Also on View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles shines a light on an incredible wealth of stories that lie just beyond the well-beaten path.

For those who love to wander through the corridors of culture and history, this book is an essential guide to the vibrant and wonderfully eclectic museum landscape that makes Los Angeles truly one-of-a-kind.--Flaunt Magazine

The African American Miniature Museum. The Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. The Skid Row History Museum. The Finnish Folk Art Museum. The First Original McDonald's Museum. The Museum of Jurassic Technology...

Also On View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles celebrates LA's most fascinating and underappreciated collections, from the deeply culturally significant--such as the Garifuna Museum--to the highly specific and unusual, like the City of Los Angeles's Streetlight Museum. There are more than 750 museums in the greater Los Angeles area, many of which lie beyond the beaten path and may not be familiar to even the most seasoned explorers. With striking photographs and a staggering range of critical, curious, and incredible histories, Also On View presents an unparalleled survey of all the diversity and wonder that Los Angeles has to offer.

Keep your mind and your camera open and book your next expedition using this invaluable guide. -- Los Angeles magazine

Fifty years of the Vietnamese Diaspora as seen through the New Wave movement, showing how young Vietnamese refugees in Orange County found rebellion and reinvention through music, fashion, and community.

As Vietnamese refugees sought safety in the United States in the wake of the fall of Saigon, a generation of Vietnamese teenagers and young adults struggled to adjust to a new life in America. Many of these young people in Southern California found a new life and a new identity in New Wave music, a type of Euro Disco that became enormously popular in this community. New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora celebrates the rebellion, reinvention, and rebirth of joy in this young generation in cultural limbo. Featuring essays from prominent Vietnamese scholars, critics, and stars, New Wave explores how music, fashion, and rebellion can be a force for healing. New Wave is a love letter to the first generation of Vietnamese punks and rebels who came of age in the 1980s.

More Accolades:

Elizabeth Ai's New Wave showcases the bold spirit of Vietnamese punk rock through heartfelt storytelling. This visual journey delves deep into a vibrant subculture, offering a compelling exploration of the immigrant experience through the power of cultural expression. - Simu Liu, author of We Were Dreamers, actor, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Barbie

What does it mean for Asian Americans to belong to ourselves? New Wave is a dazzling collection of stories, strategies, and histories both personal and collective that explores this question. As a student of Asian American art and history, I'm so moved by this vibrant archive that Elizabeth and her team have painstakingly put together. The joy, longing, and ingenuity in these pages will hold you, heal you, and move you. This is a body of work I will study and cherish. - Jezz Chung, multidisciplinary artist and author of This Way to Change: A Gentle Guide to Personal Transformation and Collective Liberation

So much of Vietnamese history remains undiscussed on a wider cultural level, and in New Wave, Elizabeth Ai illuminates some of our punk rock past. I laughed, I cried, I learned -- and most importantly -- I began to heal. - Kelly Marie Tran, actress, Star Wars: The Last Jedi; The Rise of Skywalker, Raya and the Last Dragon

Yes, there is V-pop in Vietnam, but nothing compares to the V-pop rooted in America's 1980s Little Saigon communities. Elizabeth Ai's groundbreaking book captures the personal yearnings that drove the era's catchy beats, big hair, and sultry fashions. Dive in for the vibes, discover stories of strife and self-determination.-- Andrea Nguy?n, James Beard Award winning author of The Pho Cookbook and Ever-Green Vietnamese

Discover of a lost Los Angeles from an era before the freeways in this beautiful coffee table book from iconic architectural photographer Arnold Hylen.

Los Angeles Before the Freeways: Images of An Era 1850-1950 gives a lush, visual tour of a Los Angeles that no longer exists--one of elegant office buildings and stately mansions that were razed in the name of progress to build the city's famous freeways. Featuring stunning black-and-white photography from Arnold Hylen that captures a lost era, the book contains an original essay by the photographer that provides historical background and context for the time period. This new edition contains additional, never-before-seen photographs from Hylen and newly unearthed information from historian Nathan Marsak on these lost architectural treasures.

A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler offers a blueprint for a creative life from the perspective of award-winning science-fiction writer and MacArthur Genius Octavia E. Butler. It is a collection of ideas about how to look, listen, breathe--how to be in the world. This book is about the creative process, but not on the page; its canvas is much larger. Author Lynell George not only engages the world that shaped Octavia E. Butler, she also explores the very specific processes through which Butler shaped herself--her unique process of self-making. It's about creating a life with what little you have--hand-me-down books, repurposed diaries, journals, stealing time to write in the middle of the night, making a small check stretch--bit by bit by bit. Highly visual and packed with photographs of Butler's ephemera, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky draws the reader into Butler's world, creating a sense of unmatched intimacy with the deeply private writer.

There's a great resurgence of interest in Butler's work. Readers have been turning to her writing to make sense of contemporary chaos, to find a plot point that might bring clarity or calm. Her books have become the centerpiece of book-group discussions, while universities and entire cities have chosen her titles to anchor Big Read, Freshman Read, and One Book/One City programs. The interest has gone beyond the printed page; Ava DuVernay is adapting Butler's novel Dawn for television. A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky brings Octavia's prescient wisdom and careful thinking out of the novel and into the world.

A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky will be beloved by both scholars and fans of Butler, as well as aspiring writers and creatives who are looking for a model or a spark of inspiration. It offers a visual album of a creative life--a map that others can follow. Butler once wrote that science fiction was simply a handful of earth, a handful of sky, and everything in between. This book offers a slice of the in between.

A fun, visual book exploring the art, architecture and style of America's mid-century obsession: Bowling!

Silver, 2024 PubWest Book Design Awards, Adult Trade Book - Illustrated

Bowlarama: The Architecture of Mid-Century Bowling takes aim at the obsession that swept the post-war nation: bowling! More than just a sport or a hobby, bowling became the ultimate modern lifestyle for Americans savoring the boom years that followed World War II. Bowling alleys were modern palaces; companies constantly aimed to outdo each other, whether competing for the most spectacular architecture, the most luxurious lanes, the snazziest bowling balls, or the most exciting refreshments they could offer. Bowlarama brings back--in living color--all the excitement in its lavishly illustrated pages, packed with vintage photographs, exciting ephemera, and detailed hand-drawn architectural renderings that capture all the optimism, enthusiasm, and joie de vivre of the era

Ken Bernstein, a Principal City Planner for the City of Los Angeles and a national advocate for historic preservation shares how Los Angeles has led the nation in historic preservation and how other cities can do the same with his Los Angeles Times bestseller.

2021 Foreword Indies, GOLD: Regional

Los Angeles has an image as the City of the Future--a city always at the cutting edge of change--but also as a throwaway metropolis that cares little about its history or architectural legacy. Yet the reality is quite different. Over the past decade, the City of Los Angeles has developed one of the most successful historic preservation programs in the nation, culminating with the completion of the nation's most ambitious citywide survey of historic resources. All across the city, historic preservation is now transforming Los Angeles, while also pointing the way to how other cities can use preservation to revitalize their neighborhoods and build community. Preserving Los Angeles: How Historic Places Can Transform America's Cities, authored by Ken Bernstein, who oversees Los Angeles' Office of Historic Resources, tells this under-appreciated L.A. story: how historic preservation has been transforming neighborhoods, creating a Downtown renaissance, and guiding the future of the city.

While it is younger than many East Coast cities, Los Angeles has a remarkable collection of architectural resources in all styles, reflecting the legacy of notable architects from the past 150 years. As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is also breaking new ground in its approach to historic preservation, extending beyond the preservation of significant architecture, to also identify and protect the places of social and cultural meaning to all of Los Angeles's communities. Preserving Los Angeles illuminates a Los Angeles that will surprise even longtime Angelenos--highlighting dozens of lesser-known buildings, neighborhoods, and places in every corner of the city that have been found by SurveyLA, the first-ever city-wide survey of Los Angeles' historic resources. The text is richly illustrated through images by a prominent architectural photographer, Stephen Schafer. Preserving Los Angeles is an authoritative chronicle of Los Angeles' urban transformation-- and a useful guide for citizens and urban practitioners nationally seeking to draw lessons for their own cities.

As Los Angeles confronts a growing housing crisis, a city known for its single-family housing will inevitably shift toward a greater emphasis on apartments and other types of multi-family housing. Anderton's book shows how connected dwellings work as good architecture and good social systems; multi-family housing itself will become an aspirational form of dwelling, not second in status or style to single family homes.

2022 GOLD Winner for Regional, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

For decades, the Los Angeles lifestyle has been equated with the suburban single-family home with a big backyard, yet L.A. has also been a laboratory for exceptional experiments in multifamily housing, from the courtyard to the rooftop garden, all centered on shared open space. In Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles, author Frances Anderton explores that fascinating history, from the bungalow courts and apartment-hotels of the 1910s, to the development of garden apartments, to contemporary mid-rise urban villages, and experiments in co-living. Common Ground features the work of the Zwebells, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, Ralph Vaughn, Koning Eizenberg, Sean Knibb, Michael Maltzan, Brooks + Scarpa, Lorcan O'Herlihy, Shin Shin, and many more. In a time of housing crisis, Anderton makes the case that well-designed, equitable connected living is tomorrow's aspirational American dream.

A collection of literary essays about California from some of the state's most established, and most exciting upcoming writers.

Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California explores California through twenty-five essays that look beyond the clichés of the California Dream, portraying a state that is deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal. It is a California that reclaims the beauty of the unwanted, the quotidian, and the out-of-place. Constantly in search of the spirit of a place Writing the Golden State pries into the themes of familial genealogy, migration, land and housing, and national belonging and identity.?Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individuals and towns have weathered some of the social, political, and economic changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The map may not be the territory, and the word may not be the thing, but this guide is as close as it gets.

Since its first publication by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1965, this seminal vade mecum of Los Angeles architecture has explored every rich potency of the often relentless, but sometimes--as the authors have captured here--relenting L.A. cityscape. Revised extensively and updated rigorously since its fifth edition published in 2003, The Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles now contains ninety-six sections organized in thirteen geographic chapters, boasting over 200 new additions to over thousands of entries cataloging every crease of Los Angeles County's metropolitan sheath.

Originally written by leading architectural historians Robert Winter--described by Los Angeles Magazine as both the spiritual godfather and father of L.A. architecture--and the late, great David Gebhard, the guide has been revised and edited for a sixth edition by award-winning L.A. urban walker and Winter's trusted collaborator Robert Inman. Nathan Masters, historian and Emmy-award-winning host, producer, and managing editor of KCET's Lost LA, writes the foreword.

The Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles, hailed by many as the built L.A. opus, explores the manmade structures, gardens, parks, and other physical features of a fulgurous Los Angeles. With singular wit and brio, the authors artfully steward readers through all regions and styles, from the Spanish Mexican Period to Postmodern, American Take-over to High Tech, and Beaux-Arts to Craftsman. Sites covered begin with the missions of Spanish California and end with projects completed in 2017.

Dilettantes and experts, practitioners and students, aficionados and osmotic natives alike: all are blood type-compatible with this rich and peerless Bible for architecture enthusiasts. All of its own ilk, this book is thick and alive with a tone of its own making--and doing. A unique style of writing renders the guide simultaneously funny, tasteful, and historically-comprehensive, all with equal measure. Gebhard and Winter fill in the diegetic blanks with a droll eye. More than a critical reference for the bookshelves of scholars, enthusiasts, and practitioners alike, Architecture in Los Angeles is a faithful snapshot of the city as she lives and breathes.

Dr. Robert W. Winter (1924-2019)--lauded as a Guru, Father, and Godfather of Los Angeles architecture--was a renowned historian of fabricated California, claiming a rich bibliography of various guides and histories on California architecture, including Craftsman Style (2004).

Dr. David Gebhard (1927-1996) was a preeminent architectural historian and preservationist. After a long career teaching at UC Santa Barbara, he is remembered through his many written contributions to both the field writ large and his preservation efforts in both Santa Barbara and Pasadena.

Robert Inman is the author of A Guide to the Stairways of Los Angeles (2008) and Finding Los Angeles by Foot: Stairstreet, Bridge, Pathway, and Lane (2013). A native son of Los Angeles, he is an award-winning urban walker and frequent collaborator of his mentor, Dr. Robert W. Winter.

A brilliant, multi-media work about artist, filmmaker, and community organizer Ben Caldwell.

Caldwell's restlessness of spirit is mimicked in the book's elaborate, frenetic design. It is one of the most beautiful objects I held in my hands this year, a coffee-table book as much as a rigorous monograph, full of archival images, photographs, flyers, and documents telling the story of Caldwell's life...--The New Yorker

2023 Finalist for Biography, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

Finalist, 2023 Golden Poppy Awards, California Independent Booksellers Association

California Book Award Gold Medal Winner for Contributions to Publishing

KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell tells the story of filmmaker, educator and community activist Ben Caldwell and KAOS Network, the media-arts center he founded in Los Angeles's Leimert Park neighborhood. Through vivid illustrations, archival media, and engaging storytelling, KAOS Theory shows how Ben crafted a life centered around the power of fellowship, community, and the use of art and media as a social force. The text takes a journey through history and time, beginning with Ben's ancestors in the American southwest, up through Ben's childhood in New Mexico, his experiences in Vietnam, his work as a filmmaker and pioneer of the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement, and as founder of KAOS Network.

But KAOS Theory is more than just the story of one man's life. It is a work of art, remembrance, and tribute. Encompassing music, film, art, and performance, KAOS Theory honors the vibrant and influential communities that continue to shape the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, the African Diaspora, and beyond.

A striking and elegant coffee-table book highlighting heritage landscape design in California.

California's diverse vernacular and designed landscapes have roots in the late 1700s Spanish colonization of what was then called Alta California. The state also has a unique endemic flora and rich botanical history from both the Indigenous people's protoagriculture and plant introductions that continue to this day. For many people, however, the concept of landscape is associated with gardens, especially estate gardens. Yet landscape design reaches far beyond the elite circles of private estates; California Eden: Heritage Landscapes of the Golden State showcases a wide range of landscapes from the professional to the vernacular through exceptional essays by distinguished landscape historians. Entries highlight famous and beloved estate gardens but also more frequently overlooked landscapes such as shopping malls, streetscapes, sports venues, and vernacular sites. From a military installation on the California-Mexico border to the campus of Stanford University and the Japanese American gardens of San Diego, the essays speak to design as well as the challenges of historic preservation of these-often ephemeral places. As elegant as it is informative, California Eden is an essential book for anyone who is passionate about plants.

Discover the glitz and glamour of Hollywood through a tour of its most fabulous mid-century neon signs!

Take in the glitz, glamour, and graphics of vintage Hollywood with Hollywood Signs: Glittering Graphics and Glowing Neon in Mid-Century Tinseltown. The glittering lights of the big city have never been brighter than in this delightful book from author/designer Kathy Kikkert. Featuring signage from Hollywood's hottest bars, nightclubs, restaurants and movie theaters, Hollywood Signs is a glowing love letter to Tinsletown type. And who can forget the sign that started it all, the original and iconic Hollywood Sign perched on its hill for all to admire. Perfect for locals and tourists, mid-century mavens and design aficionados, Hollywood Signs is a love-letter to La-La Land in all its illuminated glory.

This revised edition takes the history of the Santa Monica Pier even deeper, with new information and photographs that fans of the world's famed pleasure piers and the historic venues of Southern California will find entertaining and informative.

Celebrate a century of good times on the Santa Monica Pier, with the revised edition of Santa Monica Pier: America's Last Great Pleasure Pier! Vintage images and magnificent color photos capture this beloved international icon at its very best, now updated with more images and information than ever before. Its dramatic story of survival --fighting Mother Nature, politics and changing times--makes Santa Monica Pier more than a landmark, more than a pleasure pier or a must see on the West Coast. Santa Monica Pier is a slice of American history to be enjoyed again and again and again.

Step into the captivating world of Art Deco Los Angeles through the lens of renowned photographer Robert Landau.

Art Deco Los Angles is a stunning photographic tour through one of the most glamourous architectural eras of the City of Angels. From the iconic Hollywood Bowl, where the the world's biggest acts dazzle under the evening sky, to the majestic Wiltern Theater, a timeless beacon of architectural grandeur, each photograph encapsulates the essence of Art Deco glamour. With meticulous attention to detail and an artist's eye for composition, Robert Landau captures the essence of a golden age, inviting you to experience the magic of Art Deco Los Angeles like never before.

Best-selling author and beloved chronicler of Los Angeles D.J. Waldie reconsiders the city in a collection of contemporary essays.

Nobody sees Los Angeles with more eloquence than D. J. Waldie.
- Susan Brenneman, Los Angeles Times Deputy Op-Ed Editor

Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie's particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It's through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city's seasons. In his exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city's image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city's conflicted past. He encounters the immigrants and exiles, the dreamers and con artists, the celebrated and forgotten who became Los Angeles. He measures the place of nature in the city and the different ways that nature has been defined. He maps on the contours of Los Angeles what embracing--or rejecting--an Angeleno identity has come to mean.

Becoming Los Angeles draws on a decade of Waldie's writing about the intersection of the city's history and its aspirations. He asks, what do we talk about when we talk about Los Angeles today? In a global, cosmopolitan city, is there value in cultivating a local imagination? And he wonders how to describe a city that is denser and more polarized and challenged by climate change, homelessness, and economic disparity. There will always be romance in the idea of Los Angeles, but it requires renewed hope to sustain. Becoming Los Angeles is a further account of how Waldie gained a sense of place, which James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, described as an almost sacramental act of attention. Becoming Los Angeles is ultimately a book about learning how to fall in love with wherever it is you are.

Called a writer whose work is a gorgeous distillation of architectural and social history by the New York Times, whose essays and memoirs, said the Los Angeles Times, conjure the idiosyncratic splendor of Southern California life, D. J. Waldie is the author of the acclaimed Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and other books that illuminate the ordinary and the everyday in lyrical prose. In collaboration with Diane Keaton, Waldie provided the text for two photographic explorations of home: California Romantica, dealing with homes in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style of the early twentieth century, and House, examining post-modern interpretations of domesticity. California Romantica became a Los Angeles Times non-fiction bestseller in 2007. D. J. Waldie's narratives about suburban life have appeared in BUZZ, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgetown Review, Salon, dwell, Los Angeles Magazine, Spiritus, Gulf Coast, Urbanisme, Bauwelt, and other publications. His book reviews and commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He lives in the home where he was born in Lakewood, California, where he was formerly the Deputy City Manager.

Bunker Hill is the highest point of downtown Los Angeles, both literally and figuratively. Its circle of life has created a continuous saga of change, each chapter rich with captivating characters, structures, and culture. In Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Essence of Sunshine and Noir, historian Nathan Marsak tells the story of the Hill, from the district's inception in the mid-19th century to its present day. Once home to wealthy Angelenos living in LA's first suburb, then the epicenter of the city's shifting demographics and the shadow and vice of an urban underbelly, Bunker Hill survived its attempted erasure and burgeoned as a hub of arts, politics, business, and tourism.

As compelling as the story of the destruction of Bunker Hill is--with all the good intentions and bad results endemic to city politics--it was its people who made the Hill at once desirable and undesirable. Marsak commemorates the poets and writers, artists and activists, little guys and big guys, and of course, the many architects who built and rebuilt the community on the Hill--time after historic time.

Any fan of American architecture will treasure Marsak's analysis of buildings that have crowned the Hill: the exuberance of Victorian shingle and spindlework, from Mission to Modern, from Queen Anne to Frank Gehry, Bunker Hill has been home to it all, the ever-changing built environment.

With more than 250 photographs--many in color--as well as maps and vintage ephemera to tell his dramatic visual story, Marsak lures us into Bunker Hill Los Angeles and shares its lost world, then guides us to its new one.

Step inside a world where imagination dwells!

2022 SILVER Winner for Performing Arts & Music, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

Bob Baker Marionette Theater has enchanted families in Los Angeles and beyond with delightful marionette performances since 1963. Enchanted Strings captures the visual history of this palace of puppetry from Bob Baker's earliest days to the theater's transformation into a thriving hub of creative culture. You'll meet the remarkable visual artists and craftspeople who worked alongside him, contributing their talents to build the theater, design the shows, and hand-craft over two thousand incredible marionettes. Archival images and ephemera provide a behind-the-scenes look at Bob's amazing work for Walt Disney and iconic Hollywood films. With more than 300 vintage and contemporary photographs, Enchanted Strings will delight Bob Baker Marionette Theater fans around the world, and fascinate everyone who is a child at heart!

The most celebrated biography of Hollywood's Blonde Bombshell, Harlow in Hollywood is now updated with rare images and additional details about her remarkable life and its tragic end.

At last, the story of how Hollywood shaped a myth and determined a young woman's reality. A town, a remarkable town, became the backdrop for one of Hollywood's most incredible stories, a life rife with glamour, pleasure, power, and--in the end--utter sorrow. Her story lives in the pages and breathtaking pictures of Harlow in Hollywood.

When Jean Harlow became the Blonde Bombshell, it was all Hollywood's doing. She was the first big-screen sex symbol, the Platinum Blonde, the mold for every famous fair-haired superstar who would emulate her. Yes; even Marilyn Monroe followed Harlow's lead. In her short decade in Hollywood, Harlow created a new genre of movie star--her fans idolized her for her peerless image, her beautiful body, and her gorgeous façade. Harlow in Hollywood is the story of how a town and an industry created her, a story that's never been told before.

In these pages, renowned Harlow expert Darrell Rooney and Hollywood historian Mark Vieira team to present the most beautiful--and accurate--book on Harlow ever produced. With more than 280 rare images, the authors not only make a case for Harlow as an Art Deco artifact, they showcase the fabulous places where she lived, worked and played from her white-on-white Beverly Glen mansion to the Art Deco sets of Dinner at Eight to the foyer of the Café Trocadero. Harlow in Hollywood is a must for every film buff, Harlow collector, and book lover. Like Harlow herself, Harlow in Hollywood is irresistible.

The bestselling book about the Los Angeles River, originally published in 2001, is updated with an Afterword that includes the Los Angeles County 2021 Master Plan to improve the quality of life and ecosystem health in the region--all centered at the original source, the Los Angeles River.

RIO-LA: Tales from the Los Angeles River 20th Anniversary Edition traces the history and lore of the Los Angeles River. When the book was first published in 2001, few people even regarded the river, but because of Morrison's devotion to the topic, LA River has been rediscovered. The river has become the center of the county's 2021 MasterPlan to reestablish it as the heart of the city, its lifeline to all things positive: an antidote to homelessness; a source of increased affordable housing; new jobs, good health; serenity. Morrison traces this rediscovery in her extensive new Afterword, following pages of river history, dating back to before the founding of the pueblo called Los Angeles. Together Morrison and Lamonica explore the river and the culture that evolves around this virtual oasis in a land of super highways and celluloid dreams.

What? Los Angeles was the original wine country of California, leading the state's wine production for more than a century? Los Angeles County was the agricultural center of North America until the 1950s? And where today's freeways soar, cows calmly chewed their cud? How could that be?

Los Angeles, the capital of asphalt and Kleig lights, was once a paradise filled with grapevines and bovines, so abundant with Nature's gifts that no one could imagine a more pastoral place.

Los Angeles County was the center of an agricultural empire. Today, it is the nation's most populous urban metropolis. What happened? Where did the green go?

From the earliest pueblo cornfields to the struggles of farm workers to the rise of the environmental movement, From Cows to Concrete tells the epic tale of how agriculture forged Los Angeles into an urban metropolis, and how, ultimately, the Los Angeles farm empire spurred the very growth that paved it over, as sprawling suburbs swallowed up thousands of acres of prime farmland. And how, on the same land once squandered by corporate greed and progress, urban farmers are making inroads to a greener future. More than 150 vintage images enhance and expand the fascinating, detailed history.

As Americans connect with gardens, farmers markets, and urban farms, most are unaware that each of these activities have deep roots in Los Angeles, and that the healthy food they savor literally had its roots in L.A. This book is for all who treasure the country's agrarian history.