Long Beach

#223: Rancho Los Alamitos (Long Beach)

#223: Rancho Los Alamitos (Long Beach)

August 6, 2024
Native Americans
Rancho Los Alamitos compresses 150+ years of Los Angeles history into a single site. It went from Tongva village and sacred site, to Spanish land grant, to Yankee cattle and sheep ranch, to the center of a massive agricultural operation, and now a beautifully-preserved educational site, open to the public for free.
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#149: Killingsworth, Brady & Smith Office (Long Beach)

#149: Killingsworth, Brady & Smith Office (Long Beach)

April 25, 2023
Architecture
Long Beach architect Edward Killingsworth honed the mid-century modern aesthetic into 3D poetry, creating sanctuaries out of right angles, high ceilings, open plans, expansive glass and natural light.  One of the purest distillations of his design philosophy can be seen in the office he designed for his own firm in 1955.
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#130: Jennie A. Reeve House (Greene & Greene – Long Beach)

#130: Jennie A. Reeve House (Greene & Greene – Long Beach)

December 15, 2022
Architecture
This 1904 commission in Long Beach was a significant one for architects Charles & Henry Greene, because it integrated so many of the creative features that they had experimented with but never harmonized into a single building. Their approach here pointed the way to later masterpieces like the Gamble House, Blacker House and Thorsen House.
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#125: Los Cerritos Ranch House (Long Beach)

#125: Los Cerritos Ranch House (Long Beach)

November 6, 2022
Pioneers & Settlers
Built in 1844 by a yankee-turned-Mexican named John Temple, this house in Long Beach was the largest adobe built in southern California during the period when SoCal was controlled by Mexico. Its layered history tells LA’s transition from barren ranch land, to prosperous agricultural paradise, to a network of subdivisions that eventually coalesced into separate cities. You read into its history the story of Los Angeles becoming itself.

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