Window on Past in Need of Repairs

On quiet afternoons at the Charles F. Lummis Home, when the phones stop ringing, Tom Andrews sometimes slips into a musty, low-ceilinged adobe on the grounds and looks through thousands of pictures that take him back in time.

Andrews is director of the Historical Society of Southern California, which is based in the 106-year-old house on Avenue 43 in Highland Park. His cache is a rich but badly neglected collection of about 10,000 photographs and negatives depicting more than a century of California life.

Now the collection is about to get the attention it sorely needs. The Historical Society has received $7,500 from a Pasadena organization called Associated Foundations and more than $10,000 in contributions from members of the historical society.

The money will help pay for the preservation of the photographs and negatives, and enable the society to establish staffed public hours for use of the collection.

The collection encompasses thousands of pictures dating from 1870 to just a few years ago. It includes images of prospectors searching for gold, of postmen on their rounds in the small towns that made up Los Angeles, of buildings that were later destroyed and of some of Los Angeles’ most distinctive buildings as they were being built.

“As a historian, I enjoy coming in here, closing the door behind me and quietly getting a chance to observe a different era, in a sense, and just study it,” Andrews said.

The collection was built slowly and almost by chance from a series of donations to the Historical Society over the years, Andrews said.