L.A. is known for a lot of unique things: Our people and communities, our food, our entertainment scenes, our beautiful hikes and access to nature.
But one thing we’re not really that known for — or may know about — is our rich historical architecture.
Yes, we have a nice list of Victorian and Queen Anne homes in Angelino Heights, beautiful examples of art deco in downtown and craftsman homes in Mid City, but a lot of beautiful buildings have been knocked down and paved over, largely in the name progress (i.e. 10 Freeway, L.A Civic Center).
But many of our earliest street lights still stand; actually they may be the oldest thing in any neighborhood.
“When you’re standing here and you’re looking at an old streetlight from the 1920s, there’s a really good chance that it’s the oldest thing in your field of view,” says writer, historian and streetlamp enthusiast India Mandelkern. “It’s older than the road, older than the buildings. They really do connect us to the past.”
Mandelkern wrote a book centered about the city’s streetlights, “Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles.”
We have a special history and diversity of designs of our street lights that go back to the late 1800s.
“There is something that’s almost a little bit sacred about an old streetlight,” she says. “They’re these modern totems that represented the collective aspirations of our communities.”
Street light history
Mandelkern began her journey into her “street light safari” — what she calls the exploration of street lamps — during her time as a fellow at LACMA. She created a zine that highlighted Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” public art, which led her to more research about the city’s street lighting. She also credits the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting as helpful in all her history gathering.
In her book, before digging into the actual lamps and architecture, she notes that the Chumash and Tongva tribes have always looked to the lights of the sky — the sun and the stars — to guide them, already making the Los Angeles region a unique place.
As the region became more urbanized and more populated around the turn of the last century, there’d sometimes be no buildings or paved roads, but at least there’d be light.
“If you look at these early advertisements for various subdivisions around L.A., they’ll often call out the fact that they have street lights in addition to… concrete paved roads,” Mandelkern notes. “Street lights were very much part of the advertisement as a modern residential neighborhood.”
Before lamps went electric, they were gas powered and unreliable. They had to be turned on manually and would blow out with gusts of wind.
The first electric lights hit the L.A. streets in 1882. The progress of electricity was “important in making L.A. a quintessentially modern and progressive city,” Mandelkern says.
And, of course, there was a shift in street lighting in L.A. as cars became the dominant mode of transportation. You might notice some lights point toward the road instead of centering the pedestrian experience on the sidewalk. Other…
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