| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. By Greg Hise and William Deverell. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ix + 314 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendixes, notes, index. $48, cloth, $17.95, paper; £30, cloth, £11.50, paper.)

"On March 16, 1930, the Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Times alerted readers to a "gigantic county park and beach plan" that the chamber of commerce had unveiled the previous evening" (p. 1). That plan, contained in a 178-page clothbound document titled, Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region, would thereafter never see the light of day despite its having been prepared by two of the leading landscape and city planning firms in the nation at a cost of $80,000. In fact it was scuttled, strangely enough, by the same "Citizen's Committee" that had commissioned the report in the first place three years earlier. Two hundred copies of the report were printed in 1930, but the chamber of commerce, which had many members who also served on the citizens' committee, buried the bold—and expensive—proposals contained in the plan before the binding was ever stitched to the report. It has largely remained in hibernation ever since, though it did come to serve as a reference tool for future planning efforts in Los Angeles County. It also formed the basis for a series of regional investigations into uses to be made of open space in the five-county metropolitan region (for greater Los Angeles), which were undertaken by another landscape and planning firm in the 1960s and 1970s (pp. 49–50). . . .

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