Here is a (very) minor puzzle.
'
http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz0027xpz7
The only information associated with this photo is a date, 1937, and a caption: "Crowd of Workers Gathered for a Strike." I wondered if it were possible to figure out what strike it was?
The photo comes from UCLA's digital collection of newspaper photographs from the
Los Angeles Daily News.
[The Daily News, no relation to today's SFV-based Daily News, was founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt IV in 1923. After an early bankruptcy, it was acquired by newspaperman Manchester Boddy and operated as a moderately pro-labor and pro-Democratic paper in a media environment dominated by the far right-wing Times and Examiner. It continued until 1954 when ironically it was acquired by the Chandler interests and merged into their tabloid Los Angeles Mirror.]
In the foreground we see an ambulance (?) occupied by an attendant and what might be a customer loaded in feet-first. There are three policemen and an all-male crowd of workers who don't exactly look like they have white-collar jobs. An apparent gasometer looms in the background, and a few names of businesses are visible: "Commercial Super Service Associated," "Tarps-Rope[-ated?]," and furthest, "Newman Bros."
The 1938 city directory shows:
lapl
and a Sanborn map:
lapl
...confirms the presence of a gasometer at the SE corner of Alameda and E. 7th.
So it seems we're looking east on E. 7th street towards Alameda from Central, although I could be fooled by the perspective. At the SE corner of E. 7th and Central is the Los Angeles Union [Wholesale] Terminal Market (mentioned back on page 747 in the thread), which would be a plausible locus for labor disturbances.
The closest thing to a vegetable workers' dispute I could find in the
Los Angeles Times was this from April 18, 1937:
The next time I'm at the Central Library, maybe I'll take a look at the microfilm and see if the
Daily News ran the photo...(well I did say it was a
minor puzzle
)