Sept. 4, 1926:The Times publishes a map showing the streets of the day, noting the changes made since Ord’s survey.

Sept. 4, 1981: Mayor Tom Bradley and actress Bernadette Peters cut the cake for Los Angeles’ 200th birthday

Jan. 1, 1892: To retell the founding of Los Angeles, The Times reprints an account from Juan Jose Warner’s “Historical Sketch of Los Angeles County” (1876). This account also appears in the Thompson and West’s “History of Los Angeles County, California” (1880).

Then again, maybe that’s not how it happened:

Historical Society of Southern California, Quarterly. J.M. Guinn, a paper read Dec. 2, 1895. You can download the entire volume in pdf from Google here. All 14 megabytes of it. Guinn’s article, “The Plan of Old Los Angeles,” begins on Page 217. (We always download everything at the Daily Mirror HQ because Google has a nasty habit of putting a digitized document online and then breaking the link, as we discovered with “Los Angeles in 7 Days.”)

Sept. 4, 1926: And this is how The Times told the story in the 1920s: