A Brief History of
the
Los Angeles Regional
Planning History Group
By the late 1970s the
historical legacy of land use planning in the Los Angeles region in the form
of major plans and other documents was disappearing at an alarming rate.
Documents that comprised the framework of pivotal events in city and regional
planning were being lost to an overwhelming lack of storage space and the
diminishing archival priorities of local governments. Concerned planners from
agencies such as the City of Los Angeles and County of Los Angeles and
archivists from the Huntington Library gathered informally in the early 1980s
to establish a strategy for preservation and education. From this emerged the
Los Angeles Regional Planning History Group (LARPHG).
LARPHG was incorporated in 1984 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to
preserving municipal, county, and private sector planning documents from
throughout Los Angeles County. Over the past 20 years thousands of documents
have been collected, catalogued and housed at the Huntington Library for easy
research access. LARPHG has also pursued a collaborative effort with UCLA to
record oral histories of leading veterans of the planning profession and
development field to document what “really happened”—the pressures, the
politics, and the methods used to plan the Los Angeles region. To date, five
extensive oral histories have been completed. Oral histories soon to be
completed include Norman Murdoch, former Los Angeles County Planning Director,
and Melville Branch, Ph.D. emeritus professor, University of Southern
California.
The
completed oral histories include:
-
General William J. Fox,
Chief Engineer and Director of Planning (1923-1947) and County Engineer, Los
Angeles County (1947-1955)
-
Milton Breivogel,
Director of Planning, Los Angeles County (1953-1967)
-
Simon Eisner, planning
consultant to many cities and counties in the Los Angeles region
-
Calvin Hamilton,
Director of Planning, City of Los Angeles (1964-1986)
-
Edward Holden, planner
with Los Angeles County and founding Director of the Southern California
Association of Governments (SCAG)
Education is a major theme in the LARPHG mission. To facilitate active
learning about planning in the Los Angeles region, the Huntington Library has
hosted numerous well-attended conferences featuring experts on major aspects
of planning in the Los Angeles region. The panels of experts have ranged from
urbanists, historians and planning educators to planning directors and private
sector developers. Topics have ranged from transportation and
industrialization to the role of developers and plans such as the
Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan in shaping the Los Angeles region. Transcripts of
many of these conferences have been prepared and are available at The
Huntington Library.
The
conferences conducted include:
-
1985 – Planning
Retrospective 1950-1985
-
1987 – Building the
Los Angeles Region (developers and builders discussed their roles in
shaping the landscape of the Los Angeles region)
-
1988 – Mobility in
Southern California (historians and planners discussed the role of
transportation and infrastructure projects as well as lifestyle preferences
have shaped the Los Angeles region)
-
1993 – Changing
Cities: Learning from the History of Development in Southern California
(historians, academics, and planners discussed the planning implications of
local and regional change over time for three of Los Angeles’s three oldest
cities, Pasadena, Pomona, and Long Beach)
-
1997 – The Industrialization of the Los Angeles Region: The Twentieth
Century Record and Lessons for the Twenty-first Century
-
2001 – Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los
Angeles Region
-
2004 - The Entertainment Industry — City Building and the Development of
Southern California
-
2006
-
Shaping Southern California: Transportation &
Water
Members of the LARPHG Board of Directors are those responsible for its origin,
mission, and continuing activities. A Who’s Who list of Los Angeles region
planning leaders has comprised the Board over the last twenty years.
Unfortunately, founding champions Edward Holden passed away in 2003, as did
Calvin Hamilton and Milton Breivogel in years earlier, yet their insights
remain as a legacy of the preservation and education mission they initiated
with LARPHG.
How to Support
the LARPHG
To become a supporter
of the LARPHG, please
visit our
Friends
page.
