Latest news with #FluorCorp.
Los Angeles Times
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Lost L.A. comes to life in reissued book about the city before freeways
Not long after his arrival in Los Angeles three decades ago, Nathan Marsak bought a 1949 Packard, the kind of car best suited for old-timey gangsters and detectives, not an architectural historian who left Wisconsin to move to the city of his dreams. But he wanted to live 'the L.A. noir life,' he says, and no other vehicle seemed more appropriate. 'The L.A. bug just bit me. I wanted to look for the world of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and I did,' he says. 'I drove my Packard around, looking for signs of the old, decrepit, dissolute Los Angeles, and I found it in spades. I had lots of adventures.' From the old suits he wears to the big Highland Park house where he lives with his family, Marsak has a deep affection for vintage things. (He does have an iPhone, though, and his wife did talk him into a microwave — but the design had to be retro.) Marsak's affection for the past extends to Arnold Hylen, a solitary, mild-mannered Swedish émigré, whose book of mid-20th century photos and an essay about old Los Angeles, 'Los Angeles Before the Freeways 1850-1950: Images of an Era,' was recently reissued by Angel City Press in a new edition curated and expanded by Marsak. Not merely a facsimile, the new edition has been augmented with additional text, notes, fresh layouts and more Hylen photos of an old city on the verge of being swallowed up by the new — a process of cultural erasure that crops up in many criticisms of Los Angeles as a superficial place with no deep sense of itself. Marsak disagrees — sort of. 'It's deserved, and it's undeserved,' he says. 'I've been all over, and it's unfair to pick on Los Angeles alone. But I think the city's been an easy target just because we've had so many high-profile losses of distinctive architecture here. That stands out in people's minds. Hylen was certainly aware of those losses and they worried him. If they hadn't, I don't think he would've felt an obsessive drive to chronicle the old city.' Hylen lived a quiet bachelor life, Marsak says, and never imagined his photos would one day be among those by William Reagh, Leonard Nadel, Theodore Seymour Hall and Virgil Mirano. He was born in 1908 and arrived in Vermont from Sweden when he was still a baby, relocating to Southern California with his family in 1917. As a teen he studied art at the Chouinard Art Institute in L.A.'s Westlake neighborhood and found work in World War II as a photographer and designer of sales materials and trade show exhibits for Fluor Corp., an oil and gas engineering and construction firm. As he photographed refineries, his eyes opened to the surrounding city. As Marsak describes in the book's introduction, he'd 'spend the day walking the streets, camera in hand, which fed his interest in the fast-disappearing downtown area, Bunker Hill in particular.' 'I think he knew the value absolutely of what he was doing for himself and other like-minded spirits,' Marsak says, 'but I don't think he knew what to do with the photos.' Thankfully, Glen Dawson did. An iconic figure in L.A.'s literary landscape, Dawson used his small press to publish two books of Hylen's photos. Marsak learned about them (thanks to an enthusiastic barfly he encountered in an L.A. dive) and found both in the used bookstores once existing on 6th Street: 'Bunker Hill: A Los Angeles Landmark' (1976) and 'Los Angeles Before the Freeways,' the latter published not long before Hylen's 1987 death. Marsak spent many years persuading the photographer's relatives to sell him the rights to republish Hylen's work — selling his beloved Packard to fund that purchase. Marsak's dedication has paid off: 'Los Angeles Before the Freeways' is an engrossing collection of black-and-white images of a city in which old adobe structures sit between Italianate office buildings or peek out from behind old signs, elegant homes teeter on the edge of steep hillsides, and routes long used by locals would soon be demolished to make room for freeways. These images are accompanied by Hylen's book-length essay, which runs like a documentarian's voice-over throughout the collection. Two notable changes for this edition: More photos and the decision to use Hylen's uncropped photos, which provide a richer sense of locale and more photos. There were 116 photos in the original book; Marsak went through Hylen's negatives and found more photos, resulting in 143 images in the new edition. Marsak supplies an introductory essay and an invaluable guide to the many architectural styles belonging to L.A.'s past. His footnotes and captions also enhance our understanding of the photos: In some cases, he uses them to correct some false claims that Hylen makes in his essay (for instance, that a long stone trough on Olvera Street was a Gabrielino relic when in fact it was actually created by a local rancher). There are no special effects or gimmicks to Hylen's photos, no staging or posed imagery — he lets these forgotten edifices speak for themselves. They range from the magnificent, Romanesque detailing of the Stimson Block (the city's first large steel-frame skyscraper on Figueroa Street) to the multi-gabled, Queen Anne charm of the Melrose, a home built on Bunker Hill by a retired oilman. Occasionally, though, Hylen's lens does give us something a bit more impressionistic and emblematic of his thesis about L.A.'s vanishing history. Take, for example, a photo of the Paris Inn on East Market Street. The little French-style inn, which opened in 1930, stands in sharp relief in the foreground while City Hall hovers like a faint ghost in the background, suggesting that a more modern version of L.A. is on the verge of materializing out of thin air. For Marsak, who spends his time researching old L.A., giving lectures, serving as an Angels Flight operator and working with local preservationist groups, Hylen's work fills an important gap in L.A.'s past. He hopes readers, especially Angelenos, will come away with a deeper appreciation for their city. 'There's a saying that when something's gone, it's gone for good, and 98% of the stuff in this book is gone,' he said. 'Anyone who looks at this book probably already has a preservationist impulse, but if they don't, if I can light the preservation fire under at least one of them, all the hard work will have been worth it. I really hope seeing this work will make Angelenos think more about their own neighborhoods. I think Hylen would appreciate that.'
Boston Globe
02-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Supreme Court leaves in place firearms laws in Maryland and Rhode Island
The two other dissenters were Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch. Advertisement Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh agreed with the decision to sidestep the cases for now, but wrote separately to caution against reading too much into Maryland's ban remaining intact. He called the lower court ruling upholding the law 'questionable' and said the Supreme Court should eventually address the validity of bans on assault-style rifles like the AR-15 in the next term or two. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The decision not to take up the gun cases came on the same day the justices decided to hear four other cases for the next term. The Supreme Court will decide on a challenge brought by an Illinois congressman and two Republican presidential electors who say a state law that allows for the collection and counting of absentee ballots after Election Day violates federal election statutes. Advertisement In another case, a US Army specialist who was seriously wounded by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan is asking the Supreme Court to rule that federal contractors do not have immunity from civil suits filed under state law. Winston Hencely sued Fluor Corp., a military contractor, after an Afghan man the company had hired at the Bagram air base built an explosive vest while unsupervised and then detonated it, gravely wounding Hencely. The justices will also hear a case involving a class-action lawsuit brought by migrants who claim they were forced to do work for little or no pay while being held at a private detention facility in Aurora, Colo., in violation of a state law against forced labor. The case concerns a technical question about the contractor's claim that it has sovereign immunity from being sued. In the fourth case, the justices will examine what standards must be met for law enforcement officers to enter a home without a search warrant when they believe an emergency might be occurring inside, in a case originating in Montana. The courts have split over whether probable cause - or a lesser standard - is required in such circumstances. Maryland passed its ban on high-powered rifles in response to the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, in which an AR-15 was used to kill 20 children and six adults. The US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld Maryland's restrictions as consistent with the Second Amendment. 'Our nation has a strong tradition of regulating excessively dangerous weapons once it becomes clear that they are exacting an inordinate toll on public safety and societal well-being,' Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a nominee of President Ronald Reagan, wrote in an opinion that repeatedly cited the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller declaring a Second Amendment right to possess a firearm at home for self-defense. Advertisement In 2022, the Supreme Court further expanded gun rights in its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, that required the government for the first time to point to historical analogues when defending laws that place restrictions on guns. Earlier this term, the Supreme Court also upheld a Biden-era ban on ghost guns. Gun rights groups challenging Maryland's law noted that AR-15s and other assault-style rifles are the best-selling rifles in the country, owned by millions of Americans and accounting for about 20 percent of all firearms sales in the country for more than a decade. They urged the Supreme Court 'to ensure that the Second Amendment itself is not truncated into a limited right to own certain state-approved means of personal self-defense.' Lower courts, they added, are asking the justices for further guidance about how to apply the Supreme Court's new test. Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown, Democrat, whose office defended the ban, said in a statement that the Supreme Court's action Monday means 'a critical law that prevents senseless and preventable deaths will remain in effect,' adding that his office will 'do whatever we can to protect Marylanders from this horrific violence.' The Firearms Policy Coalition, one of the groups challenging the ban, expressed frustration in a statement that the Supreme Court 'continues to allow lower courts to treat the Second Amendment as a second-class right' and urged Trump's solicitor general, D. John Sauer, to join the group in 'loudly encouraging the Court to take up quality Second Amendment cases.' Advertisement In the Rhode Island case, an appeals court upheld the state's ban on high-capacity magazines, finding that it does not impose a significant burden on residents seeking to defend themselves. 'Civilian self-defense rarely - if ever - calls for the rapid and uninterrupted discharge of many shots, much less more than ten,' the US Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit said in its ruling. The appeals court said the law is consistent with the state's ban on other items 'associated with criminal activity,' such as silencers and armor-piercing bullets. The law, passed in response to the rise in mass shootings, gives owners 180 days to comply by modifying their magazines, selling them to firearms dealers, removing them from the state, or turning them over to law enforcement. The justices also declined to take the case of a Texas stripper who sued two clubs, claiming they discriminated against Black dancers. Chanel Nicholson, who is Black, says she was turned away from work on occasions because managers felt there were already too many Black dancers working. A federal judge and then an appeals court ruled for the clubs, determining that the statute of limitations had expired on her claims. The first acts of alleged discrimination occurred in 2014 but continued off and on until she filed her legal claim in 2021. The appeals court found 'her denial of access to the club … on account of her race' in 2021 was 'merely a continued effect of the first alleged discriminatory act that took place in 2014.' Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority's decision not to take the case, saying each new act of discrimination starts a new clock to file a civil action. Advertisement
