Los Angeles Before the Freeways: Images of an Era 1850–1950

An update of a hard-to-find classic published in 1981, this collection of Hylen’s (1908–87) black-and-white photographs of downtown Los Angeles, with new content by Nathan Marsak (Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill), documents a vanished cityscape. The already scant historical record would be even barer if not for Hylen’s idiosyncratic project. With an attentive eye, he roamed Los Angeles during a transitional moment in the city’s history, the late 1940s to the late 1960s. His photos of architecture built starting in the 1850s, taken decades after these buildings’ heyday, illustrate the fall from grace of dozens of elegant 19th-century structures that once defined the Los Angeles urban core and adjacent Bunker Hill residential neighborhood. Designed for business elites and affluent shoppers and tourists, much of this architecture had been repurposed downward, by the time Hylen made the photos, as single-room occupancy hotels, sites for light manufacturing, and modest cafés and shops. The photographs are accompanied by an engaging and detailed essay by Hyland, which traces the forces driving Los Angeles’s redevelopment, including the decline of the old Californian aristocracy, the waning of train travel, the ascendance of the automobile, and the expansion of the city government, as demanded by the ever-growing metropolis.