Lost LA

Why did Los Angeles dismantle one of the greatest rail transit systems in the nation? Host Nathan Masters rides a restored streetcar with Southern California Railway Museum co-founder Harvey Laner.

Explore a forgotten age when winemaking was Southern California's principal industry. Host Nathan Masters picks grapes from the oldest vines in Los Angeles with Michael Holland at Villa Adobe.

Dig deep into Southern California's past to reveal lessons for our climate-changed future. Host Nathan Masters sifts through a natural archive of climate change with Emily Lindsey (Assistant Curator and Excavation Site Director at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum)and Sean Campbell (Preparator, Rancho La Brea).

Host Nathan Masters meets with Claudia Gordon to tour Villa Aurora, a Pacific Palisades house that hosted spirited literary salons.

Host Nathan Masters visits Kristen Hayashi, Ph.D., the collections manager at the Japanese American National Museum.

Californians have long fought over what Yosemite means, and how to manage it. Since its birth as a park and preserve in 1864, Yosemite has become a postcard for the natural beauty of California. Each year, millions visit from around the globe to see the cliffs, waterfalls and meadows that inspire wonder and reverence of the American West. This episode explores how Yosemite has changed over time: from a land maintained by indigenous peoples; to its emergence as a tourist attraction; to the site of conflict over humanity's relationship with nature.

One of California's great international exports has been its beach culture. This episode explores how surfers, bodybuilders, and acrobats taught Californians how to have fun and stay young at the beach—and how the 1966 documentary The Endless Summer shared the Southern California idea of the beach with the rest of the world.

California's deserts have sparked the imaginations of millions of people around the world. From the famously alien landscape of Joshua Tree to the wide expanses of seemingly empty land, the desert has been seen as a place of reinvention, a blank slate to create your dream. This episode explores how those dreams have led to the man-made natural disaster that created the Salton Sea; to the effort to preserve Joshua Tree National Park; and how commercial interests and real estate developers created desert utopias like Palm Springs.

Some California dreams succeeded, creating megalopolis regions in the state's north and south. Other dreams failed, leaving nothing but ruins. This episode explores three California ghost towns: Bodie, a Mono County gold mining settlement that was preserved in time; Llano Del Rio, a socialist utopian community in the Mojave Desert; and Zzyzx, a former health spa on the way to Las Vegas.

From its origins as a themed seaside resort to its international fame as a countercultural hub, Venice Beach boasts a rich, multilayered history. This episode explores Abbot Kinney's original Venice of America development; the community of Beat poets who called Venice home; and how the commercial renaissance along Abbot Kinney Boulevard has impacted the historically African-American neighborhood of Oakwood.

Los Angeles has long been the place where you can imagine something — any time period, any locale, ordinary or exotic, real or fantasy — and build it. It's a tradition that dates to the 1910s and 1920s, when early filmmakers built elaborately themed outdoor sets that often remained standing for months or years, inviting visitors. It found its fullest expression in nearby Anaheim, where Walt Disney's Imagineers created the intricately themed, immersive experience that is Disneyland.

American history has long been told as a triumphant march westward from the Atlantic coast, but in southern California, our history stretches back further in time. This episode explores the interconnected lives of three people who lived through California's transition from native land to Spanish colony and from to Mexican province to American state. Featuring the stories of native teacher Toypurina, who led the revolt against the San Gabriel Mission, Spanish soldier Jose Marco Pico, who served at the mission, and his son Pio Pico, who became the last Mexican Governor of California.

Long before Hollywood imagined the Wild West, Los Angeles was a real frontier town of gunslingers, lynch mobs, and smoke-belching locomotives. This episode examines L.A.'s efforts to reckon with its violent past by examining hanging trees, remnants of vigilante justice; the massacre of eighteen Chinese immigrants that took place in 1871 near what is now Olvera Street; and railroad promotional campaigns that painted a picture of Los Angeles as a verdant paradise.

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.

Los Angeles is often identified with Hollywood, but there's more to the entertainment industry than its facade of movie stars and blockbuster films. This episode explores the career of Lois Weber, a filmmaker who rose to greatness in a nascent film industry that welcomed women into creative leadership positions; as well as a Central Casting Bureau that capitalized on the city's segregated ethnic enclaves when filling background roles.

What if the stories L.A. told about itself relegated you to the margins? This episode explores two underground guidebooks -- The Negro Travelers' Green Book and The Address Book -- that reveal the hidden geographies many Angelenos had to navigate, exposing Los Angeles as a place of coded segregation and resistance.

Americans have long looked at the California shore and seen the end of the continent. Instead, this episode interprets that sandy edge as the beginning of a Pacific world — one that has long influenced Los Angeles through geology and climate, but also through the transoceanic flows of people, goods, technology, and cultural ideas.

The premiere episode unwraps the complicated relationship between the city and its natural environment. The program explores the origin of the Santa Ana winds, that infamous weather phenomenon that trigger allergies, fray nerves, and alarm fire-prone communities. The series also examines the demise of the grizzly bear in Southern California, an animal once revered by indigenous peoples but later targeted by Europeans as a threat to safety and security.

Long before Sandy Koufax threw Dodger Stadium's first pitch, and even before the first residents moved into Chavez Ravine, there were the Elysian Hills. Raised up by tectonic forces, and carved into deep ravines by the ancient precursor of the Los Angeles River, these hills have meant many things to many people. They were a refuge from floods for the region's native Tongva Indians, and then a source of quarried stone soon after the city fell under American sovereignty. This episode explores the various ways Southern California's inhabitants have used the hills around Dodger Stadium. The program looks at an old lithographic view of L.A. as drawn from an Elysian hilltop, the vanished neighborhood of Chavez Ravine, and a massive construction project that reshaped the land into a modern baseball palace.

It is often said that Los Angeles has buried much of its history. It has suppressed inconvenient reports, recast the plight of Mission Indians as a Spanish Romance, written entire cultures and communities out of its official historical narratives. But some of lost L.A. literally lies buried beneath our feet, hidden long ago when the city, finding the shape and character of its land wanting, opted to mold it to its needs. This episode examines how the modern metropolis has reshaped its own topography. The program explores downtown L.A.'s lost hills and tunnels, as well as the vanished canals of Venice Beach.