A Municipal Tail

This project examines municipal animal control in Los Angeles between 1880 and 1909. It traces the emergence of municipal animal control from the confluence of animal welfare reform and progressive state expansion. The animal welfare movement in the United States began in the Colonial Era, but soon reflected the influence of changing attitudes in Europe and the rise of anti-cruelty reform movements after the Civil War. As Americans sought to create a better world out of the ashes of that war, many looked towards animal welfare. This movement occurred first on the East Coast, beginning with Henry Bergh’s founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866, and reached Los Angeles by the end of the century. Many in that growing city viewed the dawn of the twentieth century with optimism, hoping for L.A.’s ascendancy into the ranks of the nation’s great metropolises. As a result, they began to look at the city’s problems through an increasingly progressive lens. Newspapers had covered the animal impoundment system’s brutality since the 1880s, but by the end of the century, they carried dramatic exposés of cruelties and corruption at the pound that emphasized connections to larger social issues. Citizens, including an impressive number of women, became activists for animal welfare. The municipal government responded by passing an ordinance that put animal control in the hands of the Humane Animal League, a private animal welfare organization. When the League failed to handle the city’s burgeoning animal population humanely and efficiently, the city assumed responsibility for animal control and created a municipal system. The emergence of municipal animal control in Los Angeles demonstrates a city turning to the extension of state power at the local level to create a more humane and efficient world for both its human and animal inhabitants.

Booming Then, Sputtering Now

This article reviews the post-World War II mass production of houses in Los Angeles and the roots of today’s housing shortage. Even with a high production rate, minorities and low-income Angelenos have experienced racial barriers and displacement. Today, L.A.’s homeless population is disproportionally Black, while home ownership is disproportionally white. The article concludes with four proposals for responding to today’s shortage of affordable and racially equitable housing.

Pío Pico and Antonio Cuyas

The 1870 Pico House luxury hotel on Los Angeles’s historic Plaza has always been associated with Pío Pico, the last governor of California in the Mexican Era. Based on historical evidence in the Archive of the city’s El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument and further research, archives manager Michael Henderson traces the proprietorship of the hotel from its first conception as a partnership between Pico and Antonio Cuyas, through successive management and legal cases to its eclipse and the deaths of its original proprietors in the 1890s.