Vintage L.A.: The Facebook Page

JUST A quick post to turn your attention to the Vintage L.A. Facebook page. It's a treasure trove of long-looks backward at L.A. -- not so much in its innocence, but rather in its fast-foward display of persistent reincarnation. Maintained by another L.A.-booster, the page moderator encourages fans to contribute photos, scans, scrapbook ephemera from their personal collections. Images abound. It's fascinating looking at some of the landmarks that don't change, but the vast recasting of everything around them. (Check out Grauman's Chinese in the background of this picture.)

It's easy to get lost in a game of "so, what's there now?" So careful, while it's a great ride on old roads, back in time, it's definitely a time suck.


(photo via vintage l.a.)


L.G.

A Travel Guide to the Past

YOU might just want to check out this little time-machine jaunt: University of California Press recently republished Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City of the Angeles.

On his blog, L.A. Observed, Kevin Roderick reports:

My favorite new Los Angeles book — the one I took driving with me on Saturday — is a guidebook from the distant past . . . [the] guide . . . works 70 years later as historical snapshot of Los Angeles the way it was at the cusp of World War II — neighborhoods, places of interest (the ostrich and alligator farms on Mission Road), recreation (45 bowling alleys), literature and familiar restaurants like Musso & Frank and El Cholo.

For those of you who are interested in spending a little bit more time in L.A.'s booster past you'll find some of that atmosphere, no doubt, but as well, the book does more than glance on many of the themes we've already explored in class -- boosterism, vanished L.A., the nascent film industry, Julius Schulman and Raymond Chandler, just for starters.

For more of Kevin's post and a great photo tour of Downtown L.A. and its built history -- go here.

I've already ordered mine, I'll let you know what I think in the weeks to come.

-- L.G.

Pacific Ocean Park

AS a “theme park enthusiast” of sorts, the video of Pacific Ocean Park from class immediately caught my attention. I had never heard of the POP on the Pier, seeing as it was only around for roughly ten years. With the opening and overwhelming success of Disneyland in 1955, it seems only logical that Los Angeles would want to jump on the theme park bandwagon as well. From what we viewed in the clip, it was clear to see that they were trying to appeal to the idea of modernity that was prevalent during the 50s. But what I found interesting was the location chosen for this nautical yet futuristic park. The fact that it was placed on a pier made it reflect back on the pier theme parks and attractions of the East Coast, rather than creating its own Los Angeles identity. Was this intentional? Perhaps Los Angeles was trying to attract tourist crowds but also mirror the culture of the East Coast attractions as well. POP was initially met with high crowds and success but when Santa Monica began an urban renewal project of Ocean Park in 1965 it made it difficult for tourists to reach POP. This resulted in a drastic loss of attendance and the ultimate destruction of the park. Personally, I feel like the role of an amusement park in Los Angeles is unnecessary. LA is already an immensely popular tourist destination in itself, the addition of any major theme park, then or now, could seem superfluous.

--Reilly Wilson

image: pacific ocean park brochure
courtesy, robert huffstutter via flickr creative commons

The New Italy, the New Spain, the New Athens

SAN FRANCISCO was known as the city but it was Los Angeles that grew immensely and steadily throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. With the instatement of two rail lines into Southern California, Los Angeles began to emerge and flourish. At first, the “cow counties” were populated by a group of migrants made up of mostly white, middle class Protestants that bought into the spectacular marketing scheme that Los Angeles had to offer. By the 1920s, Los Angeles tied San Francisco’s population, but it was Los Angeles that had a secret weapon: space. Los Angeles spread across land from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, making it possible for the population to increase at rapid rates.

What boosted L.A.’s existence were the imperative connections it had. Journalists were added onto the railroad payrolls so they would have an incentive to boast about the “year-round sunshine” that came with living in California. It was these publicists that worked with city boosters, much like Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Gray Otis to promote the region. Even after Otis died, the Times collaborated with the Chamber of Commerce and the All Year Club to endorse L.A. as “the West Coast metropolis.” L.A. was an escape from the overcrowded East. People still tend to see Los Angeles as that. They leave their snow-filled hometown and retreat to the southern California beaches. When I go back home, I constantly get asked why I’m so pale, as if they think I spend every day under the bright California sun. I myself was disappointed after spending last summer in L.A. only to find that it didn’t live up to its reputation, that the June Gloom never seemed to end and the days at the beach were few and far between.

Being the spread out city that it was, Los Angeles was equipped for the arrival of the automobile. With this came the Auto Club and tourists, Disneyland and Magic Mountain. I would love to learn more about the influence the automobile had on the creation of the city. What I understood from what David Fine said in his book Imagining Los Angeles, was that the automobile did not have any influence per say, but rather the city was prepared for the use of them. It wasn’t until recently, as I was driving along the 405 with one of my California-native friends that I was informed about the car industry’s involvement in the making of the layout of the city as it is today.

If you look at present-day Los Angeles, you can see the clear separations of the different communities. Before the railroad came about, the city was made up of Mexicans, Indians, Anglos, and Chinese. There were plenty of racial conflicts, so the white Anglos took control of the land. They began to see the darker-skinned population as “dangerous aliens and foreigners” who, from the eyes of the Anglos, were a threat to the community and any progress that needed to be made. Because of their ignorance and racism, there are modern ethnic neighborhoods that have been extended from the past.

The history of Los Angeles can be seen in the fiction that was written during the time the city was being established. Although there is so much literature from this time, one must keep in mind that the writers were “outsiders, newcomers, visitors” to Los Angeles. Therefore, the majority of the written work was about the differences between the East and the new West. Displacement and estrangement played major roles in the fiction, the authors focusing on themes of “unreality, masquerade, and deception.” Although fiction, it is these themes that influenced the people of the time, bringing a whole new light to California. Unfortunately, the fiction of this time, and even the newer fiction that comes in the form of screenplays and movies, has become more factual than not. Hollywood has overtaken all of Los Angeles, becoming the image for how people are supposed to represent themselves. We have all taken on roles, characters of a movie that should be called Reality. Yet, despite all this, Los Angeles still holds some sort of appeal to those on the outside looking in.

-- Jackie DiBiase
photo: Close-up of Hollywood sign, Hollywood, California, USA
credit: Michael Dean Roberts

What's In A Boost?

L.A.’s initial growth comes from people who oppressed a marginalized group for financial gain and power. While this finding is unsettling, it is hardly original and at least as Angelenos we can pride ourselves in the fact that we did not begin this trend. In his book, Imagining Los Angeles, David Fine, in delves into this idea more in-depth, “The old Californios, the ‘first families’ who held the land grants, were unable to defend their claims in Anglo courts – unable to pay the legal fees much less to understand the laws that were disenfranchising them – and so lost their lands, piece by piece, to Yankee speculators,”(Fine 6-7). And after these “first families” are eliminated, the possibilities for this space called Los Angeles become literally limitless. For the love of God, we brought irrigation to the desert. Railroads initially created a way for Americans to get to the city, “the Southern Pacific in 1876 and the Santa Fe in 1886,” coupled with, “…land speculators, subdividers, city boosters, and railroad tycoons,”(Fine 4) created a mixture from which Los Angeles did not have a chance to be unsuccessful.

What I personally found to be so interesting is the fact that while the railroad brought people to the city, it is the invention of the automobile that designed the city’s layout. Fine writes, “In contributing to the decentralization of the city, the automobile diminished the central city’s hegemony,”(Fine 9). The same invention that plagues our freeways now is also responsible for the disjointed nature of Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs. The fact that the city is so disjointed from its genesis speaks to the fact that Los Angeles can still be considered as divided. People from the South Bay dread having to go five miles East, because God forbid they find themselves in Hawthorne. Celebrities that live in the Hollywood Hills never venture to downtown; exceptions include filming and soup kitchen publicity stunts.

Another interesting development for the city is also probably the most well-known: the development of the film industry. The obvious reasons for this include: “the region had plenty of sunshine, open space for outdoors shooting, and a varied landscape,”(Fine 12). The final reason is particularly sinister, and contributes to the over-all “scummy nature” of Angelenos. Los Angeles, “also had the appeal of being 3000 miles away from the Edison patents,”(Fine 12). First we remove landowners from the city by means of forcefully taking their land, and then our major industry exploits the ingenuity of one man’s developments.
But remember, to me, Los Angeles is like a younger sibling; I can trash on it as much as I want but the minute a “non-local” wants to say horrible things about it, I feel the need to defend this city. I feel compelled to defend the boosters, the tycoons, the celebrities. But I also feel like we can’t turn a blind eye to all the horrible crap that is a part of our city’s development. So what’s the “fair” thing to do? I guess it means just loving Los Angeles for what it is and for what it has become, while acknowledging the glaring faults as well.

--Hailey Hanann

caption: I-8 Meets California 125
credit: Allan Ferguson, flickr creative commons

It's the Water:

L.A. had to be wrestled into existence. One of the tropes you will hear, time and again, is the saga of the water wars. L.A. was --and is -- a desert. Without water, the city wouldn't have bloomed. Boosters -- businessmen, land speculators, the railroads -- had already embroidered more than a little on the L.A. narrative -- remember the citrus crate boxes we talked about last week? -- but big business saw a Utopia in the parched desert so close to the sea.

History tells us that what became to be known as "the water wars" began when Frederick Eaton was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1898. He appointed his friend, William Mulholland (yes, that Mullholland), to head up a new city agency, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).

Eaton and Mulholland's vision stretched far greater than the little Pueblo that was founded in 1781. They set their sites on the run off from the Sierra Nevada river that ran through Owens Valley. The plan was to build an aqueduct that would deliever water to the basin -- essentially literally de-hydrating the Owens Valley -- its people and its prospects -- to allow L.A. to flourish.

It took nearly eight years,2,000 workers and the digging of 164 tunnels to complete the aqueduct in 1913. Water from the Owens River reached a reservoir in the San Fernando Valley on November 5. During the opening-day ceremony, Mulholland spoke these famous words: "There it is. Take it."

After all, he did.

photo caption: Dynamite found during a string of sabotage incidents along the Owens Valley Aqueduct
photo credit: image via Wikipedia Commons, circa 1924