Alison Martino loves Los Angeles. The native Angeleno, and daughter of singer and “The Godfather” actor Al Martino, turned her love of the City of Angels into regular television segments, writing, producing, work as a historian and founder of the online community Vintage Los Angeles.
Martino said Vintage Los Angeles “started as a tribute to growing up in L.A.,” adding that she had no idea it would generate such a large following.
“People usually look for old boyfriends or girlfriends on Facebook. I just started the page where people could talk about places that are no longer here in Los Angeles. And in four months I had 10,000 followers,” she said.
She posts something on the page nearly every day.
One of her priorities has been preserving local architecture.
“I feel like it is my duty to call out developers,” she said. “I have a voice and I want to use that voice to help preserve properties and to help preserve architecture.”
For Martino, there’s a lot in the name Vintage Los Angeles. For starters, while she loves Hollywood and is often considered a historian on the area, she doesn’t want Vintage Los Angeles to just be known for Hollywood, hence “Los Angeles” and not “Hollywood” in its name.
And what makes something vintage? To Martino, its anything that came before 2000, which is the prior century.
“We didn’t have computers. We weren’t Googling in the ’90s much,” she said.
VLA, she added, was created not to show how great she thinks Los Angeles is, but to tell stories, to “document history and to understand our past.”
VLA has grown dramatically since it started in 2010. It now has 44 million Facebook impressions monthly.
Beyond social media, Martino is also a television personality, known for her work with Spectrum News.
She said she was “lucky” to have the platform.
She is also a columnist for Los Angeles Magazine and has been featured on ABC’s Eye on L.A., The Travel Channel, NPR, The Huffington Post, CurbedLA, The New York Times, and the nationally syndicated show The Insider.
Most of her revenue comes from hosting gigs and from branded Vintage Los Angeles merchandise.
She has given part of her proceeds to wildfire relief efforts and has filmed an episode about a classic eatery in Malibu that burned down.
Coming up, Martino plans to start a vintage photography gallery which will be ready by summer and write and produce a book focused on area relics, as well as launch a podcast this year.
Martino said it’s her passion to get people to “realize what is here and what is gone.”
“Vintage L.A. is an endless history book; you’re never going to know it all,” she added.
