On Wilshire, L.A. came to life

ONE of the things I love about Los Angeles is that this is a city where history is right at hand. You can see it, touch it, smell it; the past is not distant so much as it is just below the surface, almost at the level of conscious memory. In “Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles” (Angel City Press: 208 pp., $40), Kevin Roderick, with researcher J. Eric Lynxwiler, uses this proximity to suggest that the story of Wilshire Boulevard is in many ways the story of L.A.

It’s a compelling argument because, like a lot of Southern California, Wilshire Boulevard grew out of elaborate ambitions and pedestrian origins. Named for entrepreneur Henry Gaylord Wilshire, who in 1890 “became the first candidate to run for Congress as a Socialist,” the boulevard was once a 1,200-foot-long passage through a barley field -- until the city began its expansion west.

To emphasize that sense of movement, Roderick (a former editor and writer at The Times, who runs the website LAObserved) organizes his book geographically, with chapters that extend from Wilshire Center and Park Mile to Westwood and Holmby Hills and the Pacific. Equally important, he reproduces hundreds of images, including one from 1895 billed as the “earliest known photograph of the Wilshire Boulevard Tract,” as well as shots of landmarks such as the Brown Derby and the Ambassador Hotel in their prime or, as with Bullocks Wilshire, under construction -- vivid reminders of how recent much of L.A. history is. If, as Roderick claims, Wilshire Boulevard is the spine of Los Angeles, one of America’s great municipal landscapes, then this book is a work of urban anthropology, a record of how the city has evolved.

-- David L. Ulin