Exposition Park Rose Garden

This guide to the Exposition Park Rose Garden in Los Angeles traces the ground's transformation from a rowdy fairground of camel races and one of the city's most fashionable brothels into the sunken, geometric rose garden planted here in the 1920s. It follows attorney William Bowen's campaign to clean up the site and the rose experts hired to lay out its beds. Four marble statues carved by the Danish sculptor Thyra Boldsen still stand at the garden's corners, having been stolen, vandalized, and recovered more than once.