“Every city has had its boom, but the history of Los Angeles…should be regarded as one continuous boom punctuated at intervals with major explosions.” —Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land, 1946 Metro Transportation Library, Archives & Records…
This week marks the anniversary of the 1937 National Transportation Week celebrations in Los Angeles. We reviewed the event for last year’s 75th anniversary, and included video footage of child actress Shirley Temple helping out with the launch of the new PCC…
This week, we received some great news. I have been named a 2013 Library Journal “Mover & Shaker”! Each year, just a handful of individuals are selected from thousands of information professionals to be honored as the nation’s most innovative…
[Above: Metro Library's new interactive timeline for Los Angeles transit history. "X" out the introduction box and move the chronology slider along the bottom to reposition the timeline. You may click on each transit operator for more information and links…
Going back as far as at least the Gold Rush, California has been built on promotion — and we lost one of our greatest boosters this week. Television host Huell Howser criss-crossed the state promoting our diverse history and culture, uncovering…
It was announced yesterday that plans to bring streetcars back to Broadway in downtown Los Angeles took a giant step forward. Business owners and residents with an approximate three-block radius of the proposed streetcar route voted to tax themselves to…
At the 7th Annual LA as Subject Archives Bazaar last month, archivist Denise Villegas participated in a “Pecha Kucha-style lightning round” highlighting each collection’s most unusual documents or artifacts. Her presentation captivated the audience, so we are now sharing it…
Southern California history comes alive once again at the 7th-annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar on the campus of USC on Saturday, October 27 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Organized by LA as Subject and presented by the University of Southern…
Only four cities have hosted the modern Olympic Games more than once. When the world returned to Los Angeles in 1984, fifty-two years after its inaugural Games, the Olympics had changed: 140 nations were represented, compared to 37 in 1932. Even…
When a city wins the right to hold the Olympics, one of the oft cited advantages to the region is the catalytic effect upon the urban and transport projects of the host cities. However, with unparalleled access to documents and…
Millions around the globe begin to set their sights on London for the next few weeks, making this a great time to take a look back at Los Angeles’ experience with the Olympics. As one of the very few cities to…
The Metro Transportation Library & Archive reached another milestone over the weekend, surpassing more than 2,000,000 views of our Flickr photo-sharing website. This achievement comes less than 9 months since hitting the 1.5 million mark, and just 17 months after our…
This Sunday marks the 75th anniversary of the formal opening of the Golden Gate Bridge linking San Francisco to Marin County. The iconic span was at once the greatest over-water structure in the entire world, a profound achievement in engineering…
A look back through our archives provides no shortage of historic photos, documents and other resources telling the story of transportation planning and operation in Southern California. But sometimes, we come across something very special, though not necessarily related to the…
A century of auto-oriented culture and bad city planning has left most of the country with transit that is underfunded, ill maintained, and ill conceived. But as rising oil prices portend the end of the era of cheap energy, a remarkable…
