1950, Looking east from behind a newsstand at the NW corner of Brand Boulevard and Broadway in Glendale, CA. Thank you to Bruce Dunseth.
Monday, December 2, 2024
Long Beach National Forest, Los Angeles, 1940s
Long Beach National Forest, 1940s.
Was chatting with a friend in England yesterday who’d been reading about LA’s history as an oil town and I realized it’d been nearly a year since my last oil history post, so I’ve put together a collection of shots taken in Signal Hill in the third decade of the city’s ‘Oil Boom.’
The Long Beach Oil Field was discovered by the Royal Dutch Shell Company (now just “Shell”) on June 23, 1921, sparking an immediate rush to the area, with realtors selling off plots at $10K an acre ($175K today), and new wells going up within days. By the end of the week, there were nine derricks in the area, and a year later, there were hundreds, earning the area the nickname “Porcupine Hill” for its appearance from a distance.
While not the first oil discovery in the Los Angeles Basin, it proved to be the most productive, where even two competing derricks built within feet of each other could both produced hundreds of barrels a day for each owner. And, while fiercely competitive, these oilmen were organized enough to band together and incorporate the area of Signal Hill in 1924 to avoid annexation by Long Beach which might have brought zoning restrictions and added taxation.Truly the un-checked wild west, and by 1930, Southern California was producing a quarter of the world’s oil supply.
When these were taken, 15-ish years later, LA had grown tired of the pollution generated by the oil industry, leading to a war within our city government, as the heavily-bribed members of the City Council repeatedly tried granting companies “unrestricted” drilling rights within the city, only to have them vetoed each time by Mayor Fletcher Bowron who dared them to put it on the ballot and give the public a voice. It was a fight that led newspapers to refer to him as: “Mayor Bowron, the Man Nobody Likes But the Voters.”
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Photos:
• 1-4. by Andreas Feininger, 1947
• 5. by B. Anthony Stewart, 1941
• 6. Cameron Pl & Long Beach Blvd, 1948
• 7. Pasadena Ave & Spring St., 1949
• 8. Sunnyside Cemetery, by Herman Schultheis, 1937
• 9-10. by Nina Leen, 1945
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1-4,9,10. LIFE Magazine; 5. National Geographic; 6-7. Cal State Dominguez Hills; 8. LAPL
Burlesque theaters of S. Main Street, 1936 (and late-1940s).
The burlesque theaters of S. Main Street, as seen in 1936 (and late-1940s).
So these first six shots were taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and for the longest time I’ve been scrolling past them, mistaking them as duplicates all taken at the same theatre. Something about how busy and cluttered the text and photos are that makes it much more difficult to see the buildings underneath. Looking closer, I see there are three theaters here, organized as follows:
1-3. Taken at the Follies Theatre at 337 S. Main St., with shows every Saturday at midnight. Opened as the Belasco in 1904 (predating the current Belasco), it became a vaudeville theatre in 1912, then started running follies & burlesque in 1919, which continued into the 1950s. See slides 8-9 to see it in the late-1940s.
4. Taken at the Rosslyn Theatre at 431 S. Main (thanks to IG follower 'thrift_store_rescues' for identifying it), which opened in 1925 and was not known for burlesque. Tried finding more info on the "Girlesque" show and learned there was actually once an unrelated Girlesque Theatre one block over which was shut down in a vice raid in 1930. This appears to be a temporary stop for a touring "Girlesque Revue," which debuted at a carnival on the LA County fairgrounds in 1936 and then went on tour around town, also hitting San Pedro & Wilmington.
5-6. Taken at the Burbank Theatre at 548 S. Main St, which opened in 1893. Started running burlesque in 1927, and continued into the late-1960s.
7. Exterior of the Burbank Theatre, 1937
8-9. Taken outside of the Follies theatre in the late 1940s, about ten years after the photos in Slides 1-3. You can see that the building has gone through some major changes, with a neon-lined marquee added, lowered to the first story - likely part of a $60K renovation done in 1938.
10. Dressing room at the Follies, late 1940s.
11. LA Daily News, July 11, 1936
12. A 1936 program from the Follies Theatre
13-15. Follies lineup announcements, 1935
16. 1938 clipping
17. Follies ad, May 8, 1936
18. Burbank ad, 1937
19. LA Daily News, Jan. 10, 1936
20. Burbank ad, May 7, 1936
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1-6. via LIFE Magazine; 7-10. via @lapubliclibrary ; 12,16,18. via Bill Counter's Los Angeles Theatres Blog (or see: Los Angeles Theatres)
LA Railway ‘yellow cars’ servicing South Los Angeles, 1946 and 1947.
Photos:
1. Vermont & 48th, love the record store to the left.
2. Vermont & 43rd, V Line on its way to East Hollywood.
3. Vermont & 42nd, U Line headed to Florence Ave.
4. Vermont & Florence. Love the Chevy dealer.
5. Somewhere on the B Line, headed toward Ascot & 51st.
6. Taken on Central, somewhere along the U-Line, which ran between Nevin & West Adams.
7. Listed as Slauson & Central, but it’s labeled as a U-Line car which wouldn’t have run there.
8. Taken on Hawthorne in Inglewood, the 5 Line is on its way to Eagle Rock. This ran up Crenshaw, then cut across Santa Barbara Ave (now MLK) to head up Grand.
9. Somewhere along the 8 Line heading from the Plaza to Leimert Park (ended at 54th & Crenshaw). Zoom in to see LA Railway’s first African American ‘motorman’ Arcola Philpott at the helm.
10. Taken on Hoover, the F Line heading to Vermont & 116th
Unfortunately, these cars wouldn’t last much longer. When these were taken, the privately-owned Los Angeles Railway system had recently been sold to American City Lines out of Chicago, who shut down rail service on all but five of the original yellow car routes in 1948, replacing the others with buses which operated under the company’s new name: Los Angeles Transit Lines.
Today, Vermont is still one of the most traveled routes in the county, with Metro’s 204 bus carrying 20,000 riders every weekday - more than any other route. To better accommodate this, Metro is currently working to add bus rapid transit for faster, more reliable bus service on Vermont Avenue.
All photos via Metro Library & Archive
(This post is part of a paid partnership with Metro)
Unionism, Los Angeles, 1934-1979
In recognition of Labor Day.
1. United Airlines ground workers on strike, July 1968.
Photo by Ralph Crane.
2. The Brown Derby waiters strike of 1934, when waiters were being paid 90 cents a day and were asking for a base of $15/week. This strike lasted three months.
3. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union pickets nonunion dressmakers during the Biltmore Bowl, Jan. 18, 1940.
4. Red car operators picketing during a Pacific Electric Railway strike in 1943.
5. My all-time favorite: the lone picketer who stopped work at the Park La Brea construction site on Sept 15, 1949. More than 2,000 tradespeople refused to cross.
6. Carpenters Union on strike in 1949, looks like Gower with Columbia Studios on the left.
7. Striking workers review their growing “Scab Gallery,” during a Douglas Aircraft strike in Long Beach in 1952. Photo by George Silk.
8. César Chavez marches with farm workers during the five-year Delano grape strike that led to the formation of the United Farm Workers Union. Photo by Ernest Lowe, taken March 15, 1966.
9. “The longer the picket line, the shorter the strike.” Also taken by Lowe during the grape strike - March 16, 1966.
10. Disneyland’s maintenance on strike, taken March 7, 1979. In total, 500 workers marched from 14 different unions.
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Sources: 1,7. LIFE Magazine; 2,4,5,10. @lapubliclibrary; 3,6. @uclalibrary; 8,9. UC Merced.
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