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.

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 \o7abrazos\f7 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.

Los Angeles, the city that isn't supposed to have a past, has suddenly become the darling of history scholars. Observers say record numbers of academics, working on dissertations, journal articles and mass-market histories, are scattered around Southern California, their labors aided by several improvements in archiving and historic preservation.

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.

Will F. Peck, H.V. Gentry and T.T. Roach certainly knew how to cement their place in Los Angeles history. The pioneer sidewalk builders proudly stamped their names on the city's walkways and street curbs when the concrete was being poured 70 years ago in Woodland Hills, Mar Vista and Echo Park. A million footsteps later, their handiwork endures. So does a bit of the history of the subdivisions that have shaped Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs. Thanks to J.A.

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.

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.

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.

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.