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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.

Originally published by Dawson’s Book Shop in 1981, Los Angeles Before the Freeways has become a cult object among Angelenos for its record of a lost version of the city. But the long out of print volume and its photography documenting a pre-freeway city has been given new life, just as L.A., in the wake of the recent devastating fires, again contemplates the past, present, and future of its built environment. The book will be republished on March 25, and following is an excerpt from Arnold Hylen’s text, which sets the scene for the automobile’s impact on the city.

During the late 1890s, just as the old century was about to fade into history, there was a new addition to the horse-and-buggy traffic of Los Angeles. The automobile had arrived. It was a nemesis in the form of a gasoline engine. Few were aware how completely it was to dominate the city’s future, nor that within the next fifty years nearly all the familiar sights that had so many years been their environment would vanish in its wake. Travel was about to accelerate to a degree no one would have believed, and so was the growth of the city.

It would hardly be exaggerating to say that Los Angeles entered the twentieth century in high gear. By 1910, all the symptoms of the motor age were evident. Lack of regulations regarding speed, direction, and parking were already causing problems. By 1920 there were 160,000 automobiles in the city. But the leisurely pace of other days did not easily succumb. In April 1920, Mayor Snyder and the Traffic Bureau mounted a heroic effort to curb the “nuisance,” only to meet with a violent outcry from local businesses, the press, and general public. The unanimous verdict was that no one wanted a “one-horse town.”

Arnold Hylen. Photo courtesy Angel City Press

This attitude had already been confirmed, not only by the changes resulting from World War I, but even ten years earlier. The Dominguez Air Meet, held January 10–20, 1910, was one of the greatest events in local as well as aviation history. The majority of Angelenos had never seen a plane in the sky before. They tended to regard all aviators as stuntmen and acrobats. But Dominguez changed all that. Record attendance for a single day was forty thousand. Considering that the total population for the city was then barely 319,000, this was a remarkable turnout; enthusiasm ran so high that many businesses were obliged to give their employees time off.

The harbinger of a wonderful future had come to Los Angeles in a carnival atmosphere. In 1912 Allen and Malcolm Lougheed developed and flew their seaplane. A year later Glenn Martin and his soon-to-be-famous assistants Lawrence Bell and Donald Douglas were designing a plane that was destined to be the first ever used as a bomber. By 1920 Douglas had formed his own company. And barely twenty years later, at the outbreak of World War II, all of the local aircraft manufacturers combined were employing more people than the entire population of Los Angeles at the time of the Dominguez Meet.

Yet aircraft was only one phase of the many economic activities whose development began at the turn of the century. Equally spectacular was the growth of the entertainment industry. Around 1910, the movies and their world of make-believe arrived in force. The Hollywood dream factories revolutionized entertainment and brought glamour, adventure, and comedy to millions. A whole pantheon of new popular idols were born overnight.

On November 5, 1913, when Hollywood was beginning its spectacular rise, another event, hardly as glamorous, but far more vital to the future of Los Angeles, occurred at the San Fernando Mountains when water first gushed out of the Mulholland Aqueduct. Nearly thirty thousand people and a number of prominent officials were present. Many speeches were made; but the most memorable, and possibly the shortest in state history, were the words of Mulholland himself: “There it is, take it.”

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The Bur-Mar Hotel (William H. Enders, 1903) with the tall Corinthian columns, stands at 514 South Figueroa Street. Its darker neighbor at 516, a 21-room apartment house called the Saint Dunstan, was built in 1904. They were both lost to a surface parking lot in 1957. Looming behind is the Richfield Tower (Morgan, Walls & Clements, 1929). The Richfield was demolished in 1968 for the ARCO towers project, along with the rest of its block (1); Hylen stands on Court Street east of Hill Street. At left is the Hotel Broadway (Carroll H. Brown, 1904) built by the father-son team of James and Avery McCarthy; the McCarthy Company founded the Observation Tower Company, which built Court Flight. Above is a corner of the United States Courthouse (Gilbert Stanley Underwood, 1940); the Hall of Records and city hall. To Hylen’s right, a 33-unit apartment house called The Stevens (Harry Charles Deckbar, 1912). Hylen faces the dead-end where the Court Flight funicular (1904–1943) once had its engine house (2). Photos by Arnold Hylen, courtesy Angel City Press

During the 1920s the population again doubled and for the first time rose well over a million. Los Angeles was easily the fastest growing city in the country. Several hundred tracts were put on the market and nearly 12,000 acres were subdivided. In housing alone some twenty-five thousand homes and close to a thousand new apartment houses were built. The record year for construction was 1923. Prices of property doubled and tripled. Local industries reached top levels in American business. Large-scale drilling for oil began at Huntington Beach in 1920 and at Signal Hill in 1921. A new city hall, the tallest building in Los Angeles, was dedicated April 26, 1928. Other new structures were the public library and the Memorial Coliseum. In Westwood, amid rising unemployment, work was begun on UCLA.

In 1929, everything ended with a jolt, in one of the most stunning reversals ever suffered by the American economy. In the thirties, bankruptcy and loss of businesses, homes, and employment, on a scale few would have thought possible, continued year after year as if it would never end. Toward the end of the decade, when the Dust Bowl began adding its misery, there were more problems. A stream of migrants, many in jalopies loaded to the top with family belongings, became a familiar sight along highways into the city, rattling along to a cacophony of pots and pans. Local citizens, already faced with more than enough problems of their own, soon took action to stem the tide. Police joined the effort. It was a tragic confrontation, but as it happened, another upheaval was brewing.

Today, those who have little or no recollection of the city prior to 1950 hardly realize what a different place it was. Much as Los Angeles had grown before World War II, it was still surrounded by great stretches of open land. Fields of alfalfa could be found only a few miles from the Civic Center. Not far beyond could be seen rolling countryside patterned with vegetable crops or row upon row of fruit trees. But after the war, and well into the 1950s, newcomers began pouring in by the thousands and everything changed.

In a city that had witnessed many migrations this was probably the biggest of all. Whole communities sprang up, practically overnight. In time pre-war Los Angeles and its outskirts were swamped in a seemingly boundless cluster of suburbs. A current jibe persisted that the suburbs were in search of a city. In fact, they were all components of a new urban configuration, a megalopolis. In the beginning, all of Los Angeles could be seen from the top of Fort Moore Hill. Today it can only be seen from an aircraft, and not even then except at a fairly high altitude. The sight is truly awesome and even somewhat frightening. By day it is a desert with rooftops, with freeways, like a network of arteries, spreading out in all directions; at dusk it becomes a carpet of light, sparkling like a galaxy of jewels.