Going Around in an Oval

The Coast Realty Archive consists of thousands of old real estate listings, acquired by the CLUI a few years ago. These ephemeral sheets of paper, meant to be discarded when their utility was over, are an unlikely survival, and today are a fresh primary source record of the landscape of the city of Los Angeles at one time. The most useful part of these listings is the photograph and address of each listed property, which collectively create a locatable, timestamped, block-by-block survey of buildings on the westside of Los Angeles, from the late 1950s into the mid-1970s.

AS WE PREPARE THE CENTER’S Coast Realty Archive as a website feature, to be accessible to the public as a clickable map and image galleries, we occasionally test drive the archive, as we did in last year’s exhibit Coast to Coast: Venice Boulevard Through the Lens of the Coast Realty Archive, which followed Venice Boulevard, the street outside the front door of the Center’s main office, to the Pacific Ocean.

This year we examined another area in the Center’s backyard, a couple of miles away—an early housing development known as the Oval. We used the Coast Realty Archive as a sort of round magnifying glass applied to a round anomaly within the rectilinear grid of urban streets.

The Oval was designed by landscape architect Wilbur David Cook in the early 20th century, with curved streets for grand estates to be built in what was, at the time, empty fields. Inevitably, ambitions were downsized, and now the area is almost invisibly enveloped in the surrounding grid.

Contemporary photographs of addresses in the Oval, taken by the CLUI, were matched with Coast Realty Archive photographs of the same locations, to create three dozen then and now sets—revealing how the past is present, and haunts all houses. ♦

The Oval: Escape from the Grid was presented by CLUI program manager Aurora Tang during the 30th International Panorama Council Conference on September 15–18, 2021.