Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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A year ago last month, Los Angeles's Natural History Museum opened its Becoming LA exhibit -- an illustrated, interactive story of how Los Angeles became the world class city it is today. None of which could have happened without some of the most impressive water engineering projects in American history.
And now that drought and water is the minds of nearly every Angeleno, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson asked Karen Wise, Vice President of Exhibits of Education at the museum: what can LA's history with water teach us today?
If you want to watch first hand evidence of how the transformation of Los Angeles from desert to oasis was sold to the public,watch Los Angeles City of Destiny, a short film produced by Rodney Gilliam in 1949 for the Standard Oil company:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwzKW_6r_ng
The conversation at NHM continues: there's an art exhibit with work by painter Rob Reynolds called Just Add Water, and a series of great discussions under the same name.