Posts by Mike McPhate

San Francisco once had a neighborhood cobbled together from old horsecars. In 1895, the Market Street Railway Company began selling its obsolete horse-drawn inventory, “$20 with seats, $10 without.” Within a few years, more than 100 horsecars and streetcars had been repurposed as housing for artists and low-income families along the dunes just south of…

When the photographer Bob Fitch was asked to take a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. lying in an open casket on April 9, 1968, he paused. Recalling the moment for an interviewer years later, Fitch choked up with emotion: “It was a tough decision to take that photo. It felt like blasphemy to put a camera in…

Fun fact: Before they were famous, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall were roommates in New York City in the 1960s, and they palled around with an acting school reject named Gene Hackman. Few would have guessed, least of all the men themselves, that they would each become giants of Hollywood. Hackman and Hoffman, both born…

For one beautiful day nearly 50 years ago, bicyclists had a freeway in San Diego all to themselves. Before opening a new section of Interstate 805 to vehicle traffic, highway officials invited bicyclists for a Community Cycle Day along 7 miles of roadway on March 19, 1972. According to news accounts from the time, they…

Oliver Sipple was an accidental hero. On a Monday afternoon in September 1975, he happened to be standing next to Sara Jane Moore, a would-be assassin, as she pulled a .38 revolver from her purse and pointed it at President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. A Vietnam veteran, Sipple grabbed Moore’s arm…

John Wooden, the quintessential American coach, arrived at UC Los Angeles in 1948 to take over a little-known basketball program that played in a cramped gym. He left in 1975, having transformed the Bruins into a powerhouse with 10 national championships. Wooden was said to be as conversant in Shakespeare and the Bible as basketball,…

In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency announced a groundbreaking photo project designed as a “visual baseline” against which to measure progress on cleaning up our air, land, and water. Over the next six years, about 100 freelance photographers fanned out across all 50 states for the Documerica series, capturing the environmental toll of…

A century ago, astronomers believed the Milky Way was all there was to the universe. The Andromeda galaxy, while visible in the night sky, was thought to be a cauldron of birthing stars within the Milky Way. But Edwin Hubble wasn’t convinced. He and a small group of fellow astronomers hypothesized that Andromeda was its…

“Me and Bobby McGee,” a gentle tune about heartbreak on the road, was written for the voice of a male country singer. Its title character, Bobby, was inspired by a pretty young secretary in the music industry in Tennessee. The country crooner Roger Miller was the first to record the song in 1969. Roy Clark, Kenny Rogers,…

All of California’s Cook pines lean conspicuously in the same direction, as though buffeted by strong winds. The quirk of the otherwise unremarkable tree was discovered a some years ago by Matt Ritter, a botany professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He reached out to a colleague in Australia to ask about the Cook pines…

In a wooded ravine just south of San Francisco, a pair of stone pillars, 10 paces apart, commemorate the last notable American duel. U.S. Sen. David Broderick, a Democrat who made a fortune in Gold Rush San Francisco, was once friends with the Chief Justice of California, David Terry, but slavery tore them apart. Broderick opposed…

In 1903, Chiura Obata, then 17, left Japan for San Francisco to pursue a career as a painter. He met acclaim but also racial animus, as Japanese immigrants were denied entry to restaurants, barred from owning land, and forced behind barbed wire after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Obata’s disappointment with the human world could help…

In the 1980s, a wave of Asian newcomers moved into a band of predominantly white bedroom communities in the San Gabriel Valley, a cultural transformation attributed in part to relaxed immigration laws and rising economic mobility. Once moribund business strips sprang to life with Filipino grocers, Vietnamese cafes, and Japanese bakeries. Sociologists declared Monterey Park the first…

Fun fact: There’s a footbridge across a busy road in Palm Springs that connects two parts of a nudist resort. Known as the Naked Bridge, it includes canvas panels to shield the prying eyes of motorists. News of its debut in 2003 became fodder for international headlines and jokes on late-night talk shows. Jay Leno…

In the late 1980s, Jay Ohrberg had a dream. One of Hollywood’s top car customizers, he had built KITT from “Knight Rider,” Herbie from “Herbie the Love Bug,” and the “Back to the Future” DeLorean. Now he aimed for a place in the record books with the longest car ever built, a Cadillac limousine that stretched 100 feet,…

In the early 1990s, a California professor stunned the scientific community by reviving 45-million-year-old yeast — and using it to make beer. Raul Cano, a microbiologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, found the spores in the gut of an ancient bee encased in tropical amber and spread it on a growth medium to see…

In the 1950s, Angelenos would sometimes see two “sunrises” — one from the sun and another from atomic bomb tests in the Nevada desert. Between 1951 and 1962, 100 detonations were conducted above ground at the site northwest of Las Vegas, some so brilliant that they could be seen from points across the California coast. People…