With the completion of the American railroads in the 1880s and the publicity that followed, luring Easterners and Midwesterners to America's newly conceived Eden, Los Angeles, a city of farms, was transformed into a city of houses. From the orange groves of Pasadena to the Pacific shores of Santa Monica, neighbourhoods emerged with houses whose diverse architecture immediately revealed the independent spirit of early residents.Queen Anne, Arts and Crafts, Beaux-Arts, Moorish and Mission houses, designed by the city's first generation of trained architects - Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, Greene & Greene, Robert D. Farquhar, Alfred F. Rosenheim - initiated Los Angeles' engagement with national and international architectural developments. With over three hundred and fifty archival duotone photographs, landscape and house plans, brought together for the first time, Los Angeles Houses, 1885-1919, the first of two volumes, profiles the lives of Los Angeles' innovators, and where and how they lived in and around downtown Los Angeles before the city was transformed by the grand residential developments of the 1920s explored in volume two, Los Angeles Houses, 1920-1935.