Photo: Tom Bertolotti
Greetings! I’m a historian, writer, editor, and freelance sommelier based in Los Angeles, my hometown. I write about all kinds of topics ranging from art and architecture to transportation to food, wine, and urban design. At the end of the day, the stories I write always revolve around people: what motivates them and makes them tick.
I recently published my first book, Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles (2023). Scroll down to learn more.
Los Angeles is famous for many things: its traffic jams, its taco trucks, the palm trees, the sunshine. Electric Moons explores one of its most overlooked architectural legacies: its streetlights.
Cover photograph by Tom Bertolotti
Today we may not give streetlights much thought; after all, they’re virtually everywhere. But Los Angeles was once known for its breadth of unusual and innovative designs. From the early calls of the 1880s (when the newly launched Los Angeles Times salivated over San Jose’s 150-foot ‘moon tower’) to the 1920s renaissance in ornamental lamp designs (a result of crafty imagineering and an explosive housing boom) to the 1950s invasion of the utilitarian cobra-heads (which illuminated a metastasizing freeway system), streetlights have shaped the way we navigate the built environment.
Developers equated them with progress: stimulating commerce and deterring crime. They marked social, economic, and racial boundaries: framing debates about equity and public space. Straddling the worlds of art and utility, streetlights are synecdoches for urban experience, standing for power and progress, romance and solitude, nostalgia and hope. Timeless and modern, venerated and mundane, they bring the heavens to human scale.
Published by Hat & Beard Press
Follow @streetlampilluminati on Instagram for updates.
Press
Los Angeles’ heavenly lights, PRINT Magazine, June 24, 2024
Leave the street lights alone, Get a Grip on Lighting, June 3, 2024
How LA’s streetlights serve as beacons to the city’s past, LAist, April 9, 2024
LA’s streetlights are kinda a big deal, KPCC, April 5, 2024
A guide to LA’s most overlooked design legacy: streetlights, Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2024
Review: Urban Light, Alta Journal, February 19, 2024
The 37 best books about Los Angeles culture (and beyond) published in 2023, LA TACO, December 22, 2023
Streetlights parallel the history of Los Angeles in ‘Electric Moons,’ Circling the News, December 18, 2023
Shining a light on the rediscovered art of Vermonica, Spectrum News, March 31, 2021
The future of the streetlight might be in the past, CityLab, November 20, 2019
Transportation History
The history of RTD’s (and MTA’s) in-house transit police force: 1978-1997, The Source, 2024
How the Purple Line is making history, The Source, 2024
Why the Northridge quake was a defining moment for transit, The Source, 2024
The Red Line just turned 30. Here’s why it matters, The Source
Architecture + Design
Streetlight weather, Blueprint, 2024
Chasing streetlights, Curbed LA, 2018
How light pole banners took over U.S. cities, Curbed, 2018
What Our Collections Say About Us, Unframed, 2017
Luther goes viral, Unframed, 2017
Food + Wine
A Matter of Haut Gout: The Ragout in English Print Culture, Fonds of Food (Oxford University Press) 2024
The Case for Cans, Wine & Spirits Magazine, 2022
How the 1984 Olympics Defined California Cuisine in the Eyes of the World, Los Angeles Magazine, 2018
The Weird Science Behind Chain Restaurant Menus, Vice, 2018
So You Think You Can Dance––With the Dough? Roads & Kingdoms, 2018
The Bros Who Disrupted the Sandwich, Eater, 2017
The Official "Longest Pizza in the World" Guinness World Record Was Set in Fontana, California, LA Weekly, 2017
Shroomtown, Lucky Peach, 2015
Taste-Based Medicine, Gastronomica, 2015
The Language of Food Gifts in an Eighteenth Century Dining Club, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery, 2015
The Rise of the Electronic Cigarette Cognoscenti, The Huffington Post, 2014
Does the Foodie Have a Soul? Gastronomica, 2013
The Politics of the Turtle Feast, The Appendix Journal of Experimental History, 2013
Can Kombucha Couture Save the World? The Huffington Post, 2013
How to Brew 17th Century Coffee in Four Easy Steps, The Huffington Post, 2013
Essays + Reviews
Bruce Richards at Sea View Gallery, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, 2024
Handheld Gods, CURRENT:LA, 2024
Sabrina Che at Great Art Space, Los Angeles, Artillery, 2023
Landscape Through the Eyes of Abstraction at CMATO, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, 2022
Lukas Geronimas at Parker Gallery, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, 2022
Disassembly Line at SPY Projects/Molly’s Garage, Artillery, 2022
Michael McMillen at LA Louver, Artillery, 2021
Caitlin Keogh at Overduin and Co, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, 2021
Cammie Staros at Shulamit Nazarian, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, 2021
Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Artillery, 2021
David Hicks at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Artillery, 2021
Daniel Healey at PBA Projects, Whitehot, 2021
LA Cooks Itself: On Aleksandra Crapanzano’s Eat Cook LA and Elisa Callow’s The Urban Forager, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019
Menu Matters: On Alison Pearlman’s May We Suggest, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019
Writings on the Sober Life, by Luigi Cornaro, Gastronomica
The Food Industries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Food, Culture, and Society
Eating the Enlightenment, by Emma Spary, Food, Culture, and Society
Pasadena City Hall. Photo by Tom Bertolotti
Eighty-eight city halls is a book of essays and documentary photography that explores the architecture of local government in Los Angeles County as a window into the region’s political culture. A collaboration among local government expert Mark Dierking, photographer/humanist Tom Bertolotti, and yours truly, this book zeroes in on a particular municipal building –– the city hall –– to examine the ways in which notions of civic heritage, local identity, and political participation have evolved over the last 150 years. By taking a closer look at the city hall as a category, and the architectural features shared among these 88 municipal buildings, this book provides new insights into the complex politics of cityhood, as well as the larger social, economic, and political forces that have shaped the LA region.
Created in honor of the sculpture’s 10th anniversary, and funded by LACMA and the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows program, this illustrated pocket-size book locates 16 different vintage streetlight specimens throughout Los Angeles, meditating on their manufacturers, histories, and unique designs.
With invaluable research assistance by Glen Norman and illustrations by Didi Beck.
Read about Urban Light (and the field guide) in the Los Angeles Times
Read about Glen Norman’s streetlight photography habit and why LA streetlights matter in Curbed LA
Read more about the project on LACMA’s blog, Unframed
“Can I have one?”
“These are so great! ”
WHAT IS OUTSIDER?
OUTSIDER is an original zine series conceived about 300 years ago
OUTSIDER is a commentary about the way we live, eat, celebrate, and fundraise
OUTSIDER is a sentimental journey into the philosophical thickets of 18th century print culture
OUTSIDER is hand-stained with single origin, third wave coffee
OUTSIDER includes secret recipes that never before have been published
OUTSIDER is available for purchase at Art Catalogues at LACMA and on Etsy
Gourmet Ghettos: Modern Food Rituals
Gourmet Ghettos: Modern Food Rituals was a multidisciplinary exhibition that explored the linkages between Jewish food rituals and the modern 20th century food movement, headquartered in Berkeley, California. Presented at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life between August 28, 2014 and June 26, 2015, this exhibition of over 150 objects attracted more than 6,000 visitors. I co-curated the exhibition with Dr. Francesco Spagnolo.
"From Alexander Portnoy's french fry cravings to eat Chinese food on Christmas, from the abominations of Leviticus to the legendary New York City kosher deli, Jewish food rituals combine religion and history, folklore and stereotype. In many ways, food's remarkable powers of expression are encapsulated by the Jewish experience. Gourmet Ghettos considers how food, ritual, identity, and activism intersect in Jewish life. Using objects from around the world, ranging from cookware, tableware, and kitchen textiles to books, manuscripts, paintings and drawings, this exhibition examines Jewish food rituals as meaningful frameworks in which to contextualize today's food movement."
“If rituals are the core of Jewish life, then the act of dining is the mantle.”
Homo Gastronomicus
Before lending its name to this website, there was Ye Olde Homo Gastronomicus, a zany British food history blog. Started in 2010, when I was doing research in London with only the vaguest outlines of what my dissertation would look like, I posted old menus, dining club records, handwritten recipes and coffee-stained letters: fragments of an near-extinct food culture with similarities to the present day. Along the way, I made a few discoveries:
The first-ever recorded mention of toad-in-the-hole, the iconic British dish. (This got some press from The Telegraph. Even better, the historical English cooking legend Ivan Day deemed me “the foremost blogger on eighteenth century English food culture,” a great honor!
The infamous “Riddle Menus” of the British Library (MS 15956). Check out the recent Atlas Obscura article about my piece, and their efforts to crowdsource all the answers.
A piece on the 17th century traveler and virtuoso Hans Sloane’s food preferences that earned me a shout out from the London Review of Books.
A series on the phenomenon of turtle feasting, the hottest and most controversial food trend of the 1750s. (This became grounds for a separate article I did for the Appendix Journal of Experimental History, which you can read here.)
Using much of the material from the blog, I did eventually wrap up the Ph.D., granted by UC Berkeley’s Department of History. If you’re brave, you can read the whole thing. I tackled one of the most universal, misunderstood, and tantalizingly elusive subjects ever, our gustatory sense, or taste.
““Men have been writing about the sense of taste since the beginning of the written word. Diets have changed and nutritional theories have come and gone. Human convictions about taste, however, have remained quite consistent over time; they are characterized by continuity rather than change. ”
The Lost Meals of the Thursday’s Club
In 2011, I found a trove of archival menus belonging to one of the most illustrious dining clubs of all time: the Thursday's Club call'd the Royal Philosophers (they still exist today). Every Thursday, the men convened for dinner in one of the swank private dining rooms of a prominent London tavern, which was patronized by the likes of Johnson and Boswell and where the food was served on silver plate. There, a hearty commons would be served to them––generous chops of butcher’s meat, fresh fish, heaping servings of boiled fowls with bacon, market greens, butter and cheese, fruit pies and puddings––all washed down with pints of claret and port. These dinners came to be attended by princes and politicians, explorers and Eskimos, scholars and celebrities.
The menu from 1766
This resource contains over 7000 different menus, which offer fascinating new insights into the significance of food and communal dining in the 18th century. In July, 2015, I presented some of this research at the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery. One day, this database will be a searchable resource that will further our understandings of dining and social networking in urban life.
Read my article in the 2015 Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery.
