Category: Primary Resources

Primary Resources

How Is A Mastodon Like A Bus?: Local Transit Planning Impacts Los Angeles’ Paleontological Record

How is a Mastodon like a Bus?

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…

All Of SoCal History Comes Alive At The 7th Annual LA As Subject Archives Bazaar!

LA as Subject Archives Bazaar poster

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…

28 Years Ago This Week: The World Returns For Los Angeles’ Gold Medal Performance In Olympic Traffic Relief

SCRTD Bus, 1984 Olympics Los Angeles

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…

Planning Olympic Legacies: Transport Dreams And Urban Realities

Planning Olympic Legacies

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…

80 Years Ago This Week: Los Angeles Welcomes (And Transports) The World To The 1932 Summer Olympics

1932 Olympic Organizing Committee official report

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…

2,000,000 Views And Still Going Strong: Sharing Our Transportation Legacy With Rarely Seen Photographs

Los Angeles People Mover proposal, 1971

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…

75 Years Ago This Weekend: California Inspires The World With One Of America’s Greatest Infrastructure Projects (And Celebrations) Ever

California Highways And Public Works, May 1937

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…

Vault Disney: How The Magic Kingdom Showcased The Magnificent Future Of Transportation in 1958

Vault Disney: Business conference

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…

Los Angeles & The Straphanger: Surviving The End Of The Automobile Age

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

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…

Information On The Go: Metro Library Figures Prominently In “Go Metro Los Angeles” Free Mobile App

Free Mobile App

Nearly half of Americans now own a smartphone, so it is understandable that a tidal wave of information is coming to them through handheld devices — up from just 35% nine months ago. In response to the growing need for…