A Mount Washington home slated for demolition yields a trove of maps, including one from 1592.The acquisition gives the city library one of the country's top five library map archives.
Shown are some of the thousands of maps
from the collection found in the former Mount Washington home of John Feathers,
who died in February. The maps are being donated to the Los Angeles Public
Library. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
|
The discovery that real estate agent Matthew Greenberg made when he stepped
inside a Mount Washington cottage will put the Los Angeles Public Library on the
map.
Stashed everywhere in the 948-square-foot tear-down were maps. Tens of thousands of maps. Fold-out street maps were stuffed in file cabinets, crammed into cardboard boxes, lined up on closet shelves and jammed into old dairy crates. Wall-size roll-up maps once familiar to schoolchildren were stacked in corners. Old globes were lined in rows atop bookshelves also filled with maps and atlases.
A giant plastic topographical map of the United States covered a bathroom wall and bookcases displaying Thomas Bros. map books and other street guides lined a small den.
The occupant of the 90-year-old cottage had died in February. Greenberg's job was to empty the home so it could be demolished and its 18,000-square-foot lot, near the top of Canyon Vista Drive, divided into two parcels. His clients had told him to rent a Dumpster and throw away whatever he found inside.But Greenberg couldn't bring himself to do that, especially after he read a recent Los Angeles Times article about the Central Library's map collection. Instead, he invited its map librarian, Glen Creason, to Mount Washington to look at the trove.
Creason called the find unbelievable. "I think there are at least a million maps here," he said. "This dwarfs our collection — and we've been collecting for 100 years."
Creason returned to the home Thursday with 10 library employees and volunteers to box up the maps. The acquisition will give the city library one of the country's top five library map archives, behind the Library of Congress and public libraries in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, he said.As the workers went through the tiny house, they tried to piece together the wanderlust life of John Feathers, the man who amassed the collection, apparently, beginning in childhood.
But they had little evidence to go on, and it remained a mystery exactly how and why he obtained so many maps.
Stashed everywhere in the 948-square-foot tear-down were maps. Tens of thousands of maps. Fold-out street maps were stuffed in file cabinets, crammed into cardboard boxes, lined up on closet shelves and jammed into old dairy crates. Wall-size roll-up maps once familiar to schoolchildren were stacked in corners. Old globes were lined in rows atop bookshelves also filled with maps and atlases.
A giant plastic topographical map of the United States covered a bathroom wall and bookcases displaying Thomas Bros. map books and other street guides lined a small den.
The occupant of the 90-year-old cottage had died in February. Greenberg's job was to empty the home so it could be demolished and its 18,000-square-foot lot, near the top of Canyon Vista Drive, divided into two parcels. His clients had told him to rent a Dumpster and throw away whatever he found inside.But Greenberg couldn't bring himself to do that, especially after he read a recent Los Angeles Times article about the Central Library's map collection. Instead, he invited its map librarian, Glen Creason, to Mount Washington to look at the trove.
Creason called the find unbelievable. "I think there are at least a million maps here," he said. "This dwarfs our collection — and we've been collecting for 100 years."
Creason returned to the home Thursday with 10 library employees and volunteers to box up the maps. The acquisition will give the city library one of the country's top five library map archives, behind the Library of Congress and public libraries in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, he said.As the workers went through the tiny house, they tried to piece together the wanderlust life of John Feathers, the man who amassed the collection, apparently, beginning in childhood.
But they had little evidence to go on, and it remained a mystery exactly how and why he obtained so many maps.
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