L.A. Noir History Goes Backward In Time

One of my favorite blogs for awhile had been the 1947 Project, which re-reported daily tales of crime and mystery from Los Angeles circa, natch, 1947, providing piece by piece a sometimes gruesome but ultimately fascinating and loving, deeply textured portrait of what day to day life was like (at its worst) in my home town in those long ago immediate postwar days of flux.

With a full year of 1947 nightmares relived at the site, its creators have gone back in time to recreate an even more distant and mysterious year, Los Angeles's 1907. Take a looksee into pre-Hollywood L.A.'s heart of darkness here. It ain't all crime either--the 1907 site especially is shaping up to be an incredible source for understanding L.A's shifting commercial and residential geography and architecture, and even some interesting details about old-school education.

Full disclosure: one of the site's creators/writers/editors is Kim Cooper, who edited two anthologies in which my writings appear, Lost in the Grooves and Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth.