Creating advocates for history through the stories of greater Los Angeles.
by Paul R. Spitzzeri In 2002, the Criminal Courts Building, completed thirty years earlier in downtown Los Angeles, was renamed for the first female lawyer on the West Coast of the United States and the earliest proponent of an office of public defender: Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849-1934). This remarkable woman was a trailblazer in so... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri The 1920s was a decade of much transformation and innovation, so that much of the broad template for how we live now, nearly a century later, was laid out during the period. In burgeoning Los Angeles, we grew by enormous leaps and bounds, punctuated by the occasional economic depression or recession... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri Photos show a mild-mannered looking fellow with large glasses befitting a shy clerk more than an ambitious promoter with massive ideas and a talent for raising millions of dollars from investors. E.G. Lewis, however, proved to be an incredibly complex figure, who managed to avoid too much legal jeopardy for about... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri It was a pleasure today to welcome paid and volunteer staff members from the Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles to the Homestead. The visit began with a presentation about artifacts in the museum's collection related to Chinese and Chinese-Americans in greater Los Angeles. It noted a couple of connections between... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri After a wet winter, we're seeing drier weather with warmer temperatures here in the early part of spring, though there may still be some rain in upcoming weeks. As past posts on this blog have discussed, years of heavy precipitation, amid frequent drought periods, have often brought major flooding to the... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri Children's Hospital Los Angeles is a pediatric healthcare facility that is among the finest in the world and it has been a presence in the City of Angeles since 1901, when it was modestly established in a small residence on Castelar Street in what became, in the 1930s, the Chinatown neighborhood... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri Last November, a "No Place Like Home" post here focused on the highly eclectic residence of the very powerful publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis. Otis' home, called "The Bivouac," was located on Wilshire Boulevard and his next door neighbor was friendly rival in the newspaper business, Edwin T.... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri For decades from the late 19th century through the World War II years, greater Los Angeles was, as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce liked to put it, an "agricultural empire." The region was among the most fertile and productive in the nation and the world when it came to a... Continue Reading →
by Paul R. Spitzzeri With its frequent years of low rainfall and drought punctuated by occasional intervals of heavy rains and significant flooding, greater Los Angeles' massive growth from the late 1880s onward, especially in the suburbs, increasingly forced local leaders to confront the question of flood control. Massive floods in the winter of 1913-14... Continue Reading →
