In 2024, the Los Angeles Conservancy, together with the Where Women Made History initiative of the National Trust for Historic Places, launched the Los Angeles Women’s Landmarks project. This ambitious, multi-year effort addresses the inherent biases that have historically skewed the landmark designation process.

Of the 1,300 places in Los Angeles designated as Historic-Cultural Monuments, less than three percent represent women’s history.

Working with the L.A. City Office of Historic Resources, the University of Southern California, and many others, the project makes Los Angeles a laboratory to create a new national model for a more gender-equitable historic designation process, looking at both the existing HCMs to add diverse women’s history that was omitted, as well as sites of women’s achievement that should be designated as new HCM’s.

The project will also generate new public-facing interpretive and student educational programs that communicate the critical role that women have played in shaping Los Angeles.

In the summer of 2024, the Conservancy took a major step forward. Thanks to a grant from the National Trust’s “Where Women Made History” initiative, we were thrilled to welcome Arabella Delgado, an intern from USC, who studied forty-three Historic-Cultural Monuments (HCMs) in Los Angeles. Her goal? To understand how HCM sites represent women’s heritage and to find ways to better acknowledge women’s contributions to the city’s history.

Join her in this short video that takes a closer look at five landmarks in Los Angeles and explores how each site either celebrates—or overlooks—the remarkable contributions of the women behind these HCMs.

Photo credits: “Sisterhood is Beautiful.” Alcoholism Center for Women, circa 1974. Courtesy Carolyn Weathers private collection; The Woman’s Building, 2017. Source: Laura Dominguez/L.A. Conservancy, Sumi (Sakai) Kozawa at Tokio Florist, February 14, 1999. Photo courtesy of Giovanni Jance.  International Institute, Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1937; Marilyn Monroe Residence, Photo by Mercer/Vine.