is. More importantly is that in the pictures you get to see what city life was like for people back then, e.g. the cars that they drove, the cable cars that ran along downtown, and how people dressed. And readers will get to see some billboards and signage from stores, restaurants, shops and hotels in the area. The book is a quick and easy, interesting read, and after doing so, I have a better appreciation for some of the old buildings that I've seen and visited. I'm a Los Angeles native and never knew half the stuff about the city until I read THE HISTORIC CORE OF LOS ANGELES. I recommend it to history and photography buffs and even to other Angelinos.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
First Sentence:
For five decades following the 1880s, the railroad depots located east of Main Street provided the primary connection between Los Angeles and the rest of the United States. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
height limit Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Los Angeles, Spring Street, Pershing Square, Main Street, Courtesy of Whittington, Seventh Street, Sixth Street, Courtesy of the Examiner, Southern Pacific, Van Nuys, Continental Building, Union Station, Fifth Street, First Street, Fourth Street, Southern California, Arcade Building, Court Street, Olive Street, Wall Street of the West, West Seventh, South Broadway, Subway Terminal Building, United States, Angels Flight New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
For five decades following the 1880s, the railroad depots located east of Main Street provided the primary connection between Los Angeles and the rest of the United States. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
height limit Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Los Angeles, Spring Street, Pershing Square, Main Street, Courtesy of Whittington, Seventh Street, Sixth Street, Courtesy of the Examiner, Southern Pacific, Van Nuys, Continental Building, Union Station, Fifth Street, First Street, Fourth Street, Southern California, Arcade Building, Court Street, Olive Street, Wall Street of the West, West Seventh, South Broadway, Subway Terminal Building, United States, Angels Flight New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 5
books:
- Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide by David Gebhard in Back Matter
- The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Haymarket) by Norman M. Klein in Back Matter
- The Italian Renaissance by Ian Barras Hill on page 93
- The Los Angeles Metropolis by Howard J. Nelson in Back Matter
- The Great Depression - How We Coped, Worked and Played: Life-Experience Stories from the Carolinas' Piedmont (1929-41) by Margaret G. Bigger on page 101
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
So You'd Like to...
|
|
