noirish Los Angeles

[stanklem]

Originally Posted by CityBoyDoug

I always loved the neo-classical exterior when I drove by. It had a rich elegance back in the day. That was then, this is now. Fast forward.
As a venue for its 3,000 seat auditorium and its 1,500 seat dining room...it's 200 space parking is a disaster. I guess the Masons were very lucky to get even the 8 million dollars they got for this faded albatross. Private art museums [as supposedly planned] have not done well in LA over the decades. Several have either relocated or closed up shop. How did the city ever let them build the building without even adequate parking in the first place [insiders]?

PS: I think I figured it out. The bare land on Wilshire Blvd. is worth 8 million. The actual ''temple'' building has a value of ''0''.

Getty.
Norton-Simon
Hammer.

Who is the 'private' owner.
Scientology? They have been purchasing a number of older properties nationwide.

Likely the 200 space parking is 'grandfathered in.'

[Tourmaline]

Originally Posted by Slauson Slim

"Disaster or not, what was the alternative? As I said before, the tracks were by and large in place in the streets before cars; as soon as someone could afford a car, they ditched public transport for all the usual reasons (poor service, freedom, privacy, independence, status), reducing revenue. There is simply no way, even if it had occurred to the owners of the PE and LARy, to relocate all the tracks to run along the curb, which is the only alternative I can think of--impractical and cost-prohibitive. Anyone who looked at the exponential growth of car registrations through the '20s could see that streetcars, as they were laid out originally, were doomed."

Did you ever ride the streetcars? I did - PE to Santa Monica or Long Beach. Cars to downtown shopping with my mom, Hollywood, etc. Fond memories. I remember the wicker seats on the old cars. Middle and working class folks rode the cars to work and shop. What happened in LA happened elsewhere is what happened to the railroads - deliberate downgrading of the service by the owners to persuade folks to go to autos, and transit systems to move to buses. Petroleum and internal combustion engines. LA streetcar public transport was doomed by deliberate management decisions. The LA I grew up in had a reasonable, timely, environmentally sound and useful public transit system. And that's not nostalgia. Subways in NYC and London and SF Bay Area, and street cars in Salt Lake City, Seattle, Sacramento, SF, San Diego etc. move people. It works. I went to work and to college on the streetcars in SF. It's madness to commute via auto from The Valley or Long Beach or Orange County daily on the freeways - one person, one car, bumper to bumper driving when they have just woken up or tired after a day at work. 1 - 2 hour commutes. In SF people still stand in the street to catch the street cars.

Clang Clang Clang

I never rode LA's street cars, but I always assumed even a little slice of it was worth keeping, and I am not referring specifically to Angel's Flight. Much the same as I view old cars, planes and horse drawn carriages. They are charming anachronisms that also serve a utilitarian purpose, however uncomfortable and inconvenient. They clearly never appealed to everyone and never did. I applaud San Francisco and Memphis, etc. for keeping the charm alive or attempting to revive it. On that note, San Francisco probably has the most collective experience with street [cable] cars and that system is far from perfect. I've never explored the aspect of San Francisco pedestrian/rider safety, but the ridership seems undeterred. I like my car, but if I can't drive it far or fast due to Manhattan traffic . . . may as well make my garage a private museum.


http://i.ytimg.com/vi/geEmqRxm5No/hqdefault.jpg




And for something different


Is there any doubt that this where pumping equipment is for MWD? (1936-46)
http://img.kansasmemory.org/00477282.jpg



A couple of familiar gasometers. Undated.
http://img.kansasmemory.org/00203539.jpg



<1894 - Le Grand Depot
http://img.kansasmemory.org/00580366.jpghttp://img.kansasmemory.org/00580365.jpg



1950 Los Angeles Freight house(?)
http://img.kansasmemory.org/00113898.jpg

[Tourmaline]

LA Union Stockyards - 1923
http://img.kansasmemory.org/00318548.jpg




LA Stockyards ('40s-'50s)
http://img.kansasmemory.org/00204460.jpg

[Tourmaline]

Originally Posted by MartinTurnbull

I still haven't worked out how to effectively search this thread to make sure I'm not posting photos we haven't already seen. Is there one?!?!?

I would imagine we've seen this one of Griffith Observatory in the late 1930s, but it was new to me.

From Steak to Stars.




Undated Griffith Observatory

http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/co...riail2/id/1108




Undated Griffith Observatory

http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/co...riail2/id/1432











http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/co...riail2/id/1075


Griffith Observatory 1940

http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/co...riail2/id/1483

[Tourmaline]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

Santa Monica arch rock in 1878.



usc





below: The Santa Monica arch along the old stage road in 1893.



usc

1906 Arch Rock

http://cdm16016.contentdm.oclc.org/u...XT=&DMROTATE=0

[Tourmaline]

Bostock Arena and Jungle? (Location?)



http://images.wisconsinhistory.org/7...22000248-l.jpg

The Bostock Arena and Jungle, part of David Horsley's Centaur motion picture studio and animal attraction in Los Angeles, c. 1915. "The Moving Picture World" of 28 August 1915 reported on page 1457: "The animal subjects will be filmed in the hexagonal arena in Mr. Horsley's new plant in Los Angeles, built especially to facilitate staging such productions. This arena is arranged in six sections of fan-like shape each with a background to give the locale of the scene to pictures. . . . The players in the animal pictures will work face to face with the brute performers without the precaution afforded by bars, wires, nets, etc., either of which precaution has generally been used in animal pictures heretofore. The only avenue of escape the players have is a moat surrounding an island at the hub of the arena. The camera is stationed on the island, from which point the director oversees the production."http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Cont...ails=R:IM96401

[CityBoyDoug]

Originally Posted by Slauson Slim

"Disaster or not, what was the alternative? As I said before, the tracks were by and large in place in the streets before cars; as soon as someone could afford a car, they ditched public transport for all the usual reasons (poor service, freedom, privacy, independence, status), reducing revenue. There is simply no way, even if it had occurred to the owners of the PE and LARy, to relocate all the tracks to run along the curb, which is the only alternative I can think of--impractical and cost-prohibitive. Anyone who looked at the exponential growth of car registrations through the '20s could see that streetcars, as they were laid out originally, were doomed."

Did you ever ride the streetcars? I did - PE to Santa Monica or Long Beach. Cars to downtown shopping with my mom, Hollywood, etc. Fond memories. I remember the wicker seats on the old cars. Middle and working class folks rode the cars to work and shop. What happened in LA happened elsewhere is what happened to the railroads - deliberate downgrading of the service by the owners to persuade folks to go to autos, and transit systems to move to buses. Petroleum and internal combustion engines. LA streetcar public transport was doomed by deliberate management decisions. The LA I grew up in had a reasonable, timely, environmentally sound and useful public transit system. And that's not nostalgia. Subways in NYC and London and SF Bay Area, and street cars in Salt Lake City, Seattle, Sacramento, SF, San Diego etc. move people. It works. I went to work and to college on the streetcars in SF. It's madness to commute via auto from The Valley or Long Beach or Orange County daily on the freeways - one person, one car, bumper to bumper driving when they have just woken up or tired after a day at work. 1 - 2 hour commutes. In SF people still stand in the street to catch the street cars.

The Los Angeles basin has the most congested traffic situation of the entire world. Its a 24/7 nightmare.

In the 1960s I used to travel the freeway at 3:00 AM and it was mostly free of traffic....no more, its crowded all day and night in 2015.

[ethereal_reality]

(enlarged)

http://images.wisconsinhistory.org/7...22000248-l.jpg







Tourmaline, I found these photos from 1916, but no address. (the fence is the same as in your photograph above, but it doesn't show such a grand entrance)

"David Horsley's Motion Pictures and Bostock Jungle Film Co."


Bruce Torrence at http://hollywoodphotographs.com/deta...studios-in-la/





below: I think the grand entryway shown in Tourmaline's photograph is visible down the street (above the streetcar).


Bruce Torrence at http://hollywoodphotographs.com/deta...ilm-costudios/

Does anyone recognize the large apartment building down the street?

__

[ethereal_reality]

Originally Posted by Earl Boebert

That is a switchstand, used to change the routing of tracks at a turnout :-)

Cheers,

Earl

I've seen them in rail yards (of course), but never on a busy street. That's what threw me off.

__

[HossC]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

below: I think the grand entryway shown in Tourmaline's photograph is visible down the street (above the streetcar).


Bruce Torrence at http://hollywoodphotographs.com/deta...ilm-costudios/

Does anyone recognize the large apartment building down the street?

David Horsley's Studios were at 1919 S Main Street, so it's the Rutland Apartments in the background. There are more pictures of the Rutland in post #18688. Here's a current view from outside the old studio site. The Mode-O-Day Building is on the left.


GSV

[HossC]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

601 Club, Fine Foods, c. 1953 (with the Hotel Madison in the distance)


http://www.ebay.com/itm/35mm-Dupe-Sl...item5675c3d61a

Remembering the picture above from a couple of days ago, I thought the one below was mislabeled. The seller titled it "Photo. 1923. Los Angeles, CA. Block of 651-653 South Main Street". It turns there was another Hotel Madison at 631½ S Main Street. Behind the Madison is the Central Building.


eBay

[Tourmaline]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

posted earlier by Tourmaline (enlarged)

http://images.wisconsinhistory.org/7...22000248-l.jpg







Tourmaline, I found these photos from 1916, but no address. (the fence is the same as in your photograph above, but it doesn't show such a grand entrance)

"David Horsley's Motion Pictures and Bostock Jungle Film Co."


http://hollywoodphotographs.com/deta...studios-in-la/





below: I think the grand entryway shown in Tourmaline's photograph is visible down the street (above the streetcar).


http://hollywoodphotographs.com/deta...ilm-costudios/

Does anyone recognize the large apartment building down the street?

__

Unrelated or not?


I have seen references to Jungle Film Studio at 1720 N Soto, which coincidentally is close to Lincoln Park and Selig Zoo at 3800 Mission Rd. But it is unclear that this is related to Bostock, unless Bostock had more than one location. The 1915CD lists an employee/co-owner of E & R Jungle Film Co., Joseph S Edwards, but not JF address.

Now that "quick-on-the-draw" HossC has provided Bostock's 1919 S Main location, I would have expected to see more photos. Notice in the bottom photo the name is painted on a roof. Visible from a distance? By 1923, per the '23CD, the same location is Joseph Steinberg's Used Cars.



From IMDB

Horsely was in Europe when war broke out in August 1914. The Bostock Animal and Jungle Show was evicted from its London exhibition rooms due to military necessity. The manager of the Jungle Show sold it to Horsely for $40,000, approximately a tenth of his fortune from the sale of his Universal stock. Horsely transported the show's assets to the US by ship. From the docks of Brooklyn, Horsely shipped the menagerie, which included 58 lions and two elephants, to Los Angeles. Altogether it cost him a total of $15,000 to freight the animals from England to L.A. He spent a further $47,500 to create a new park for his show, including grandstands, arenas, cages, and a concrete fence on a property at Washington and Main that rented for $600 per month.

After he opened the show in 1915 he was facing a daily overhead of $225, though the most tickets the show ever sold in a day was $165, while on a bad day the show took in as little as $1.25. To make the show pay, Horsely built a film studio at the site that he called the Bostock Jungle Films Co., which included its own film processing lab. Horsely began turning out movies, many of which used the wild animals as background. His new studio made five-reel dramas with Crane Wilbur, "Stanley in Africa" pictures, and approximately 200 comedies with George Ovey. By the fall of 1918 his movie-making venture was through, and when he filed for bankruptcy in 1919, the once-rich Horsely was $38,000 in debt.

The loss of his company, his exotic animal show and his fortune broke David Horsely. He died on February 23, 1933, a forgotten man, barely remembered as one of the men who saved the film industry from The Trust and pioneered Hollywood as a filmmaking center. Horsely was interred in Hollywood Cemetery, now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery, reduced to a footnote in American cinema history. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0395438/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...orsley_001.jpg



http://image2.findagrave.com/photos/...1026185795.jpg

[HossC]

Originally Posted by Tourmaline

From IMDB

The studio must have been on the side of the Chutes/Washington Park site. Its fleeting existence probably explains why it isn't on the Sanborn maps posted by Flyingwedge in post #19307, or the Baist maps posted by me in post #19077.

[Tourmaline]

Originally Posted by HossC

David Horsley's Studios were at 1919 S Main Street, so it's the Rutland Apartments in the background. There are more pictures of the Rutland in post #18688. Here's a current view from outside the old studio site. The Mode-O-Day Building is on the left.


GSV

The Washington and Main area certainly has a colorful past. Fifty-eight lions and Aimee.

Sister Aimee and Mode 'O Day


http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=1122

[ethereal_reality]

A photo taken to mark the arrival of David and William Horsley in Los Angeles, 1911. William is on the left, dressed in a gray coat. David is the mustached man on the right,
in the black coat and derby. Noticed that his left coat sleeve is empty; he lost his arm in an accident as a boy.



http://sensesofcinema.com/


I just found out at another site that the young boy with the camera is David's son, and that Al Christie is over David Horsley's right shoulder.
__

[MichaelRyerson]

Originally Posted by CityBoyDoug

The Los Angeles basin has the most congested traffic situation of the entire world. Its a 24/7 nightmare.

In the 1960s I used to travel the freeway at 3:00 AM and it was mostly free of traffic....no more, its crowded all day and night in 2015.

If we have any lurkers from Mexico City, they are laughing right now.

[CityBoyDoug]

Originally Posted by CityBoyDoug View Post
The Los Angeles basin has the most congested traffic situation of the entire world. Its a 24/7 nightmare.

In the 1960s I used to travel the freeway at 3:00 AM and it was mostly free of traffic....no more, its crowded all day and night in 2015.

Originally Posted by MichaelRyerson

If we have any lurkers from Mexico City, they are laughing right now.

Here is someone's opinion about traffic pain...108 being the worst pain. I differ from this chart.
Of course LA is right up there just under some of the more primitive countries of the planet.

Mexico City: 108
Shenzhen: 95
Beijing: 95
Nairobi: 88
Johannesburg: 83
Bangalore: 75
New Delhi: 72
Moscow: 65
Milan: 53
Singapore: 44
Buenos Aires: 42
*Los Angeles: 34*
Paris: 31
Madrid: 28
New York City: 28
Toronto: 27
Stockholm: 26
Chicago: 25
London: 23
Montreal: 21

[MichaelRyerson]

.

[ethereal_reality]

1916

old file / of mine

I believe the streetcar is on Hollywood Blvd., and the cars are on Sunset. (unless it's the other way around) duh.




gsv

I've been trying to re-create the same view via the google-mobile. I think this is pretty close. (unless it's not )

__

[ethereal_reality]

Here's a LARGER version of a newspaper clipping I posted back in 2013.


1960


eBay

So what is the building with the nicely arched windows in the upper right corner?

*(Initially, I had forgotten about the earlier post. thx t2)