Nathan Masters
Nathan Masters is host and executive producer of Lost L.A., an Emmy Award-winning public television series from KCET and the USC Libraries. The show explores how rare artifacts from Southern California's archives can unlock hidden and often-surprising stories from the region's past. Nathan’s writing has appeared in many publications, including Los Angeles Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. He also helps manage public programs and media initiatives at the USC Libraries, home to the L.A. as Subjectresearch consortium.
In the late 1800s, Southern California's first amusement parks offered visitors up-close encounters with an ornithological curiosity: the ostrich.
The site of Dodger Stadium was once home to the thriving Mexican-American community of Chavez Ravine.
The freeway planners drew lines straight through established residential communities, with houses and local businesses along the freeway route no more an obstacle than existing surface streets or water mains.
Today, most of L.A.'s streams have been paved over, buried and converted into storm drains, or eliminated from the landscape altogether.
In June 1943, L.A. witnessed sailors coursing through the city streets in their Navy uniforms, carrying sticks and targeting anyone wearing a zoot suit.
In 1896, Griffith J. Griffith gave Los Angeles 3,015 acres to create "a place of recreation and rest for the masses."
There was a time when, far from being a defining characteristic of the city's landscape, freeways were merely an experimental impulse of traffic engineers.
A look back at Los Angeles' two turns in the Olympic spotlight.
In 1924, the downtown L.A. intersection of Seventh Street and Broadway was the busiest in the world with 504,000 people crossing those streets each day.
The transportation hub has hardly stood still since it emerged from the bean fields of Westchester in the late 1920s.
Bridges tame the Southern California landscape for freight trains, light rail vehicles, and millions of private automobiles.
Recently rediscovered photos shed new light on Bunker Hill, a downtown Los Angeles neighborhood razed in the name of urban renewal.