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• UHA 11th Biennial Conference: Metropolitan Majorities

  • Start
    09 Oct 2025
  •  
  • End
    12 Oct 2025
  •  
  • Location
    Los Angeles, CA

  Register

  Welcome to the UHA conference registration page! 

  Early bird pricing is available until July 10, 2025. Registration is required of all presenters by July 15, 2025. A program will be posted this summer with full session details. 

  The UHA will host two receptions, free of charge: 

  October 9, 2023: Welcome Reception at the Biltmore Los Angeles

  October 11, 2023: The UHA President-Elect's Reception at the Biltmore Los Angeles 

  Tickets for the Friday (Oct. 10) evening banquet are available now. Admission includes dinner and wine. You will receive an email closer to the event to make your menu selections. 

  FRIDAY NIGHT BANQUET TICKETS HERE!

  
  

  The UHA is offering 5 tours during the conference, led by experts in LA and California history. Tickets available at urbanhistory.org/events.

  
  

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• Imagining Bunker Hill: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

  • When
    09 Oct 2025
  •  
    2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Los Angeles
  • Spaces left
    26

  Register

  Imagining Bunker Hill: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

  Thursday, Oct. 9, 2-5 pm

  Transport: Walking tour. Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.

  Tour Maximum: 30 people

  Cost: $10

  Tour Description: 

  Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill looms larger in the imagination than its geographical footprint would suggest. From its beginnings as an elite enclave at the end of the 19 th century to the gritty film noir fictions of the Cold War era and the global corporate skyscrapers of the late twentieth century, the neighborhood has been a testing ground for ideas about how cities should develop and what the urban life of Los Angeles should be. This walking tour examines Bunker Hill's shift from a residential neighborhood to a target for redevelopment and its reemergence as a commercial and cultural hub through the framework of thirty-year cycles of literal and symbolic imagining in the 1930s, 60s, 90s, and 2020s.

  
  

  This engaging and interactive walking tour covers roughly 2 miles round trip, including some stairs. We begin at the base of Bunker Hill, view the Depression-era lobby of the One Bunker Hill building, ascend to Hope Street, and walk along Grand Avenue to LA’s mid-century “cultural acropolis” at the Music Center. The tour ends at the bottom of the Angels Flight funicular across from Grand Central Market, where participants can stop in for snacks or happy hour.

  
  

  Tour Leaders:

  
  

  Dr. Andrea Thabet is a historian and historic preservation consultant specializing in Los Angeles, urban, and public history. She is currently on the Humanities Faculty at the Colburn School, Conservatory of Music.

  
  

  Dr. Meredith Drake Reitan is an Associate Dean at the University of Southern California’s Graduate School and Lecturer at the Price School of Public Policy and School of Architecture. She is founder and co-director of the Bunker Hill Refrain project, an immersive digital recreation of a neighborhood lost to urban renewal.

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• UHA Conference Banquet

  • When
    10 Oct 2025
  •  
  • Location
    The Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles

  Register

  The Urban History Association will host a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles on Friday, October 10. 

  Admission includes dinner and wine. You will receive an email closer to the event date to submit your menu selections. 

  Please note the reduced ticket price for graduate students!

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• Lost Chicano Urban Design: A Tour of LA’s Eastside

  • When
    10 Oct 2025
  •  
    8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    Los Angeles

  Register

  Lost Chicano Urban Design: A Tour of LA’s Eastside

  Friday Oct 10, 8am - noon

  Transport: Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel. We will ride the Metro together to 3 stops: Mariachi Plaza, ELA Civic Center, and Indiana, walking around each site.

  Bring either a Metro pass or $5.25 for three Metro tickets. There will be an option to linger afterwards for lunch near Indiana Station.

  Tour Maximum: 30 people

  Cost: $10

  Tour description:

  In East Los Angeles, a 1960s-era emphasis on cultural memory and meaning became visible through a series of fine-grained urban design interventions led by Chicano artists, architects, and residents. The neighborhood evolved into a living representation of Aztlán—the mythical homeland of the Aztecs. Murals became the visual language of resistance and pride, transforming blank walls of public and private buildings into vibrant canvases. Public buildings embraced the aesthetics of Latin America’s international architecture movement, but with a distinct Chicano twist. Indigenous figures, now seen as Chicano political icons, appeared on both public and commercial buildings, transforming them into cultural landmarks. These structures told stories, blending images of the past with a vision of an idealized, utopian future. These structures remain even as the region has transformed into one part of a sprawling, polycentric Latinx metropolis.

  
  

  Tour stops include the Edward R. Roybal Health Center (La Clinica de Colores),

  Belvedere Park, the Pan-American Bank with its José Reyes Mexa mosaic mural, First Street Store, and Mariachi Plaza. Tourgoers may choose to stay for lunch at El Mercado de Los Angeles, Birria Los Socios, or Los Cinco Puntos.

  
  

  Tour leader:

  James Rojas is an urban planner who grew up in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles.

  
  

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• Landmark Gems of LA’s Historic Core

  • When
    10 Oct 2025
  •  
    1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
  • Location
    Los Angeles

  Register

  
  

  Landmark Gems of LA’s Historic Core

  
  

  Friday Oct. 10, 1:00-3:00 pm

  Transport: Walking tour. Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.

  Tour Maximum: 36 people – will be split into 3 groups of 12 each. 

  Cost: $25

  Tour Description:  

  Join the Los Angeles Conservancy for a guided exploration of the city’s Historic Core, home to a remarkable concentration of early 20th-century architecture. This two-hour walking tour begins at the 1923 Beaux Arts-style Biltmore Hotel, once the largest hotel west of Chicago and famously known as the “Host of the Coast.” Highlights include the original lobby with its Moorish beamed ceiling, a sweeping Spanish Baroque staircase, and a 350-foot-long galleria leading to a series of lavishly decorated ballrooms.

  Next, tourgoers visit the Los Angeles Central Library, Bertram Goodhue’s richly symbolic 1926 landmark that merges ancient iconography with early Moderne design. A devastating fire and threats of demolition in the 1970s helped inspire the founding of the Los Angeles Conservancy. The tour concludes at the Bradbury Building, an 1893 commercial structure whose skylit atrium, open-cage elevators, and intricate ironwork remain one of the most iconic and visually striking interiors in Los Angeles.

  Tour leaders: 

  L.A. Conservancy docents.

  
  

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• California Suburban Dreams and Dystopias: Altadena and Pasadena

  • When
    11 Oct 2025
  •  
    8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    Pasadena and Altadena

  Register

  
  

  California Suburban Dreams and Dystopias: Altadena and Pasadena

  Tour sponsored by the Schuele Family Charitable Fund

  Saturday, October 11, 8am - noon

  Transport: Van tour.  Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.

  Tour Maximum: 26 people

  Cost: $25

  Tour description:  

  One of the oldest tropes about Los Angeles is the juxtaposition between "sunshine and noir" in the nation's original suburban city. This tour explores the history of suburban dreams and dystopias in one corner of the LA metropolis, Pasadena and Altadena.  Set against the San Gabriel Mountains, these suburbs were formative locations for the evolution of suburban dreaming in California. In the late 19^th century, Eastern millionaires and Midwestern home-seekers created a landscape of affluent leisure and communion with nature in Pasadena. Elite white settlement attracted a parallel migration of Black families (including future baseball pioneer, Jackie Robinson) who pursued opportunities in service jobs, property ownership and political and social freedom. These dreams clashed repeatedly in conflicts over segregation and civil rights. By the 1960s and 1970s, neighboring Altadena beckoned as an interracial suburban haven, and ultimately achieved unusually high rates of Black multigenerational homeownership. The 2025 Eaton Fire challenged the area’s suburban dream once again, destroying nearly 50 percent of Altadena’s structures. In its aftermath, competing voices are advocating different paths for building back in the context of housing, justice, and climate crises.  This van tour explores these histories, including stops along Orange Grove Boulevard and the Rose Bowl area, historic Old Town Pasadena and the 710 freeway, Eaton Canyon, Altadena, and impacts of the 2025 fire. The tour concludes with a Q&A with community activists and organizations advocating for a just and sustainable reconstruction. 

  
  

  Tour leaders:

  Becky Nicolaides, research affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, is author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford), and co-editor with Andrew Wiese of The Suburb Reader (Routledge).

  
  

  Andrew Wiese, Professor of History at San Diego State University, is author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago), and co-editor with Becky Nicolaides of The Suburb Reader (Routledge).

  
  

  
  

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• The Hidden Histories of Los Angeles’ Beaches

  • When
    12 Oct 2025
  •  
    8:00 AM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Santa Monica

  Register

  The Hidden Histories of Los Angeles’ Beaches

  Sunday, Oct. 12, 8am-2pm

  
  

  Transport:  Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.  Walking and Metro Purple Line public transportation https://www.rome2rio.com/map/The-Biltmore-Hotel-Los-Angeles-South-Grand-Avenue-Los-Angeles-CA-USA/Santa-Monica-Pier#r/Tram

  It takes about an hour to reach Santa Monica from Downtown LA using public transport. Tour leaders or chaperone will be available to guide people from the Biltmore hotel to public transportation at 8am, then at 9am the tour will begin in Santa Monica. 

  Tour Maximum:  25 people

  Cost: $10

  Bring either a Metro pass or $5.00 for Metro ticket. Each participant will be responsible for their own lunch cost, up to $25 depending on what they want to dine on at the cafe.

  
  

  Tour description:  

  At first glance, it may seem as if all the beaches of the Los Angeles region resemble each other: sea, sand, seagulls, and those iconic powder-blue lifeguard towers. Yet there is more to the Los Angeles coastline than meets the eye. This tour explores the hidden histories of Los Angeles’ beaches, including the history of African American beach access and discrimination, the environmental history of the shores, the life, death and rebirth of world-famous Muscle Beach, and the repression of gay cruising at Crystal Beach. The tour begins at Historic Belmar Park, a Santa Monica commemorative justice initiative which features an outdoor exhibition exploring Black life in the first half of the 20th century. It continues on to early landmarks of Black Santa Monica, including Bay Street Beach, sometimes controversially called “the Inkwell,” followed by Crystal Beach, a cruising ground for gay men and women in the 1950s-70s, and the original location of Muscle Beach, where acrobats and bodybuilders included Jack LaLanne and Steve Reeves. Tourgoers will stop for lunch at the affordable beach cafe Cha Cha Cha (serving Caribbean cuisine). The tour concludes with a walk through Tongva Park, to explore the history of the Gabrieleño-Tongva people, their relationship to the sea, and how the city has commemorated its indigenous past.

  
  

  Tour leaders:

  Alison Rose Jefferson, independent historian and Heritage Conservation Consultant, is author of Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era (University of Nebraska Press).

  Elsa Devienne, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle, is author of Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford).

  
  

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