Los Angeles History

For the next four weeks, public-television station KCET will be reminding Los Angeles that the city of the future also has a history. Beginning tonight, Channel 28 will introduce the "Los Angeles History Project," four half-hour programs exploring the city's past. These first installments, which will air Monday nights at 7:30 through May 30, begin a series that the producers hope will continue with four episodes a year through 1991.

On NFL and college football rosters, this is the week for a little trash talking via text messages, tweets and Facebook postings. "I tell them, 'You went to the wrong school,' and they tell me the same thing," Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman Brandon Mebane, a Crenshaw grad, says of running into a Dorsey alumnus. "It's all love and respect. " And a little teasing. It's Dorsey vs. Crenshaw week, and Friday's 6 p.m. Coliseum League game at Crenshaw is a big deal in the community.

Few images in Los Angeles history have had the impact--or ignited more raw emotion--than a grainy home video capturing Los Angeles police officers mercilessly beating a black motorist named Rodney G. King on March 3, 1991.

The El Royale apartment tower in Hancock Park, a magnet for celebrity tenants since the Jazz Age, has sold for nearly $30 million in what may be the largest price-per-unit sale in Los Angeles history. The 12-story building, at 450 N. Rossmore Ave., was built in 1929 for the Hollywood crowd, and early residents included Clark Gable, William Faulkner and Loretta Young. It was designed in a mix of Spanish and French Renaissance styles by the same architect who created the famous Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood.

The City of Angels has its share of saints, as artist J. Michael Walker is busily figuring out. This spring, he has embarked on a project to inventory 23 city streets named after holy men and women, then research the names, connecting them to specific events in Los Angeles history. He will focus on the northeastern part of the city, an area bounded roughly by Vermont Avenue, Soto Street, and Washington and Colorado boulevards.

A Los Angeles history conference Saturday turned into a scathing review of current events as scholars tied the Los Angeles school board's efforts to oust Supt. Ruben Zacarias to what they said was the historic disregard of the city's Latino roots and people.

There are at least two Los Angeles landscapes in the life of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. There is real-life L.A., through which he hustles daily, running late by afternoon as the pictures and autographs, the abrazos and the press of eager constituents pile up. And then there is the Los Angeles of his imagination, the city whose outlines he hints at in speeches and whose details spill out when he settles in long enough to ruminate.

The Gold Rush may have begun up north at Sutter's Mill, but it was in Los Angeles that the first discovery of California gold was made, six years earlier in 1842. Another little-known fact: The speed of light was first measured from Mt. Wilson to Mt. Baldy in an experiment that Albert Einstein described as one of the most significant of this century.

In the 1940s, Hollywood's glamorous movie industry suffered through more than a year of violent strikes that laid the foundation for the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, and for then-actor Ronald Reagan's conservative ideology and political future. In the 1930s, Los Angeles' original Chinatown was leveled to make room for Union Station, forcing the immigrant residents of that persecuted community to move and, without any compensation, start all over again.

Growing up in Philadelphia, I could hardly avoid history. Virtually every semester in grammar school, we would be packed on to buses to visit all the approved historical stops: the Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin's grave, Betsy Ross' house, then lunch and back to improper fractions. Southern California was different. When I first arrived in the 1960s, all I could see was the absence of the East, no overhanging past, no famous history. There were palm trees and open spaces, as well as a fair number of buildings.

The U.S. Forest Service has launched an internal inquiry into the agency's attack on the deadly Station fire, an operation that was scaled back the night before the blaze began to burn out of control. "With the significant loss of life, and impacts to the local community, we must determine the effectiveness of our efforts," Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell said in a written statement Wednesday. Tidwell said he would ask other agencies to participate in the review. But the Forest Service has declined to release detailed information about its response to the suspected arson fire, citing in part an ongoing homicide investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department into the deaths of two firefighters whose truck fell off a mountain road.

Imagine we could dismantle the skyscrapers on Bunker Hill and step back in time to the downtown Los Angeles that was. In place of soaring glass and steel, we find the squat wood frames of Victorian mansions and humble clapboard apartments hugging old palm trees. Studebakers and Fords with bulbous bodies and chrome ornaments glide down the streets, guzzling gas. Just about everyone smokes, including the down-on-his luck writer gazing out from his room at the Alta Loma Hotel.

To vote on your favorite, go to latimes.com/sports. ROY CAMPANELLA NIGHT It meant nothing, it was only an exhibition, but don't tell that to the record baseball crowd of 93,103 at the Coliseum that paid tribute to the paralyzed Hall of Fame catcher. DODGERS SWEEP YANKEES IN 1963 WORLD SERIES Sandy Koufax pitched two complete games, Don Drysdale pitched one and Johnny Podres went 8 1/3 innings in the other game. SANDY KOUFAX'S 1965 PERFECT GAME The Dodgers got only one hit against the Cubs, but it didn't factor in the run in the 1-0 victory at Dodger Stadium, the fourth no-hitter in as many years for Koufax.

After half a dozen women had testified, it was another mother's turn Tuesday to tell how the most prolific serial killer in Los Angeles history had devastated her life. "Are you the mother of Chester Turner?" "Yes, I am," said Audrey Turner, who seemed confused and overwhelmed through 59 minutes of testimony in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

CZECH NOVELIST Milan Kundera wrote that "the struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." A recent vote in a corner of the San Joaquin Valley threatens to marginalize the memory of a part of America's cultural inheritance: the only state park in California honoring contributions of African Americans. Last month, the Tulare County Board of Supervisors gave the go-ahead to build two huge dairies within a mile of Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.

On a clear, chilly December evening 30 years ago, Kenneth Olsen, head of the English department at Belmont High School, and his wife, Caroline, drove to Santa Monica's Lincoln Park tennis courts to meet another couple for a friendly doubles match. The courts on Wilshire Boulevard at Seventh Street were dark when the Olsens arrived about 8 p.m. Caroline went to the light meter to deposit a quarter. When she had trouble getting the meter to work, Kenneth went to help.

The annals of child kidnapping are replete with heartbreaking tragedies, but probably none have been quite as bizarre as the crime that first mesmerized, then convulsed, Los Angeles more than 70 years ago. By the time it was over, it would involve not only an apparent abduction, but also impersonation, police coercion, false imprisonment, psychiatric abuse and--this being Los Angeles--a court fight that stretched on for more than a decade.

THE best stories always seem to come at us sideways, while we are looking for something else. Thus, Daniel Hurewitz writes in his introduction to "Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics," "I did not set out to find Julian Eltinge. Instead, I stumbled across him while on a search for another man.... Harry Hay." In the early 1950s, Hay was a founder of the Mattachine Society, the first significant gay-rights organization in the United States.

Universal City, already the world's largest movie studio lot, would also become a major office and residential hub as part of a $3-billion development plan unveiled Wednesday by owner NBC Universal. Under the proposal, the historic studio would add a neighborhood with 2,900 homes and apartment units -- creating a new community at a time when large parcels of land for new housing are virtually unavailable within the urban core.