Adding a New Page to the Story of L.A.

They’re making history in a top-floor corner of an obscure city maintenance building in downtown Los Angeles.

Two dozen authors have spent months rifling through piles of dusty ledgers and brittle tract maps and rummaging among stacks of aging department reports and purchase orders.

Page by faded page, the researchers are tracing the evolution of municipal government in Los Angeles from its modest start in 1850 through the year 2000.

When they are finished, each will sit down to help write the story of how the city has grown from a sleepy pueblo to a global center.

With chapters devoted to every city department, the unusual history book will be the first of its kind for Los Angeles when it is completed next year.

It will also showcase the city’s obscure municipal archives--a collection of minutiae and municipal meeting minutes that paints an unexpectedly colorful portrait of an emerging metropolis.

Officials say the book is also likely to puncture more than a few myths about Los Angeles and those who have governed the place since its founding.

“The city’s history will be rewritten by what these people are finding here,” said Hynda Rudd, the city’s records management officer. She also serves as president of the private, nonprofit Los Angeles City Historical Society, which is sponsoring the project.

It was Rudd’s idea for a book outlining the city government’s growth.

“I’m sick and tired of this being considered La-La Land,” she said. “There’s a serious aspect to this city and its roots. I feel that the government deserves to have its story told--the truth. And the truth comes out of the archives.”

Rudd works at the Piper Technical Center, a hulking maintenance center next to downtown’s Santa Ana Freeway. It houses repair facilities for city cars and for communications equipment and is the home of the Police Department’s helicopter fleet. It is also the site of a gymnasium-sized, temperature- and humidity-controlled vault that protects Los Angeles’ most important public records.

Some of those documents date from 1827.

“This municipality has probably the finest collection of city records in the country,” Rudd said. “We have had really good city clerks. By virtue of the city charter, all of these records have been kept.”

To get the writing project going, Rudd’s historical society recruited authors who have written about Southern California and scholars with knowledge about such fields as municipal finance.

The authors are being paid $1,500 for each chapter they write. Those fees and other costs are underwritten by a $65,000 grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, an organization created by a 1920s-era Los Angeles philanthropist that funds public policy research.

The historical society is in talks with several publishing houses. Rudd said the book will be in general circulation, as well as in libraries and schools.

The city archives are filled with surprises along with musty documents, the researchers are discovering.

“The authors working here are amazed by what they are finding. Some of the historians are in tears with what they are finding. It’s material that they never knew existed,” Rudd explained.

One surprise involves former Mayor Sam Yorty--whose conservative, Populist administration in the 1960s and early ‘70s is generally perceived to have pandered to white Valley voters.

But documents show that Yorty actively fought for inner-city improvements, said Martin Schiesl, a Cal State Los Angeles history professor who is writing the book’s chapter on housing and redevelopment.

“It tells me he was very concerned about the plight of low-income housing. Yorty was arguing for federal funding; it’s surprising. He was mayor in one of the most critical periods of city history. His policies were thoughtful and showed a lot of planning,” Schiesl said.

“There is no scholarly biography of Yorty. And he deserves one.”

Another misconception that the history book may change is that Los Angeles was insular until World War II dragged it onto the world scene, according to Suzanne Borghei, a history professor at Santa Monica College who is researching the city government’s international influence.

Records show that officials moved to build an international seaport in the 1850s. And America’s first international air meet was held here in 1910.

And Los Angeles was a pioneer in social services, discovered Frances Feldman, a retired USC professor of social work who is writing the chapter on human services.

The city was reimbursing citizens for taking care of sick strangers in 1850, Feldman found. By 1905 the city had set up a nursing bureau to deal with health needs of youngsters in schools and children of working mothers. Day care centers were being run by the city in 1918.

City fire officials were forward-looking about opening new stations as the city grew, but had mixed feelings about trading in fire horses for motorized trucks, found researcher Todd Gaydowski, a city records analyst who is handling the Fire Department chapter.

“The Fire Department would publish obituaries of fire horses when they died,” said Gaydowski--whose next phase of research involves the racial integration of the department.

Matthew Roth, a historian for the Automobile Club of Southern California, is writing about transportation. He said the archives reveal that the city’s street construction was often compromised by fierce arm-wrestling between professional planners and angry property owners.

Michael Eberts, a Glendale College professor of mass communications who is writing the recreation and parks chapter, found that parkland has often been an afterthought in Los Angeles.

But records show that early recreation leaders were activists--providing showers for transients and municipal vacation camps for poor families.

Other authors and their subjects include: James Ingram III of UC San Diego, the city charter; Xandra Kayden of UCLA, reform movements and civic groups; USC’s Philip Ethington, population, geography and annexations; Cal State Fullerton’s Lawrence de Graaf, race and immigration; University of Maryland criminologist Sandra Bass, the Police Department; UC San Diego’s Steven Erie, the harbor and airport departments; and UCLA’s Leonard Pitt, neighborhood impacts.

An editorial board of other historians and educators is overseeing the writing project. Board member Gloria Ricci Lothrop--a Cal State Northridge history professor who is handling the chapter on social issues--predicted the book will not only be encyclopedic but also “will have plenty of life to it.”

The project has already started bringing history to life for one group of college students. They are enrolled in USC history professor Greg Hise’s classes. Hise is writing the chapter on city planning.

As early as 1890, residents were petitioning City Hall about such things as location of slaughterhouses and the number of farm animals that were allowed to be moved along city streets.

“It was 19th century NIMBY-ism,” said Hise. “I’d never seen those petitions before. It was an eye-opener. I’m already using what I’ve found in my school work.”