noirish Los Angeles

[GaylordWilshire]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

BTW, I love the 1908 map of Los Angeles, ethereal. I like looking at the now vanished street grid, before the freeways and before the destruction of Bunker Hill. It's also cool to see 10th Street denoted as such before it was renamed Olympic Blvd.

Sopas: Go to Scott's "Los Angeles Past" posting of Sept 24, 2009:

http://losangelespast.blogspot.com/s...&max-results=5

Click the link there and Scott will have led you to an amazing trove of interactive maps. (I have a PC so had to download Firefox, which is free and a quick operation.) You will lose a night of sleep.

[ethereal_reality]

sopas_ej
Thanks for posting that photo of the interior of the train shed at the Arcade Depot.

That photograph completes my mental image of the Arcade Depot.

[Chicago3rd]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

Here's a photograph of the ill-fated Los Angeles High School on Olympic.
This was the third L.A. High School.


usc digital archive

The Room 222 High School, Walt Whitman. It looked so beautiful...when I was a kid I wanted to go to High School there....well not the real one....Walt Whitman....had a crush on Pete.

[mayxbo5]

Hi, I'm new here. Stumbled across this page just now and thought I'd contribute. In college I did a paper on how the La Brea Tar Pits changed. These are some of the pictures I stumbled across when I was going through books at the Page Museum, where I did a lot of my research.


^View looking northwest from Pit 4, February 1914. Santa Monica Mountains in the background.


^Aerial view of Rancho La Brea, 1921. The street cutting diagonally through the middle of the photo is Wilshire.


^Same angle, different elevation 10 years later in 1931. You can see the La Brea Tar Pits more clearly in this picture just south of the oil derricks.


^You can see the intersection of Wilshire Blvd. (running top to bottom) and San Vicente (cutting diagonally across). The top was taken in 1922. The bottom in 1955.


^To give you Angelinos an idea of the area Rancho La Brea covered.



^Wilshire Blvd. 1920's (?).

[JDRCRASH]

Originally Posted by mayxbo5

^Aerial view of Rancho La Brea, 1921. The street cutting diagonally through the middle of the photo is Wilshire.


^Same angle, different elevation 10 years later in 1931. You can see the La Brea Tar Pits more clearly in this picture just south of the oil derricks.

That growth is just amazing.

[Los Angeles Past]

Originally Posted by JDRCRASH

That growth is just amazing.

I was just about to say the same thing. The difference between the 1921 and 1931 views is particularly striking.

mayxbo5 - could I perhaps have your permission to post those two pictures in my Los Angeles Past weblog? (If so, how should the photo credits read?) A lot of my blog entries are "then & now" comparisons, and this is certainly one of the more interesting such comparisons I've seen in quite awhile...

-Scott

[ethereal_reality]

Great photographs mayxbo5.....welcome to the thread.


Below: You might find this photo interesting. It's looking east on Wilshire from Fairfax in 1929.




usc digital archive

[ethereal_reality]

Originally Posted by Beaudry

Am I going to complain about needing to go to bed, or am I going to talk about oil wells? Well, duh.

Yep, those are derricks, a lot of people assume that LA oil production is Wilmington/Long Beach/Signal Hill, and those are important to be sure, but later in the grand scheme of things...

There was nothing but a little seepy brea until Doheny's first shaft, fall of '92, which was near where Beverly crosses Glendale; by '95 derricks lined First Street. By '97 the area bounded by Figueroa, First, Union and Temple held over 500 producing wells--one could climb between derricks without touching the ground. Three out of every five barrels produced in California came from that field, and California produced a quarter of the country's oil. The big strikes in Signal Hill, Huntington Beach et al were still twenty years away.
Check out this map, 1906:



...and this isn't even all of them (you'll notice there are none around the aforementioned Fig/Temple area, this is just a map of a certain sand, that is, a particular stratigraphic substructure).

Nathan....thanks for answering my question...and with graphics.
I somehow missed this post earlier. -ethereal

[GaylordWilshire]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

Great photographs mayxbo5.....welcome to the thread.


Below: You might find this photo interesting.
It's looking east on Wilshire from Fairfax in 1929.




usc digital archive

It's interesting to see the site of the future May Co/LACMA, and that Fairfax was the western end of the famous Wilshire streetlamps (and the new "Miracle Mile')-- I saw Chris Burden's Urban Lights a year or so ago, but don't remember if the tall Wilshire lantern is among them. Anyway, that installation is great--best seen at night, of course--like being in a cathedral, as I once heard it put. Btw, What is that odd walled building with towered entrance on the site of the future Mays/LACMA?

[ethereal_reality]

Originally Posted by Chicago3rd

The Room 222 High School, Walt Whitman. It looked so beautiful...when I was a kid I wanted to go to High School there....well not the real one....Walt Whitman....had a crush on Pete.

Here's another impressive view of the high school on Olympic, this time with a streetcar in front.



usc digital archive

[GaylordWilshire]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

Here's another impressive view of the high school on Olympic,
this time with a streetcar in front.



usc digital archive

On that lot in the foreground remains this Austin-designed echo of the high school:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2282/...0e5d7457ec.jpg

Is there a vintage shot anywhere of Memorial Library?

[ethereal_reality]

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire

It's interesting to see the site of the future May Co/LACMA, and that Fairfax was the western end of the famous Wilshire streetlamps (and the new "Miracle Mile')-- I saw Chris Burden's Urban Lights a year or so ago, but don't remember if the tall Wilshire lantern is among them. Anyway, that installation is great--best seen at night, of course--like being in a cathedral, as I once heard it put. Btw, What is that odd walled building with towered entrance on the site of the future Mays/LACMA?

Funny you ask that GaylordWilshire. I wondered that myself.

With the strange entrance, I thought it was a mausoleum and/so cemetery.
But there are structures inside (with obvious trusses/arches) that look like a collection of warehouses or sound stages.

[ethereal_reality]

Below: Here's an interesting photo looking NE from Santa Monica Blvd.
and Highland Ave. in 1926.



usc digital archive


I can't remember what's on this corner now.

[ethereal_reality]

Below: Santa Monica Blvd. looking west from Western Ave. in 1927.



usc digital archive

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

Below: Here's an interesting photo looking NE from Santa Monica Blvd.
and Highland Ave. in 1926.



usc digital archive


I can't remember what's on this corner now.

Hehe I know full well what's on the northeast corner of SM Blvd. and Highland. There's a mini-mall with a Donut Time on the corner, which is open 24 hours. In the 1990s, Donut Time had all kinds of "interesting" characters, particularly at 2am-- rent boys, drug addicts, transvesitite prostitutes... I think it's somewhat tamer now, beginning in the early part of this decade the LAPD really started cracking down on street prostitution. I used to work graveyard shift in Hollywood and it would be interesting to drive down this stretch on my way to work; also, leaving the clubs you'd see the interesting folk along the stretch of Santa Monica Blvd. east of WeHo.

[ethereal_reality]

Below: Beverly Blvd. and Vermont in1926.



usc digital archive

[sopas ej]

ethereal that pic you posted of Santa Monica Blvd. looking west from Western is very interesting to me; that bank building on the northwest corner still exists, as does the Sears building, which is the building in the background that you see with the tower. The tower still exists, though the building itself has been massively remodeled beyond recognition and looks horrible; looks like a 1970s remodeling, and even the Sears logo that's on the building now is from the 1970s, with that all-cap, red lettering.

[ethereal_reality]

Below: This photo was also labeled looking northeast from Santa Monica Blvd. and Highland. 1926.
It's from the same vantage point as the photo in post #553, just angled a little more to the right (east) I believe.




usc digital archive

[ethereal_reality]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

ethereal that pic you posted of Santa Monica Blvd. looking west from Western is very interesting to me; that bank building on the northwest corner still exists, as does the Sears building, which is the building in the background that you see with the tower. The tower still exists, though the building itself has been massively remodeled beyond recognition and looks horrible; looks like a 1970s remodeling, and even the Sears logo that's on the building now is from the 1970s, with that all-cap, red lettering.

Sopas_ej, thanks for the feedback.
It's always interesting to hear from you.

[ethereal_reality]

Below: A view over Westlake Park (later MacArthur Park) in the 1930s.
The tower on the right is Bullocks Wilshire Department Store.



usc digital archives




Originally Wilshire Blvd. ended at Westlake Park
(it was Orange on the opposite/east side).


1908 map




Wilshire Blvd. was extended in 1934 to pass through the park.



usc digital archive








usc digital archive


....someone left the cake out in the rain.