Quote:
Originally Posted by Beaudry
Let's say you had a time machine (apart from the one that is this thread; a real one, with blinky lights on it and stuff) and you could pop back to Old LA for, say, a weekend...
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Book me a room at the United States Hotel for the weekend of October 14-16, 1910.
I'd be in town principally for the dedication of the new Federal Building at Temple Square on Saturday, but there'd be plenty of other things to see and do while I'm there.
Assuming I could get my hands on a camera during my visit, I'd take a ton of good pictures of various buildings for posterity, most notably the Baker Block, of which there appear to be no detailed photos still extant.
I'd also take better photos of the then-very-recently-bombed L.A. Times Building.
I'd like to take a 360-degree panorama from the top of the 1888 Court House. (1910 would be the last year you could do that, what with the Hall of Records rising at that time.)
I'd also try to get an Edison cylinder recording of the bell chimes of the Court House for posterity (and L.A. City Hall's bells, if there actually were bells in that tower – does anyone know?).
And you bet I'd walk the diagonal alignment of Spring Street about a million times. I'd ride Court Flight over and over, too, until they kicked me off of it. (Nevermind Angels Flight – been there, done that, 50 years later.)
I'd eat breakfast at the Hollenbeck Hotel, dinner at the Hotel Nadeau, and lunch at this little hole-in-the-wall indicated in this old postcard. Gotta be good! Someone actually wrote home about it!
And, I'd take a decent picture of each and every block of Downtown that we haven't already seen pictures of here.
I'd do a bunch of other things, too, including an afternoon's jaunt down to the
Longstreet Palms (of course), but this is all I can think of off the top of my head.
Oh, one more thing. Before I left, I'd buy a quarter-section of land in the western outskirts and bring the deed back home with me to the present day.
-Scott