Picturing History in LA’s Architecture

My father grew up in a Los Angeles with electric-powered streetcars, lingering adobe and cast-iron architecture, and City Hall reigning as the capital of noir’s tallest building.

He had friends who got caught up in the Zoot Suit Riots. I remember him once advising me, somewhat out of the blue, “You cannot fight the police.”

What about battling time? This too may be doubtful, though some try.

Consider Arnold Hylen (1908–1987), an LA-based photographer who specialized in commercial and architectural photography. 

For about two decades, starting in the early 1940s and continuing through 1958’s lifting of the height ordinance keeping City Hall the tallest building in LA, Hylen spent his weekends traversing the city to photograph its architectural past: the nineteenth-century buildings rapidly disappearing in LA’s architecturally Modernist mid twentieth century.

Most of the buildings Hylen photographed were soon to be torn down as office towers and freeways transformed Los Angeles from the 1960s forward. 

Hylen brought his photos together in Los Angeles Before the Freeways: Images of an Era 1850–1950, first published in 1981 but now being republished by Angel City Press. This new edition augments the original with additional, before unpublished photos by Hylen and an introduction by Nathan Marsak. Historian of Los Angeles Marsak also contributes expanded explanatory captions for Hylen’s photos. 

What were these nineteenth-century buildings that persisted into the LA of the 1940s and 1950s, only to vanish soon thereafter? 

Examples include the Talamentes/Santa Cruz adobe (1835), simple Folk Victorian homes (1880s), elaborate Queen Anne mansions (1880s), and Mission Revival buildings (1890s) hearkening in architectural style to the Franciscan missions of California’s Spanish colonial period. Hylen also photographed hotels, government buildings, and business blocks built mostly from the 1880s to the 1910s.

Marsak’s new introduction and Hylen’s essay “The Historical Background: 1850–1950” (republished from the 1981 edition) provide guidance to readers heading into LA’s architectural past through Hylen’s lens.

It is a fascinating journey. Let me try to suggest why.

Imagine it’s 1959. You are 75, watching The Twilight Zone’s first season. You remember a largely horse-drawn LA, even as you are living on amidst fast food, freeways, and rocket launches. The TV show’s temporal whiplashes between pre-automobile America’s final years and the USA’s car-saturated space age speak to you uncannily.

Then imagine it’s 1959 and you are Hylen standing near City Hall snapping a photo of a three-story 1883 building with a cast-iron front, built by the carriage dealers Rees & Wirsching, while overhead flies American Airlines’ 707 jet Flagship California making the first transcontinental passenger flight from LA’s International Airport to New York City’s International Airport.

Hylen documented nineteenth-century architectural styles in LA but also set out to record a fast-receding past’s disappearing overlap with an onrushing future. 

1981 was LA’s bicentennial, the city being founded in 1781. The bicentennial called for historical reflection. Hylen’s essay deplores amnesia regarding LA’s pre-automobile history. Hylen finds this amnesia at work in the minds of Angelenos but also in LA’s car-heavy post-WWII dynamic, erasing artifacts originating from the city’s first hundred and twenty or so years.

Hylen emphasizes how, after WWII, the car dominated and transformed LA. In the photo captions, in reference to historic buildings, the phrase “destroyed for a parking lot” and variations of the phrase “destroyed for a freeway” occur frequently. 

There is some nostalgia in Hylen’s project. Hylen writes that the Paris Inn’s “singing waiters will remain forever dear to Angelenos who remember the 1920s.” Hylen was one such Angeleno. 

But he was not alone in his nostalgia. Hylen recounts how tens of thousands of people came out in 1969 to ride the LA funicular Angels Flight when, having run since its 1901 opening, its immanent closure and dismantling were announced.

Hylen did not live to see the 1996 reopening.

We should not too easily scoff at this nostalgia. Hylen’s photos have ecological implications.

Think of the nostalgia for the Holocene, the geological epoch that started about 12,000 years ago after the last ice age. Many Earth system scientists tag this sweet spot for civilization as ending about 1945/1950, when the global surge of fossil-fueled industrial activity these scientists call “the Great Acceleration” took off and perhaps made irreversible anthropogenic global warming’s collision course with planetary civilization. Think Titanic and iceberg.

Like demolishing a building from a specific past, global warming is on track, for example, to disrupt an ocean current system, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, load bearing for much of contemporary civilization.

Expand the photographic frame a bit and you realize Hylen documents Great Acceleration transformations at the city scale. Yet the planetary ecological scale is at stake too when you tear down Queen Anne houses to build a freeway.

Who will want to read the new edition of Los Angeles Before the Freeways? Scholars of LA’s architectural, photographic and civic histories obviously will. Many readers with an enthusiasm for LA’s past would love to receive this book as a gift. And for Pasadena and Altadena residents the Eaton Fire has attuned to local human history’s intersections with planetary-scale ecological history, Los Angeles Before the Freeways offers much to ponder.

Los Angeles Before the Freeways: Images of an Era 1850–1950, by Arnold Hylen with Nathan Marsak. Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library, 192 pages, $45. Available from local booksellers or through the publisher at: https://acp.lapl.org/book/los-angeles-before-the-freeways