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How a lone photographer documented ‘Los Angeles Before the Freeways’

April 28, 2025

As you linger over the photos within “Los Angeles Before the Freeways: Images of an Era 1850-1950,” you might catch glimpses of the city you recognize today.

Maybe, if you spend a lot of time downtown, you can try to imagine where certain long-gone structures stood. In the middle of the 20th century, as L.A.’s core transformed into a modern metropolis, photographer Arnold Hylen documented buildings and homes that were ultimately razed. His photos, along with an essay he wrote, were first published in a limited run in 1981 by Dawson’s Book Shop. The book is now out in a new, expanded edition from Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library.

“Hylen is a fascinating character, so anachronistic for his time,” says Nathan Marsak, historian and author of the 2020 book “Bunker Hill Los Angeles.” For years, Marsak has been working to bring Hylen’s legacy to a new audience.

Hylen was born in Sweden in 1908, shortly before his family emigrated to the United States. He was still a child when his family headed to Los Angeles after a stint living in Vermont. He grew up following his carpenter father around downtown, and he developed his own artistic inclinations.

The view looking south on the Hollywood Freeway under construction, seen circa 1952. The dirt embankment at right is now topped with the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, designed by José Rafael Moneo Vallés and opened in 2002.
(Courtesy of Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library)

In 1888, Benjamin Cohen built the bay-windowed Cohen Block as the new home for his wallpaper and rug business. Cohen Block architect Harvey R. Leonard relocated his offices there after its completion. At left is the Willard Block (Carroll Herkimer Brown, 1893), a Romanesque Revival structure of rough-cut Lordsburg sandstone, built by WIllard Stimson. The Cohen and Willard blocks were demolished for a parking lot in early 1961.
(Courtesy of Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library)

The Bur-Mar Hotel (William H. Enders, 1903) with the tall Corinthian columns, stands at 514 South Figueroa Street. Its darker neighbor at 516, a twenty-one-room apartment house called the Saint Dunstan, was built in 1904. They were both lost to a surface parking lot in 1957. Looming behind is the Richfield Tower (Morgan, Walls & Clements, 1929). The Richfield was demolished in 1968 for the ARCO towers project, along with the rest of its block.
(Courtesy of Angel City Press at Los Angeles Public Library)

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He studied art at Chouinard and initially set out to be a painter. But photography proved to be his calling. For decades, he worked as a photographer for the Fluor Corporation, an engineering and construction company. In his spare time, he would take his camera downtown and shoot the rapidly changing urban landscape.

“If you know anything about post-war America in general, or Los Angeles in particular, you know that it was a pathologically forward-thinking time and we were a forward-thinking people,” says Marsak.

“It’s important to realize that because this was part of a modern, post-war America, it was literally us vs. the Soviets,” says Marsak. “Arnold Hylen was having none of it. He’s like, I’m watching this stuff disappear before my very eyes.”

Hylen’s dedication to documenting vanishing signs of the past was also prescient. “Everyone else was forward-thinking by looking towards this bright, shining, gleaming new future,” says Marsak. “But he was truly forward-thinking by recognizing the old adage, when it’s gone, it’s gone. He was watching things fall to parking lots constantly.”

In the early 1990s, when Marsak worked at MOCA and chatted with regulars at the bars near Central Library, he heard about someone who had photographed the surrounding neighborhoods back in the 1950s and published a book. Only 600 copies of “Los Angeles Before the Freeways” had been printed, so when he finally found a copy, it came with a hefty price tag.

Marsak not only bought it, but he also got a lot of use out of it.

“I used to drive around with this on my lap like a Thomas Guide,” Marsak says, holding up his vintage copy of Hylen’s book and comparing it to the iconic street map book that many drivers used in the years before mapping apps.

Marsak says he resolved to reprint “Los Angeles Before the Freeways.”

That, too, proved to be a years-long endeavor. Not only did he need to acquire the rights to the book and the negatives, but the negatives needed to be cleaned, scanned and touched up. “I tend to be a little meticulous in that regard,” he says. Along with Hylen’s original essay, Marsak wrote his own introduction along with extended captions, which help contextualize the book for the 2020s audience.

The book has also been reformatted from its original layout, which had the text in the front and photos in the back. Originally published with 116 images, the updated version of “Los Angeles Before the Freeways” includes more photos.

“This has 143 because you have a strip of negatives. Each strip has three shots on it,” says Marsak. When he went through the negatives, Marsak says, he would remark, “What’s that? That’s incredible!” while looking at the images that hadn’t been published in the original. “So,” he says, “we also got to put in a bunch of stuff that no one has ever seen before.”

Although “Los Angeles Before the Freeways” wasn’t a well-known book upon its initial release, Hylen’s reputation has grown in the decades that have followed.

“He was not the only gentleman film photographer walking around Los Angeles in the 1950s,” says Marsak.

However, because many of his photographs were made available online via the California State Library, Hylen’s work became important to new generations searching databases in hopes of peeking into L.A.’s past. “Hylen’s images definitely played a role in people being able to see old Los Angeles and to communicate to them what the world used to look like,” says Marsak. “I think that’s very important.”

Beyond showing glimpses of a long-gone L.A., Hylen’s work also points to the importance of documenting our ever-evolving city.

“If this book gets into the hands of somebody who says, ‘Wow, Old L.A. was really cool,’ I hope that it sparks a preservation impetus in them,” says Marsak.

As for Marsak, there’s still more of L.A.’s visual history to be discovered, as plenty of buildings in the city had been demolished before Hylen shot them.

“There could have been a Hylen-esque fellow in the ‘30s — pre-dating Hylen by 30 years — who went around taking pictures of things as they were being demolished,” Marsak says. “I haven’t found that archive.”

How a lone photographer documented ‘Los Angeles Before the Freeways’ Orange County Register

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How a lone photographer documented ‘Los Angeles Before the Freeways’

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