The day my own dear Central Library reopened I got my name in the L.A. Times which elicited ragging from pals around the city. “As soon as I crossed the threshold I got down on my knees and kissed the…
The last time I looked upon Admission Day as an important holiday for our dear Golden State was probably back in Sister Leocritia’s grade 4 classroom at St. Helen school back when electricity was new…
"It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary…
The best way to celebrate the National Park System in America is to stand on the hallowed ground of any one of them and just look around. They never fail to fill you with wonder and genuine pride in…
To celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month at the Los Angeles Public Library, we have occasion to show off one of the greatest pictorial maps ever created: The Pageant of the Pacific by the…
Previously, in writing about Pershing Square I neglected to describe the essential role the place had in the Gay history of Los Angeles. This post is an attempt to redress that lack of research and to…
As a salute to African American Heritage Month we present a brief glance at the epicenter of Central Avenue in the once glamorous and glorious Dunbar Hotel. In its heyday, the Dunbar was the stopping…
This masterpiece of pictorial mapping is an original from the earliest printings of the famed Fischgrind Publishing house and one of the mysterious Miguel Gomez Medina’s greatest works. The map is…
To honor LGBT Heritage Month at the library we present this pictorial map of West Hollywood, one of America’s most enlightened cities. Street maps from as recently as the 1970’s ignored the growing…
To commemorate African American Heritage Month, Central Library offers two maps that exemplify the struggles and triumphs of African-Americans in this country. The first is “Americans of Negro Lineage…
