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Los Angeles appears to be about the surfaces, but it's really about the depths.
Los Angeles used iron to grow out, not up — the steel rails of trolley lines spawned countless suburbs.
In the 1850s-70s, an elaborately themed garden surrounded the town's most eccentric building, the Round House.
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If any one building material defined mid-20th-century Los Angeles, it was concrete.
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Only five percent of Los Angeles' old-growth redwood forests remain after exploitation.
The Dodgers then called home the cavernous Coliseum, which seated more than 92,000. They beat the White Sox four games to two.
Freeways once represented L.A.'s best hope for the future, as these photos illustrate.
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Wood, iron, steel, concrete -- these are the materials that gave form to Los Angeles and shaped its identity in the national imagination. This episode also questions the cultural legacy and environmental costs of the city's relentless growth.
California cut down 95% of its original coast redwood forest – much of it to build Los Angeles.
Long before concrete, iron enabled L.A. to enter the modern age.
The progress concrete once embodied seems today as brittle as some of its aging structures.
To the south of San Francisco lie the scattered remains of a vast redwood empire. This "Southern Redwood Empire" played a vital role in early California.