On the Shelf
Los Angeles Earlier than the Freeways: Photographs of An Period 1850-1950
By Arnold Hylen with Nathan MarsakAngel Metropolis Press: 192 pages, $45If you purchase books linked on our website, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help impartial bookstores.
Not lengthy after his arrival in Los Angeles three many years in the past, Nathan Marsak purchased a 1949 Packard, the form of automobile finest suited to old-timey gangsters and detectives, not an architectural historian who left Wisconsin to maneuver to the town of his goals. However he wished to stay “the L.A. noir life,” he says, and no different automobile appeared extra acceptable.
“The L.A. bug just bit me. I wanted to look for the world of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and I did,” he says. “I drove my Packard around, looking for signs of the old, decrepit, dissolute Los Angeles, and I found it in spades. I had lots of adventures.”
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
From the outdated fits he wears to the massive Highland Park home the place he lives together with his household, Marsak has a deep affection for classic issues. (He does have an iPhone, although, and his spouse did discuss him right into a microwave — however the design needed to be retro.) Marsak’s affection for the previous extends to Arnold Hylen, a solitary, mild-mannered Swedish émigré, whose e-book of mid-Twentieth century images and an essay about outdated Los Angeles, “Los Angeles Before the Freeways 1850-1950: Images of an Era,” was lately reissued by Angel Metropolis Press in a brand new version curated and expanded by Marsak.
Not merely a facsimile, the brand new version has been augmented with further textual content, notes, recent layouts and extra Hylen images of an outdated metropolis on the verge of being swallowed up by the brand new — a technique of cultural erasure that crops up in lots of criticisms of Los Angeles as a superficial place with no deep sense of itself. Marsak disagrees — form of.
“It’s deserved, and it’s undeserved,” he says. “I’ve been all over, and it’s unfair to pick on Los Angeles alone. But I think the city’s been an easy target just because we’ve had so many high-profile losses of distinctive architecture here. That stands out in people’s minds. Hylen was certainly aware of those losses and they worried him. If they hadn’t, I don’t think he would’ve felt an obsessive drive to chronicle the old city.”
A banner throughout seventh Avenue, trying west at Figueroa Avenue, welcomes Atlanta’s Yaarab Shrine to the Shriner’s Conference in 1950. The Samsonite constructing, left, initially a Hellman Financial institution, was torn down for a Union Oil service station in 1956.
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
Arthur Hylen, pictured in 1955, started photographing the town throughout World Conflict II.
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
Hylen lived a quiet bachelor life, Marsak says, and by no means imagined his images would someday be amongst these by William Reagh, Leonard Nadel, Theodore Seymour Corridor and Virgil Mirano. He was born in 1908 and arrived in Vermont from Sweden when he was nonetheless a child, relocating to Southern California together with his household in 1917. As a teen he studied artwork on the Chouinard Artwork Institute in L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood and located work in World Conflict II as a photographer and designer of gross sales supplies and commerce present displays for Fluor Corp., an oil and gasoline engineering and development agency.
As he photographed refineries, his eyes opened to the encompassing metropolis. As Marsak describes within the e-book’s introduction, he’d “spend the day walking the streets, camera in hand, which fed his interest in the fast-disappearing downtown area, Bunker Hill in particular.”
“I think he knew the value absolutely of what he was doing for himself and other like-minded spirits,” Marsak says, “but I don’t think he knew what to do with the photos.”
Mason Opera Home, 125-127 S. Broadway, opened in 1903, and by the point of this circa 1951 picture was a Spanish-language movie and vaudeville venue.
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
Fortunately, Glen Dawson did. An iconic determine in L.A.’s literary panorama, Dawson used his small press to publish two books of Hylen’s images. Marsak realized about them (because of an enthusiastic barfly he encountered in an L.A. dive) and located each within the used bookstores as soon as present on sixth Avenue: “Bunker Hill: A Los Angeles Landmark” (1976) and “Los Angeles Before the Freeways,” the latter revealed not lengthy earlier than Hylen’s 1987 dying. Marsak spent a few years persuading the photographer’s relations to promote him the rights to republish Hylen’s work — promoting his beloved Packard to fund that buy.
Share by way of Shut additional sharing choices
Los Angeles Earlier than the Freeways was initially revealed in 1981, then went out of print.
Marsak’s dedication has paid off: “Los Angeles Before the Freeways” is an engrossing assortment of black-and-white photographs of a metropolis by which outdated adobe constructions sit between Italianate workplace buildings or peek out from behind outdated indicators, elegant houses teeter on the sting of steep hillsides, and routes lengthy utilized by locals would quickly be demolished to make room for freeways. These photographs are accompanied by Hylen’s book-length essay, which runs like a documentarian’s voice-over all through the gathering.
The unique Los Angeles Excessive Faculty was demolished in 1949 to make means for the Hollywood Freeway.
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
A view of the Hollywood Freeway below development circa 1952
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
Two notable adjustments for this version: Extra images and the choice to make use of Hylen’s uncropped images, which offer a richer sense of locale and extra images. There have been 116 images within the unique e-book; Marsak went by way of Hylen’s negatives and located extra images, leading to 143 photographs within the new version.
Marsak provides an introductory essay and a useful information to the various architectural types belonging to L.A.’s previous. His footnotes and captions additionally improve our understanding of the images: In some circumstances, he makes use of them to appropriate some false claims that Hylen makes in his essay (as an example, {that a} lengthy stone trough on Olvera Avenue was a Gabrielino relic when actually it was really created by a neighborhood rancher).
The Bur-Mar Resort positioned at 514 S. Figueroa St. turned a parking zone in 1957, whereas the Richfield Tower, in-built 1929, was demolished in 1968 for the ARCO towers venture together with the remainder of the constructions on the block.
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
There aren’t any particular results or gimmicks to Hylen’s images, no staging or posed imagery — he lets these forgotten edifices communicate for themselves. They vary from the magnificent, Romanesque detailing of the Stimson Block (the town’s first giant steel-frame skyscraper on Figueroa Avenue) to the multi-gabled, Queen Anne allure of the Melrose, a house constructed on Bunker Hill by a retired oilman.
The Natick Resort constructing at 1st and Fundamental was initially constructed as a part of an workplace constructing in 1882 and changed into a resort in 1884. It was torn right down to turn out to be a parking zone in 1950.
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
Sometimes, although, Hylen’s lens does give us one thing a bit extra impressionistic and emblematic of his thesis about L.A.’s vanishing historical past. Take, for instance, a photograph of the Paris Inn on East Market Avenue. The little French-style inn, which opened in 1930, stands in sharp aid within the foreground whereas Metropolis Corridor hovers like a faint ghost within the background, suggesting {that a} extra trendy model of L.A. is on the verge of materializing out of skinny air.
Nathan Marsak bought his classic Packard to assist finance the reissue of “Los Angeles Before the Freeways,” which incorporates beforehand unpublished images.
(Angel Metropolis Press on the Los Angeles Public Library)
For Marsak, who spends his time researching outdated L.A., giving lectures, serving as an Angels Flight operator and dealing with native preservationist teams, Hylen’s work fills an vital hole in L.A.’s previous. He hopes readers, particularly Angelenos, will come away with a deeper appreciation for his or her metropolis.
“There’s a saying that when something’s gone, it’s gone for good, and 98% of the stuff in this book is gone,” he stated. “Anyone who looks at this book probably already has a preservationist impulse, but if they don’t, if I can light the preservation fire under at least one of them, all the hard work will have been worth it. I really hope seeing this work will make Angelenos think more about their own neighborhoods. I think Hylen would appreciate that.”
