Long before Los Angeles became a center of culture, commerce, technology, and reinvention, Henry E. Huntington saw what it might become.
When Huntington settled in L.A., the population of Los Angeles County was only 170,000. But Huntington, who brought experience in railroads, real estate, utilities and finance, saw in the region’s landscape the outline of a future metropolis. He believed L.A. was destined to become “the most important city in this country, if not the world.”
He helped to make it so, in part, through transit. Huntington and his associates expanded the Los Angeles Railway downtown and, in 1901, formed the Pacific Electric Railway, the celebrated Red Car system that connected L.A. to outlying communities across Southern California. In laying track, Huntington was not only moving people. He was making a metropolitan region imaginable.
Working alongside him was William May “Billy” Garland, Huntington’s real estate broker, who later led L.A.’s successful campaign to host the 1932 Olympic Games. Garland’s pursuit helped transform L.A. from an ambitious Western city into a place capable of presenting itself to the world.
As L.A. prepares for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and as the U.S. marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to ask not only what this city has built, but whose histories made that building possible. Cultural organizations have a vital role to play in that work: preserving and sharing the layered histories that reveal L.A.’s contributions to the nation.
At The Huntington, our library, art and botanical collections invite us to study, interpret and reflect on the stories that have shaped L.A. and the nation.
We are exploring this larger story through THIS LAND IS …, our multiyear initiative reflecting on America at 250, through the lens of land, anchored by an exhibition of the same name.
From the West, the nation’s founding comes into wider view – not only through the original 13 colonies and the Declaration of Independence, but also through longer histories of lands. Across our collections, the initiative considers land not only as territory, but as beauty, memory, labor and conflict – as common and contested ground. And across The Huntington’s broader holdings, we see repeatedly how the story of L.A. has been shaped by many communities and forms of civic life.
One part of that story is the capacity of generations of Angelenos to imagine and build the future. Huntington helped shape Southern California through transit and infrastructure. Garland’s Olympic campaign helped establish L.A. as a global city. The Huntington’s collections include materials related to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the 1932 Olympic Games, reminding us that hosting the world is a civic act – one that reveals what a city values and whom it includes.
Another part of L.A.’s history lies in the families and communities whose labor and creativity made the region possible in other ways.
Consider a 1928 panoramic photograph of the Kuromi family cultivating flowers off Los Feliz Boulevard. On view in “This Land Is …,” the image tells the story of a Japanese American family that built a successful flower business, was uprooted by the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and rebuilt after the war. Their story belongs in the social and economic history of L.A.: a history of agriculture, entrepreneurship, displacement, resilience, and memory.
That broader responsibility is also evident in our archives, which hold records of La Prensa and La Opinión – the latter now the country’s most-read Spanish-language print newspaper. Founded and managed by the Lozano family, their documents, newspaper volumes, photographs and family correspondence preserve more than a publishing enterprise. They show how generations of Angelenos found information, built businesses, debated public life, sustained community and claimed a voice in the city’s civic identity.
If newspapers help us understand how communities speak themselves into public life, artists and writers help us see the land – and one another – anew. On view in “Borderlands” in our American art galleries, the work of Southern California artists Laura Aguilar, Sandy Rodriguez and Mercedes Dorame brings distinct perspectives on body, land, Indigenous presence, cultural memory and the natural world.
That same power of imagination has shaped L.A.’s relationship to the future. Southern California helped power the aerospace industry that made space exploration possible. At The Huntington, we hold extensive aerospace archives, including materials from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as the papers of Octavia E. Butler, the Pasadena-born speculative fiction writer who imagined futures beyond Earth to explore human survival, community, and adaptation. In a notebook documenting the Apollo 11 moon landing, on view in “Stories from the Library: The Mirror of the Moon,” Butler followed the event meticulously as it unfolded on television, recording times and data and transcribing Neil Armstrong’s first words from the moon. Decades later, NASA recognized Butler’s influence by naming Perseverance rover’s Mars landing site “Octavia E. Butler Landing.” Together, these holdings remind us that imagination is one of L.A.’s most consequential resources.
To be sure, L.A.’s economic achievements are extraordinary. Its industries and business community have made the city a global force. But a city’s influence is also measured by the stories it chooses to preserve and the communities it recognizes as central to its history.
That standard applies to cultural institutions, too. In 1919, through a trust indenture, Henry and Arabella Huntington transformed their private estate, with its library and art collections, into an institution “to promote and advance learning, the arts and sciences … and the public welfare.” As part of both our research and public missions, we continue to examine our own history – not only the prescient vision of the Huntingtons, but also the people whose labor helped shape our institution.
The work of preservation involves the work of reinterpretation as well. Natalia Molina, historian, MacArthur Fellow and former research fellow at The Huntington, is writing a book that uses archival fragments and oral histories to trace the lives of immigrant gardeners who helped shape the institution as they worked on its land. THIS LAND IS … asks us to look deeply – both literally and figuratively – not only at the city L.A. has built, but at the land and lives that formed its foundation.
As the nation marks its 250th anniversary and L.A. prepares to welcome the world in 2028, the question is not only how the city will greet visitors or demonstrate economic vitality. It is what histories we are willing to claim – and what kind of future we want to model.
Karen Lawrence is the president of The Huntington, a cultural institution located in San Marino.
