The Coast Realty Archive Map
THE CLUI INTRODUCED A NEW feature on our website in 2023—the Coast Realty Archive Map. The map puts the 14,000+ real estate listings in the Coast Realty Archive (dating mostly from the 1960s) into a searchable, scalable map format, allowing people to explore and browse by location.
Coast Realty Archive sites take travelers back to a time when Los Angeles’ postwar boom was still taking off, when modest single family homes, simple storefronts, and brand new dingbat apartments were ripe for the picking. Most of the real estate listings are on the west side of Los Angeles, around Venice and Santa Monica—for many people the ultimate destination for postwar westward migration.
CLUI researchers continue to extract patterns, themes, and notions latent in the archive, some of which are presented on our website. These include a rephotography collection, where images of properties listed in the archive are coupled with images taken today, to show changes from then to now, which can be extreme, or subtle in compelling ways.
Another online feature, Re-Listings, shows addresses where specific properties are listed more than once, with a few years between them. In this way change is captured with rephotography being done within the archive itself. The images often show a modest single-family home replaced a few years later with a new stucco multi-family building on the same site—part of the first wave of Los Angeles' residential densification.
Residents of the Coast Realty Archive is a slideshow which selects images from listings where people are captured by accident in the frame of the itinerant real estate photographer. The effect at times is like a low-tech analog street-view, where faces are not intentionally anonymized by Google algorithms, but rendered more alluring by the haze of low-resolution reprographics. ♦
