[photo courtesy of Pasadena Heritage]
Pasadena Heritage will host a lecture entitled “New Worlds to Build: Highlighting Some of Los Angeles’ Most Innovative Residents and Their Historic Spaces” with speaker Amanda Karkoutly of CahuengaPast on Saturday, April 25.
Karkoutly, creator of the CahuengaPast Instagram and newsletter, will discuss some of Northeast L.A.’s most intriguing and unconventional figures – the artists, scientists, mystics, and independent thinkers whose ideas and lifestyles helped shape the city into the special place it is today.
Through photographs and stories, she will explore the overlap between architecture, creativity, crime, and the more metaphysical side of the region’s past.
From the otherworldly meetings at Jack Parsons’ home to the dizzying parties at Zorthian Ranch, she will examine where they gathered, what they built, and the spaces where they created new ways to live.
“This program gets at a side of history that doesn’t always make it into the standard narrative,” shared Nick Giovanazzi, Pasadena Heritage Programs Director. “The experimental, the unconventional, the personal ways people shaped both their lives and the spaces around them. What’s especially compelling here is that our speaker, Amanda Karkoutly, is bringing forward brand new research and offering fresh insight into figures and places that still feel surprisingly underexplored.”
Held at the Pasadena Mausoleum at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, refreshments will begin at 5pm with the lecture taking place between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Tickets are available here.
“At its core, this is really about how people shape space, and how those spaces, in turn, shape all of us. The homes, gathering places, and environments these individuals created weren’t just backdrops, they were active expressions of new ideas, new ways of living, and new ways of seeing the world,” said Giovanazzi.
Pasadena Heritage is a nonprofit organization founded in 1977 and dedicated to historic preservation in Pasadena, California. The organization advocates on behalf of historic resources, educates the public about local history and the benefits of preservation, provides referrals and consultations to those restoring historic buildings, and demonstrates quality restoration through its own preservation projects. Its members are drawn from Pasadena and neighboring communities, and throughout Southern California. Learn more at www.pasadenaheritage.org.