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>>Male presenter: Welcome everybody to another issue of Authors at Google, here in the Santa
Monica office. I'm very delighted to welcome Glen Creason today, a librarian at the Los
Angeles Public Library, who has worked in the map department for over 20 years and he
has quite a few stories to tell us about the maps that have been produced on Los Angeles.
And I welcome Glen Creason. Thank you.
[applause]
>>Glen: Good afternoon. This is something to see this building. I come from Central
Library downtown, where I was telling Chris we don't even have pencils anymore; has something
to do with the budget and the mayor. Anyway, I feel like I'm really, really lucky because
in 1989, there was a fire in the library in 1986. And in 1989, we moved the library to
temporary quarters and it was so difficult. It was at 4th and Spring; it's a very dicey
neighborhood. The map librarian decided to call it quits, so I ended up getting this
job and I was an English major at UCLA. I'm not a cartographer and I have no scientific
background. I really didn't know anything, so I literally started going drawer by drawer
and looking at the maps and trying to figure out what they were. And so, in this process,
is this working? Can everyone hear me? OK. Over the years, I just fell in love with these
maps and I realized that in looking at maps, you learn so much about Los Angeles' history.
And the more you look at it, the more you will learn. And you read them like they are
books and there are some of the maps that are in this book you can literally spend weeks
with. I'm not gonna spends weeks with them, but I'll try to keep this, you can tell me
when it's time to stop because I tend to just keep talking. I also wanted to mention that
my experience in Santa Monica was when I was a hippie a long time ago and I worked at a
glassworks at 10th and Pico with these hippies, but I found out it's not a good business concept
to have hippies working for you cause they tend to smoke hash and go to the beach instead
of doing their work, so. Anyway, I grew up in Southgate and that's the first map I put
up there to show you it's about 20 miles away from Santa Monica. It's a blue collar suburb
and not much to say about Southgate, except that it used to be where General Motors was.
>>audience #1: When were you there? In Southgate.
>>Glen: In Southgate? In the 50s and 60s.
>>audience #1: [inaudible]
>>Glen: Really? Well, I was there one year later.
>>audience #1: [inaudible]
>>Glen: Really.
>>audience #1: [inaudible]
[Glen laughs]
>>presenter: [inaudible]
>>Glen: OK. Sure.
>>audience #1: [inaudible]
>>Glen: Well, I just threw this in because I think it's interesting in that this is a
very early map of the coast of California. Originally, there was a misconception that
lasted through, all throughout the 18th Century that California was an island. And this is,
they corrected that eventually and this is a map of the coast of California, where they
actually call it the City of the Angels, cause that was the original name of the city and
the city was the City of Los Angeles de--, I can't even pronounce Porciúncula, but it's
the river; Los Angeles River. One of the first maps I wanted to use in the book, and this
does look pretty compressed, this is the Kirkman Harriman Map. It was created by a very eccentric
columnist at the Los Angeles Times. Kirkman Harriman, as it turns out, was a man who was
one of the first people to care for the indigent in Los Angeles and he ran the county farm
where they would literally take care of homeless people and so forth. I believe that he did
a lot of the research on this because he tracked a lot of these kinds of things. Anyway, they
created this map and it's amazing in that it was done in 1938, but it portrays the area
in 1860. And the thing about it is there's layers of historical fact in this map. It
shows the early trails, the roads that people traveled on, it shows battle sites and it
shows where the Indian villages were. And I think there's a small misconception that
there wasn't much of a Native American presence here and there was much more than you would
expect. That's what Santa Monica looks like on this map and you can see there were villages
here. It was the Tongva Indians and further north it was the Chumash Indians. Eventually,
they named them; they called them Gabrielinos, or the Fernandinos, which is really an Anglo
naming of the Tongva Indians. They formed the original settlement here, which was Yang-na,
which was here thousands of years; they thrived. This was one of the most successful tribes
in North America, actually. But they lived in a Stone Age. They didn't really need to
do much more than what they were doing, which was enjoy this beautiful weather and this
harsh winter day here in Santa Monica.
[laughter]
And they dug things out of the sand, they fished, they hunted and they very rarely fought.
This was a very, until the Spaniards came there was very little conflict for them. Also,
on this map you'll see these battle sites. Those little crossed swords at the top of
this, right here, you can see that's still Los Angeles River at the top flowing through
there. That is like the Cahuenga Pass right there. And that's the Battle of La Providencia.
That was a battle in which California fought the Americans and because in this area, most
of the battle were fought between family and friends. They didn't really kill people, they
just kind of, too bad people don't do that now, if they had drive-by shootings where
they'd shoot into the air. So, in this battle, they actually only killed a mule and injured
a horse and that was the casualties for the Battle of La Providencia. You can see at the
heart of this map, the thing that amazes me about it is if you took this and reproduced
it on a transparency, you could put this right over a map of the freeways today and you'd
be amazed to see how many of these trails end up being freeways, or major thoroughfares.
So, it's actually, on this map, you'll see, Yes.
>>audience #2: When was this map created?
>>Glen: It was created in 1938, but it portrays 1860.
>>audience #2: Just to repeat, this is as, intended to look as it did in 1860--
>>Glen: 1860, but it's layered with historical--
>>audience #2: Right, well are we seeing 1770, January 16th here, so--
>>Glen: Right, those would be the events that happened and a lot of the, when the Spanish
explorers came through here, first they just sailed by in the 1540s and it looked nice,
but they just kept going. Then eventually, they had these inland expeditions and they
were commissioned by Spanish government to seek out and create missions that would be
a backbone of civilization. So, on this map you're gonna see up there, oh, you can see
Eagle Rock. There's Hollywood over there and the roads going south, that would be like
the 110 freeway and you can actually see the San Bernardino freeway there, the Hollywood
freeway. All these, even though these maps existed in the past and the present and also
they're going to continue, the Mexican colonial, Spanish colonial American period, they also
meld together in this one historical flow. Which is why I threw this in because I thought
this was quite interesting. This is de Anza's, the de Anza's trail as he came through here
and studying it historically, we can see that he took the 101 to the 134 and then he got
on the 60, headed out toward--
[laughter]
>>audience #3: That's what he wrote and he said--
>>audience #4: And there was a Sigalert up there, heading towards the County Fair.
>>Glen: The other, the next period really, after of course the native Americans is the
Spanish and Mexican colonial periods where they divided the city, or the area, into these
ranchos. And at first, it was a very, it was 1783. It was the first rancho and it was a
very informal process in which the people that had settled here originally they actually
brought 44 people up here. Eleven families came up here from Mexico on foot; walked up
and in 1781, founded the Pueblo of Los Angeles. And then, as time went on, they needed a place
to graze their cattle and so forth, so they would just ask the governor, "May I have land?"
And they would be granted these ranchos. And in some cases, I think one of the ranchos,
Tijuana, he asked the governor and he said, "Sure, you can have the land to the water."
And that went from Compton to the Pacific Ocean. Some of these ranchos were absolutely
immense. That's the Treaty of Guadalupe of Hidalgo, which we'll get to later. The other
thing about these, actually the ranch showed here is ironically entitled Rancho Santa Monica,
or one of them. There's Boca de Santa Monica, also. At the center of all these ranchos is
the four square leads and that was granted by the Spanish government. Where it says "Pueblo
de Los Angeles" that was an area that was basically given to the government of the city.
And it's quite important that they controlled that little area and we'll see why this city
grew because there are reasons why they were able to annex all this territory all around
the city and it has to do with having this right from the Spanish crown. I did a program
with DJ Waldie, who's a historian. He was called a rock star historian. Anyway, he explained
why Los Angeles is crooked--
>>audience #5: [inaudible]
>>Glen: Yeah.
[Glen laughs]
Geographically crooked. It goes back to a Roman ideals of the way you should lay out
a city and it was supposedly that you would *** the streets at a 45 degree angle, but
in Los Angeles, because of the geography and the way the city was set up, it's actually
38%. So the city is kind of, and you'll see that in later maps and the maps that are used
in the book, you'll see later when they started trying to create a grid like cities on the
East Coast, you'll see that the Pueblos tilted to the side. But then again, it was all based
on this premise that the winds blew from the North, South, East and West, which they don't
always do that. Not even in Santa Monica, so.
[Glen clears throat]
Yes? Oh, this. I skipped one.
[pause]
You know, I think those are supposed to be the missions. Although, there is an extra
one there. Oh, you know what that is? That's the plaza. That's the plaza church, cause
that was the center. That was the center of the pueblo. Now, even though this is a pictorial
map and people think of it as plebeian, I just wanted to use it in the book because
it shows how the city was laid out; how the whole area was laid out. And because this
is a typical deseño, these were the maps that were done of the rancho. And you can
see this looks like something that maybe your kid did in 3rd grade, but surveying was so
primitive in those days, the way they measured these ranchos is they would take two horsemen
on racing horses with a big rope in-between them and they would ride like this; back and
forth, back and forth. And that's how they would measure. But once statehood came, the
people that were gonna buy these ranchos; they didn't want to rely on that kind of loose.
So anyway, we'll get to that about how they actually did survey these later on. This represents
two different things. This is what's called the land case map and first it represents
the missions, which were these outposts of civilization. And of all the missions along
California, Mission San Gabriel is probably the most successful mission; the one that
really worked the best. But in 1833, they secularized all the missions and they basically,
eventually sold those lands and they became part of other ranchos. Now, when the Mexican
government took over, and this is a very loose control of the Californians who lived here,
the Californians who lived in Los Angeles area paid very little attention to government.
So--
>>audience #6: [inaudible]
>>Glen: No. [laughing] So, once that Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was settled, the US and
Mexico they said, "We will recognize these rancho lands." So, they heaved a sigh of relief
while these rancho owners. Unfortunately, when statehood came, Uncle Sam wanted taxes
paid and this was not a cash economy here. Most of these people were cattle ranchers
and would literally drive Longhorn cattle from here all the way up to San Francisco.
So, they basically had to sell their land and the US government said that you have to
prove your title to the lands. And that meant that they had to hire lawyers, they had to
survey the property, they had to send people all the way up to Washington, DC for these
hearings. And these would take 15, 18 years. In the meantime, they were completely drained
and most of the, or many, of these rancho owners who lived this very beautiful, idyllic
life that you picture old California, like the old Zorro episodes, they ended up in Sonora
Town, which is where Alvera Street is now; absolutely impoverished with not a penny to
their names. This particular map here represents the case of William Workman, who was at one
time mayor of Los Angeles, and one of the very first bankers. And he was ruined by this
and he eventually actually committed suicide. This is what the city looked like. This was
a sketch done by a German artist. He's an engineer and an artist. As they came down,
they were trying to find a rail route for the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. There
was no railroads in Los Angeles until the 1870s. So, they were trying to determine a
route to take and this is a sketch that this German artist, Coppel, made. And you can see,
I guess I can't use a pointer, right? Or, is there a pointer?
>>presenter: [inaudible]
>>Glen: I can actually point.
>>presenter: [inaudible]
>>Glen: See this right there? That's the plaza church. This is taken if you were climbing
up the hill towards Dodger Stadium looking down, there's actually Main Street and if
you look at this map closely and it is reproduced in the book and fairly large, apparently somebody
on Amazon didn't like my book because they thought they should be able to use it like
a road atlas, so--
but a good, old magnifying glass will work and you can see the oldest building in Los
Angeles, is the Villa Adobe, and you can see it on this. You can see, basically, the plaza
and you see where Main Street was. And I'm not sure what that building is in the foreground,
but normally they would put the jail on the outskirts of any of these plazas. There's
a close-up so you can see. It looks all nice, but Los Angeles in 1853 was anything but nice.
It was very much Wild West and wild and wooly and well, one of my favorite stories is one
of the more wealthy owners, land owners, in Los Angeles was Abel Sterns and he had a party.
He had the nicest place in Los Angeles and he had a party and some party crashers showed
up and the way they handled that was they just stuck rifles out the window and fired
them until the crowd of the and that discouraged them. It worked. Now, we've come to the first
surveyed map of Los Angeles. This is Orin's survey. This was done in 1949 and it's all
about the money. So, the city realizes that the American government wants them to pay
taxes; the state of it is here and they don't really have any money. So, they're gonna sell
city lands and they are gonna measure it exactly. You can see on here, originally the settlers
who came here, the 44 original settlers. Actually, two of them were deemed too lazy and they
were sent home after a year. It's a good lesson for the boss that's in the crowd. You can
see, and all of this was laid out as part of the Spanish ideal of the way of pueblo.
The streets had to be a plaza of a certain size. The lots were only like, 40 by 90 and
this is something that happened and continued to happen right up into the 20th Century.
They would name the cities in both Spanish and English. So you see Calle Loma, that's
Hill Street. There's Acetuna; is Olive Street. 14, that became Broadway; that's 4th Street
and Principal. That's interesting because Spring Street, I think people also ask the
question, "What was the spring? Where does the spring come from?" Well, Spring is actually
Orin's girlfriend and then he called her Prima Vera, so he named a street after her. Yes.
>>audience #7: [inaudible]
>>Glen: It's, let's see. Yeah, like that way.
[pause]
Now, the original Ord survey was something they made up; it was on four sheets of paper
and they just stuck them together. There is no original of the Orin. If anybody tries
to sell you the original Orin survey, don't buy it. But this map is one of the first maps
in which they used the Ord survey and you can really see they have really created a
proper grid. Now, the outlying lands, those rectangles there, are called donation lots
and they're 35 acres in size and at the middle is the original pueblo. This, again, this
city is 80 thousand dollars in debt and they're gonna sell these properties. So, you could
buy one of these donation lots for a small fee and if you're able to improve it over
the space of a year then you got title to that land. So this is also, I just wanted
to mention that two of the early, real, real big shots of Los Angeles are a man, George
Hanson, who is an Austrian immigrant and a man named William Moore, and they were both
surveyors. And they're the ones that surveyed all this land which was eventually was sold
in the city; became solvent by selling off the land. Also, I love William Moore. He's
my hero because he's the guy who was impatient. He was in San Francisco and he wanted to come
to Los Angeles; he saw opportunities here and he didn't think the trains went fast enough,
so he walked from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
[pause]
>>audience #8: I'm looking at that layout now and you said that it's a 35 acre rectangle,
which I guess is seven by five. But the nominal layouts, more recently, tended to be townships;
160 acre pieces. So, when does that transition take place, or am I not remembering that right?
>>Glen: No, that's true and the original settlers were given both a lot within the pueblo and
a thing called the "suerte," which would be agricultural purposes. These sold for about
a dollar an acre, too. So, it would have been a pretty good investment.
>>audience #8: I wish [inaudible].
>>Glen: Yeah.So, this is actually called the Hanson Survey. This is one of my absolute
favorites. This is a Stevenson map; not so impressive like this, but this is truly a
map that you can read like a book. And I like it because you see the river running through
the right, slightly off-center, so you'll see both East Los Angeles and the Los Angeles
that we know of that's like where downtown is now. You can also see there's--
>>audience #8: [inaudible]
>>Glen: where the Dodger's have been playing poorly for the last 20 years, or at least
in a mediocre way. In the upper right hand corner, that's where Highland Park is in the
Northeast. On this, you can see right in the middle there, that's Echo Park. That's the
reservoir. You can see there's Chavez Ravine to the right; it's pretty easy to spot. The
other body of water you can see up in the top left there, that is what's Silver Lake
Reservoir now. Now, the thing that makes it even more interesting is that it's a plat
map, and a plat map shows you the owners of the property. And this was done in 1884 and
I've seen others that were done in the 1870s and you can see the names, the old Spanish
names, of the fundadoras people, the original people. They start to disappear, but even
on this you can start to see Ramirez and Avila, Sepulveda. But then, you're gonna see more
Keller and Childs and
Beaudry. Beaudry was a real big butter and egg man. And one of the points that I found
in research in this book is Los Angeles was always very much a multi-cultural city right
from the beginning. It was not just a purely Spanish city. There was as much French spoken
on the streets as there was Spanish. And there were other languages: Russian, German, Chinese,
and all kinds of, it was a mixture of people. This is one of the main stories of Los Angeles
and where the city, I mean it would have stayed the sleepy, little place; it would've been
like Santa Ana or something if they hadn't conquered the water problem. So, this is the
original, the Zanja Madre. This is a map that was done in 1875 to demonstrate this mother
ditch, which they dug off of the Los Angeles River. I mean, this started in 1781. Just
as soon as they arrived here, these families, they started digging these ditches off the
river for all kinds of purposes. This is what it looked like. I mean, these guys were called
water carriers and they would literally fill these jugs and walk around like a Peerless
water delivery guy. And water was so dear, it would be like 50 cents a bucket and that
water from the LA River and those zanja's did everything. You bathed in it, you washed
your dishes, you washed your animals, you irrigated land, and I just threw in some pictures.
This is, those hatched lines, that's the Zanja Madre as it passes through the pueblo. You
can see those names. The funny thing on this map is that so many of the property owners
were women. It's a time of history, but women owned a lot of the property. Anyway, this
is the Zanja Madre and these women are washing their clothes in there and you're gonna be
drinking that water. And then this is what it looked like. It went through all different
kinds of manifestations and this water being such a major thing; it also was always the
big political issue. And also, this is another story the mayor, I think it was Marchessault,
he came with an idea that they were gonna hollow out logs and run the water through
these logs and make water available to everybody. So, they spent all this money and they did
that and it didn't work and he went into the City Council meeting and shot himself during
the council. And researching parts of the book, I went to the archives and I got out
the city council meetings, and all it says, it doesn't even mention the fact that a man
shot himself in the council chambers, it just says that the meeting adjourned early.
[laughter]
So, this is part two of that water problem is as early as 1861, they started realizing
that they had to find a way to store the water because the river is always a very unpredictable
thing, and there was lots of flooding and they had trouble controlling it. So, they
set out to create reservoirs and build ditches and this was the big money-maker. This is
where, uh-oh. There's a little storm there. Anyway, again, the same guys, Hanson and William
Moore and Prudent Beaudry, they all had different ideas about building a reservoir and creating
a water company. So this is, right at the middle there where you see that, that is Echo
Park and they did eventually build this. I think this was done in like, 1878. They did
build these reservoirs and on the way, they went through Silver like that also was a reservoir.
And one of the ways that people became very wealthy, is they bought property around these,
and we'll see later. I hope I make it to when the Huntington's became involved in the building
streetcars and see, there's the reservoir. And you can see the names again. There's Beaudry's
name, there's Child's and so those. And they could rely on gravity to get it all; it went
down Glendale Boulevard and what we know as Glendale Boulevard now. And when it got down
there, there's a 78 foot drop, so they built a mill. They built like a big waterwheel and
they built a mill. That was the very first industrial, first factory in the city of Los
Angeles, was this Woolen mill that they created in making Echo Park Reservoir. This is also
just a, I'm gonna just touch on this-this is an important concept. Again, there's those
35 acre lots and there's the river running through there. The reason I threw this in
is because they managed to, a lot of the thrust in Los Angeles, especially in the 1870s, 1880s,
was to remove themselves from the Spanish colonial city. They were trying to make it
an American city, but not when it came to the river. When it came to the river, they
wanted to stay Mexican, because in Mexican, in the Mexican tradition was the pueblo owns
the water. So, in the American system, if your house butts up on the river, that water's
yours, but not in the Mexican or Spanish system. So, the city of Los Angeles, somehow, kept
the river and owned the river. And so, since water was dear to everybody in Southern California,
all these cities ended up joining Los Angeles and that's how Los Angeles got so much bigger.
Especially like a place like the San Fernando Valley, where they just needed water desperately,
so they, and Hollywood, too was annexed by the city of Los Angeles because of the water.
So, this is a map. On one side, there's East Los Angeles, but that's what this is. Again,
they're selling the property to make money, but they're keeping hold of that water. And
this is the other problem about water that Los Angeles had, which was they needed to
control, they needed storm drainage and they needed a sewage system. Once the city started
growing, and in the 1880s, the population was doubling every decade. So, a lot more
people. I think they were building something like, 110 houses a month. That's a lot of
building, and in a city like this with like 60 thousand people. So, they had to build
roads, they had to bring in gas lines and they to figure out something to do with this
sewage. So this is a map that was used in a report that was done by who was the city
engineer, a man named Fred Eaton. His name pops up in Los Angeles history all over the
place. He was the mayor eventually and he's the guy that eventually was able to get the
Los Angeles reservoir created and that was huge in LA history. So, this is the map that
he and The Sanitarian of this European, Rudolph Herring, came up with of building a sewage
system where the big problem always was, where is all that sewage gonna end up? So, the outfall
problem is the major problem and what they, in this plan, they just basically ran it out
towards Southeast County, which is where I was born and raised.
>>audience #9: [inaudible]
>>Glen: So, you know, we had all this sewage out there, but there were all these truck
farms and people that really wanted this water and they paid good money for this grey water
or brown water probably. But anyway, if you look at the Los Angeles newspapers in this
period, like the 1880s, even up to the 1890s, that's all they talk about is how the government
is corrupt in there. And they had a plan where they were gonna put it into the ocean, but
they didn't have it far enough and some of this has to do with Santa Monica, also. And
I purposely left out a couple of things in doing this just because they're so complicated
that I felt like my brain might explode, so one of them is the harbor where Santa Monica
and Wilmington fought over the harbor. And luckily, if you're people in Santa Monica,
Wilmington won out. But anyway, if you look at the book, there's a bibliography and I
do recommend certain books that they go into that harbor problem. This is one of the other
major, major things about why LA grew and is the incredible rapid transit system we
have; best in the entire world. It's not just some huckster, you know, somebody trying to
get people to move here, it was for real. They had a great streetcar system. So, you
can see on this map this was done in 1912 and already Henry Huntington, Collis Huntington
was the president of the Southern Pacific Railway, and his nephew was the one who basically,
there were two systems. There was the LARy system, that was streetcars within the city
and then there was Pacific Electric that was in outlying areas. Well, eventually, he combined
the two and then he sold everything. He got, I don't know, I guess he made enough money
because when they built all these rail lines, they also bought all that property. So whereas
before, a place like Azuza or Monrovia or Downie, I mean, this would be like so far
out in the sticks nobody even knew it was there. Now people could actually work in Los
Angeles and get on the streetcar and go there. You could also go to, from downtown LA; you
could go to Venice and walk around for a nickel. Or, you could go to the top Mount Lowe and
stay in a hotel up there. And you can see this goes all the way up to San Bernardino.
It, as Mr. Waldie said, it covered the county like paint. And this is such a complex story
about the streetcars and what happened to the streetcars. How am I doing for time?
>>presenter: [inaudible]
>>Glen: I got 20 more? OK. I'll just keep going and then just disconnect the electricity
when, anyway. So, I have to admit that I am old enough that I rode the streetcars, and
this was my father's idea of making a man out of my brother and I, which never really
worked. He made us take the streetcar to the Coliseum and we sold programs at Ram and SC
and UCLA games. And basically, I got on the streetcar at Huntington Park and rode it over
to Slawson and then took that to Vernon and then walked. And after being beaten up and
having the money taken away from us, we walked to the Coliseum. But anyway, you can see how
the PE, the Pacific Electric System, in 1912, after Huntington sold it, they painted them
all red. So, you'll hear people, old people, say "riding the red cars", "the big red cars"
and all that. They didn't maintain these cars. There were like, 900 trains and they would
constantly going, and the traffic in downtown Los Angeles was just terrible because of all
the streetcars and eventually, they didn't maintain them; they started adding buses.
So, by 1930, whoops, by 1930 the tide had turned away from streetcars and the automobile
started taking over, and I will touch on that. But I did want to look at a few of these things
called panoramic maps that I personally love and I think they're fun to look at. And I
threw this one in just so you could see that Santa Monica's represented. This is Santa
Monica in 1877; no parking problems.
[laughter]
No promenade. I think it's looking down, like towards Malibu.
>>audience #10: [inaudible].
>>Glen: Oh, it is. Yeah. And that, the funny thing about it, too, is that--
>>audience #10: [inaudible]
>>Glen: in the rail. There had not been a railway in Los Angeles until 1876, and they
connected us with San Francisco. So, but the reason there is a railway there is because
they were trying to get the harbor. And Santa Monica, thank God, didn't get it. This is
a typical panoramic map and these were created to get people to move to Los Angeles, and
there's a style that they used. These were done all through the Victorian era. They wanted
to make the city look like a garden spot and this is like, the first, they're trying to
sell the Southern California good life. But they also, it's ringed by all these impressive
public buildings and to show, "Oh, this is a civilized city; up and coming." And that's
the City Hall and there's also, that's the tallest building in Los Angeles because after
the San Francisco earthquake, they put limits, so was is it. You could do three stories.
I like the fact, too, that City Hall, that, oops. Next door. Oops. Next door to this is
the Temperance Temple; the Women's Christian Temperance Union building. And somebody said
it had very little effect on City Hall, temperance. So, this is an example of the detail. They're
really terrific maps. I actually have this on my wall at home. That is Fort More Hill
and part of Bunker Hill there. You can see Bunker Hill Avenue and, oops. That's the new
high school there, right in the middle of the building. Right in the middle of the map,
that's the new high school. This is the absolute masterpiece of these pictorial maps. This
was done; it's like a travel guide. All that printing at the bottom, that tells you like,
every building in the city and stuff to do and how to get there, and you can see the
incredible detail. It took this man 16 months. He walked the streets of Los Angeles making
sketches and I'm not sure if they actually used the blimp, but this is 1909. So, in the
middle there you can see that that's actually they called it Central Park then. That's what's
now Pershing Square, which is now a big piece of ugly concrete, but then it was a really
nice park. And this particular map, you can go on the Library of Congress website and
they have a really great panoramic mapping exhibit on there where you can bring this
up and you can zoom in on an individual building and see these things really close up. It's
really impressive. And right here, in the upper right hand corner, right there, [inaudible].
In talking about the streetcars, this is the very first automobile map. This was done in
1903, and it's called the Automobile and Miners Road Map, which is kind of mysterious because
I'm not sure what the miners had to do with this. And originally, when I saw the map,
I thought these little dots were oil wells because this is when they had discovered oil.
Doheny is the guy that discovered oil over by La Brea Tar Pits. It's amazing that they
sharpened a eucalyptus tree and then drove it into the ground. That's how they first
did oil discoveries. Anyway, this is when the speed limit was eight miles per hour,
but you can see that there it's still really sprawled out. So, Los Angeles has always been
this kind of sprawling, and it has a lot to do with the ranchos, it has a lot to do with
streetcars. This is what downtown looked like in 1913 and this is kind of a watershed year
because the city of Los Angeles was the very first city to have a population boom after
mass production of automobiles. And so, the city, even though World War I was on the horizon,
was really booming and there was a lot of building and there were, in downtown, you
can see that this is an amazing map, too, cause it's an orthographic projection. And
it's like an aerial photo. You can see the top there. Again, there's a central park.
Five years later, that became Pershing Square. I guess Pershing was a hero in World War I.
And there were showing movies; the first movies were being shown in downtown and the next
year, the Panama Canal opened and the Harbor had already been approved, so then Los Angeles
just really took off as an industrial power. There again is Central Park and there's also
Hamburger's Department Store is in there. That's where they had the movable staircase,
they called it. This was done much later, but this is an example of one of these tourist
come-on maps. I love this one because it has some personal significance for me and I just
think it's so funny because this man was a German, and for some reason, he did the regular
tourist thing. So, on this you see the Brown Derby and the Groman's Chinese and the Hollywood
Bowl and things like that, but when he gets to Santa Monica, what does he have? The Crystal
Pier nude sunbaths.
[laughter]
And he also has, see there's Clover Field up there. There's the Venice oil fields, Sunset
Pier and he has the, my father happened to be a craps dealer on a gambling boat. They
used to take these ships and put them off the coast outside of jurisdiction of the law
and they would gamble out there, so my father was a craps dealer there. So, that's not the
one he was one, but in this, this guy who did the map included them. This one here,
I think, is the quintessence of the Southern California good life. You have all the flora
and the fauna and everything just looks, everything is like, washed in the sun and again, there's
Santa Monica. I tailored this for the Google audience. Everybody's horseback riding and
having a great time. Nobody seems to work.
[laughter]
And there's a whale on the, see there's, but he does include their oil well. See the oil
wells there, gushing oil along with some of the actual, I think that's 1932. So, the called
the Coliseum the Olympic Stadium, cause this was the year of the Olympics in '32. This
is, to me, the greatest map ever. This is a Joe Morrow. He was an immigrant from Uruguay;
amazing artist. He was a great sculptor, he was a painter. When he was 14 years old, he
already had a job as a cartoonist at the Boston Herald and he did these things they called
"carts." And at first, I think he did them for his children for fun and this one he did
in Los Angeles in 1942, and it's just incredible. It's just like a history of the city. And
everything around the edges there, at the top, that's Los Angeles history and this man
lived with the Indians and he was an expert on Californios; the pre-statehood California
history. He wrote a book on the Californios and everything in those illustrations is exactly
correct, right down to the hair styles and the clothes they're wearing. Although, at
the bottom I really like, there's these, it shows the population growth of the city and
its women wearing bathing suits, blowing up these balloons that say, "80 thousand people"
or whatever. But it has like, when electricity was invented, when the Pacific Coast League
baseball started, earthquakes, the Pony Express, which came through here. This is a close-up
where you'll see the little Trojan there for USC. There's a little Bruin for UCLA and even
a little Jesuit there for Loyola.
[Glen clears throat]
I'm just throwing these in because these are my Los Angeles stories. One of the things
that I personally wanted to do when I got the chance to write this book, is to demonstrate
that Los Angeles is not a city of empty-headed, blond people laying on the beach, you know,
with no culture. And I've been to New York; I've heard those stories and so I personally
like this because I've been a librarian for 30 years and this is a map of the library
system done in 1930 of the branches of the library. And in researching this, I was amazed
to find that in 1930, Los Angeles was the best read city in America. And we had this
really terrific, it's ironic though, in that I chose this little thing here, and I asked
the other librarians, I said, "I don't know where Hazard is and I don't know." Anyway,
what happened was they opened those branches and then they had budget cuts and they closed
them. So, but anyway, we've always been a well-read city here in Los Angeles, and we've
always had the vital cultural life and we are one of the, have a really great audience
for contemporary classical music. How are we doing for time?
>>presenter: [inaudible]
>>Glen: OK. You know what? I'll go for, I'm gonna skip that, but this is the studios in
Hollywood.
[pause]
I guess I'll just mention this one and then I'll answer some questions. This is just a
question that we had many times and I had to actually work with a guy who writes a column
for LA Magazine and the Cecilia Rasmussen from the LA Times. We read through all these
accounts and they called people on the phone and everything because there's this terrible
story in Los Angeles history where these teenagers had a party at this little reservoir and they
had a fight and one of them got killed. You know, the kind of stuff that happens all the
time now, terrible stuff, but that little square at the top there by the curving part,
that's Sleepy Lagoon; the famous Sleepy Lagoon. And after that event, it set forward this
tide of racism in the city and then there was the Zoot Suit riots, where they actually
beat young Mexican Americans, Filipino, Blacks, any soldiers who were here on leave. They
just roamed the streets and it's a very sad story. So anyway, we threw that in and I'll
skip that. I'll just open it to questions now.
>>audience #11: [ ]. At what point does the first freeway go in? I'm thinking about the
Arroyo Seco, going up from LA to Pasadena. Was that about 1950 or something?
>>Glen: 1938.
>>audience #11: 1938?
>>Glen: 38, yeah. And then they, I think, in 1950 they passed the Highways Act and they
just built--
>>audience #11: Yeah, it was 1956 was the Interstate highway.
>>Glen: Even when I was a kid, we would go from South Gate. There wasn't a Harbor freeway
yet. We would go to Park La Brea. I also have a bunch of maps that I brought, a few maps
for people to actually touch them and see them, which is, even though I have to admit
that I did a lot of research on the book, on Google books. There's nothing like hardcopy
for some things. So, and this is a fire insurance atlas, Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas of Santa
Monica. This was published in 1930 and then when there where change in the neighborhood,
they would paste this piece of paper over these [inaudible]. So, this is exactly what
Santa Monica looked like building by building in 1956.
[pause]
[laughter]
>>audience #12: I was gonna say, it sounds like you kind of touched on it. It seemed
like a lot of times I hear people say that Santa Monica is as spread out as it is because
of the building of freeways and the cars and they blame the evil suburban sprawl and that,
but it sounds like you've implied that LA was always spread out and that cars just came
about at random.
>>Glen: In the rancho period, the ranchos were all self-sufficient, so they had their
own schools, they had their own carpenter, they made their own wine, they had their own
security. It always was "we don't really need government downtown." It's, yeah.
>>audience #13: Going back to the libraries map, I was, there's an Echo Park branch, then
there's an Edendale and there's an Alessandro. Is that, are those all compressed, sort of
along Glendale Boulevard, there were three libraries? Those are all locations--
>>Glen: Yeah, I think that was Atwater, Edendale, Echo Park. Yeah.
>>audience #13: Yeah, cause the Edendale branch now is the Echo Park library, right?
>>Glen: No, there's a separate Edendale now that's over there by--
>>audience #13: Sunset and Glendale.
>>Glen: Yeah.
>>audience #13: And then, it looks like north of that, like that looks like that would be
the Echo Park one. It looks like there's another one and then there's another one on Alessandro,
which is right, which is a street also in Echo Park. So, it just looked like there was--
>>Glen: I think maybe Alessandro, that was like a storefront and then they moved it to
Cypress Park on Pepper Street.
>>audience #13: I see. I see.
[pause]
>>presenter: All right. Thank you, Glen.
>>Glen: My pleasure.
[applause]