Wow- Mike- what a magnificent undertaking uncovering Lost Angeles! The model reflects a concern by City Planning for the physical reality of the City’s growth. Imagine if any of them cared now?
You and your friends have also revealed the trove of sketches which show our architectural history in situ. Thanks for this marvelous work.
Thanks Fran. My real passion though is researching the story behind Minnie Barton. She has mostly been forgotten and yet she was a major player in LA history. There's a real interesting history as to how everyone knows about Alice Stebbins Wells and not about Minnie Barton. Wells served as the model for the professional policewoman. Barton represented the time women seeked out social work as a calling. Wells went on to run the LAPD museum and pretty much ignored the women who were before her, like Barton and Aletha Gilbert. Barton worked behind the scenes and her organization today is a $60 million per year charity (though much of what they know about the founding organization is wrong). And Barton's Big Sister League took a major turn in the '50s thru '70s when the women in charge (white and mostly republican) did not want their money going to help "those women." So, they went from helping their sisters to saving the babies. I wonder how much damage this did to communities of color where the child became the focus of help, of being saved, while the mothers were written off as a lost cause. And I have so much more. A detailed history of a forgotten faith healer here in LA, the activities of the Klan in the '30s and how they may have helped Barton in helping her when things turned dark, a major Hollywood studio figure Hans Dreier who lived next to the Barton camp, and a whole bunch of oddballs and kooks who lived in Shadow Hills at the time.
We've struggled to shoot a select sheets of the plastic coated WPA sketches, and know what a remarkable undertaking this was. Thank you! It is a reminder of how essential the volunteer work of caring citizens is to telling the real story of any city, and the value of The Internet Archive (back from a massive hacking attack) as a free, accessible hosting site.
Now we're wondering if there might be a way to crowdsource tagging of specific buildings/intersections on the page they appear on, searchable within the Archive uploads or as a standalone index?
Thanks Kim/Richard for the kind words. Shooting at the City Archive is a challenge since you are dealing with minimal assets, poor lighting, etc. In addition, all of the photos were shot by hand on an iPhone. That created all sorts of issues such as skew and zero info as to actual drawing size. I'm happy with the end product, but it isn't archival quality. That said, getting hung up on those issues is likely why the drawings have been hidden away all these years.
Creating a building index is another major task that is needed, just another future project. My partial solution was to take WPA planning maps from USC/Huntington and fuse them into one giant map of the city and then overlay a grid based on model data. In truth, the WPA planners did not always follow the grid and given the cities orientation, the sector lines do much zigging and zagging. The planning map was interesting in that I created the full size map believing that the individual maps would be in the public domain. The USC site claimed copyright but the Huntington supported my position. It turns out that in the early days of the internet, the lawyers had the archives label everything as protected even if in the public domain. The Huntington has been good in updating their site as to status. Now I just need to find a low cost repro shop to run off some 3 foot square planning maps of the city.
All government work is public domain, and we're glad the Huntington is updating this. Check out Angels Flight Railway operator Will Campbell's Instagram post from earlier today: you can print poster sized documents for free in LAPL's Octavia Lab! https://www.instagram.com/p/DCeaFAhPNfK/?img_index=1
Wow- Mike- what a magnificent undertaking uncovering Lost Angeles! The model reflects a concern by City Planning for the physical reality of the City’s growth. Imagine if any of them cared now?
You and your friends have also revealed the trove of sketches which show our architectural history in situ. Thanks for this marvelous work.
Thanks Fran. My real passion though is researching the story behind Minnie Barton. She has mostly been forgotten and yet she was a major player in LA history. There's a real interesting history as to how everyone knows about Alice Stebbins Wells and not about Minnie Barton. Wells served as the model for the professional policewoman. Barton represented the time women seeked out social work as a calling. Wells went on to run the LAPD museum and pretty much ignored the women who were before her, like Barton and Aletha Gilbert. Barton worked behind the scenes and her organization today is a $60 million per year charity (though much of what they know about the founding organization is wrong). And Barton's Big Sister League took a major turn in the '50s thru '70s when the women in charge (white and mostly republican) did not want their money going to help "those women." So, they went from helping their sisters to saving the babies. I wonder how much damage this did to communities of color where the child became the focus of help, of being saved, while the mothers were written off as a lost cause. And I have so much more. A detailed history of a forgotten faith healer here in LA, the activities of the Klan in the '30s and how they may have helped Barton in helping her when things turned dark, a major Hollywood studio figure Hans Dreier who lived next to the Barton camp, and a whole bunch of oddballs and kooks who lived in Shadow Hills at the time.
We've struggled to shoot a select sheets of the plastic coated WPA sketches, and know what a remarkable undertaking this was. Thank you! It is a reminder of how essential the volunteer work of caring citizens is to telling the real story of any city, and the value of The Internet Archive (back from a massive hacking attack) as a free, accessible hosting site.
Now we're wondering if there might be a way to crowdsource tagging of specific buildings/intersections on the page they appear on, searchable within the Archive uploads or as a standalone index?
Thanks Kim/Richard for the kind words. Shooting at the City Archive is a challenge since you are dealing with minimal assets, poor lighting, etc. In addition, all of the photos were shot by hand on an iPhone. That created all sorts of issues such as skew and zero info as to actual drawing size. I'm happy with the end product, but it isn't archival quality. That said, getting hung up on those issues is likely why the drawings have been hidden away all these years.
Creating a building index is another major task that is needed, just another future project. My partial solution was to take WPA planning maps from USC/Huntington and fuse them into one giant map of the city and then overlay a grid based on model data. In truth, the WPA planners did not always follow the grid and given the cities orientation, the sector lines do much zigging and zagging. The planning map was interesting in that I created the full size map believing that the individual maps would be in the public domain. The USC site claimed copyright but the Huntington supported my position. It turns out that in the early days of the internet, the lawyers had the archives label everything as protected even if in the public domain. The Huntington has been good in updating their site as to status. Now I just need to find a low cost repro shop to run off some 3 foot square planning maps of the city.
All government work is public domain, and we're glad the Huntington is updating this. Check out Angels Flight Railway operator Will Campbell's Instagram post from earlier today: you can print poster sized documents for free in LAPL's Octavia Lab! https://www.instagram.com/p/DCeaFAhPNfK/?img_index=1
I love this! Thanks, Mike!