Photo: Futterer, Holyland Exhibition, Probably late 1920s. Courtesy Corralitas Red Car Property

One of my favorite local blogs is a group project, Corralitas Red Car Property, which is partly devoted to the effort to restore and preserve the former Red Car terminus above Glendale Boulevard in Silver Lake, and which also has turned into a defacto naturalists site as well as historical project. Hummingbirds. Foxes. Stairways. And this month, according to Diane Edwardson, the group is "reviewing the photographic history of our neighborhood
surrounding the 2 Freeway in anticipation of the EIR for State Route 2 Glendale Freeway Terminus Improvement Project." (More on that to come.)

Some surprising and stirring photos have been collected and posted; the online exhibition includes a foray into the Holy Lands, one of the religious projects that flourished in the area in the first decades of the 20th century.

According to Red Car:

Antonio F. Futterer founded the Holyand Bible Knowledge Society in 1924. It is a non-profit, interdenominational organization. Futterer's descendants still offer tours of the Holyland Exhibition today. Futterer's photographs of the neighborhood in addition to the Holyland building (at the corner of Lake View Ave. and Allesandro Way) chronicle change since 1923.

Futterer is the author of "Eye-Ographic" bible study. After years of research in the "Bible Lands," he realized the Bible and its lands are inseparable. The Exhibition incorporates the history of the Holy Lands in their visual method of bible study with photographs, art and artifacts.

The Exhibition also kept current with the changing times in the Middle East: offering "Palestine Tours" prior to World War II and "Israel Tours" after World War II. (See photos above.)

To this day, the Holyland Exhibition has a meticulously tended garden featuring native plant species of the Holy Lands.