Images of L.A.’s Real Treasure

In the end, it is our people more than our buildings that distinguish Los Angeles.

To be sure, there are buildings of transcendent architectural value here, more in fact than usually acknowledged. The Art Deco masterpiece that was once Bullock’s Wilshire always comes to mind, along with Griffith Observatory and the Wiltern Theater. There are also structures of historical interest like the Spanish missions and the Bradbury Building. But buildings in which occurred the sort of momentous historical events that mark Philadelphia’s Independence Hall or Faneuil Hall in Boston? Of those we have few.

What we have instead in Los Angeles are historical riches of a different sort. We may at times link our past to specific buildings, but these were merely the backdrops for a story that draws its historical power from its repetition: waves of migration from every corner of the world, yielding inexorably to assimilation. This is the story now being told in two imaginative projects.

As part of “Mapping Boyle Heights,” a Getty Research Institute endeavor, students at Roosevelt High School are studying the cultures that once dominated but have since faded from their communities. The students’ research is reflected in murals, poetry and maps that they have created.

“Before, I thought Boyle Heights was about gangster life,” said one student. “Now I see it differently, like it’s an old community.” That it is, in the last century housing Jewish immigrants, Japanese, Russians, Armenians, Italians and Chinese before taking on its current Mexican American character. Traces of the previous residents are visible in a Buddhist temple, a clothing store, a Baptist church. These buildings were the settings for ordinary lives of struggle and, often, of dignity.

That’s also the point of the Los Angeles Public Library’s massive photography project, “Shades of L.A.: A Search for Visual Community History.” A sampling of the 10,000 images contributed from family photo albums is now on display in the Central Library downtown.

Some city landmarks are recognizable in the pictures, dating back as far as the late 1800s. But this exhibit focuses on people: Two Mexican American brothers, proudly posing in their L.A. police reserve officer uniforms in 1945; Norwegian-born factory workers horsing around during a break in 1928; the Italian American proprietors at the Union Bar, 3rd and Central, in 1910; the daughter of Holocaust survivors on the sunny patio of their home in 1961; a mother and child on a Venice canal in 1908.

Individually, these snapshots and formal portraits are like those in everyone’s family album. Collectively, they attest to the vitality that this city has so long drawn from its extraordinary people.