Pictures: California Before the Stars Arrived
A collection of rare photos shows Los Angeles and Santa Monica in the late 1800s.
An extraordinary archive of 4,600 photographs taken in the city of Los Angeles and the beach suburb of Santa Monica between the 1870s and the 1950s has recently been acquired by the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Many of the photographs show streets and buildings that were important to the history of the area. Others were made for the tourist trade. "Some of these images I'd only seen in bad reproductions," Jennifer Watts, Huntington's curator of photographs, said in a phone interview. "Now we have the original prints. It's thrilling."
The previous owner was a local resident, 89-year-old Ernest Marquez. Over the course of 50 years, he collected the images as a hobby, buying them for a dollar or so
