Compton, CA 1927

1927, Los Angeles River flooded by torrential rain seen from the Compton Bridge, Compton, CA, 1927.

Flooding in Compton in 1927 (…and also in the 1930s, see update below).

Likely taken the same day as the Atwater flood photos that I posted last month, these 98-year-old images show Compton after heavy storms in February 1927 that affected not only LA but much of the Southwest. But this was not new for Compton. With Compton Creek being a major tributary of the Los Angeles River, the town often flooded during heavy storms, going all the way back to the 1890s.

Things got much worse in 1924, when the Los Angeles Board of Public Works announced its own new flood control plans, which involved directing LA’s drainage into the flood-prone Compton Creek. Newspapers at the time reported it as “a death-blow to Compton,” with the Long Beach Press Telegram calling it: “the latest effort of Los Angeles to wipe [Compton] off the map.”

After two years of being ignored, Compton managed to get themselves invited to the table in 1926 to discuss the installation of a drainage system under its streets (to save face, a Board representative asked reporters, “Why didn’t Compton come to us about this two or three years ago?”).

Now, I don’t know whether the 1927 plan was ever implemented. While I’ve found hundreds of newspaper articles discussing and debating that plan from 1927 through 1936, I can’t find any on its construction. What I do know is that, following the great flood of 1938, the creek was encased in concrete as part of the first phase of channelizing the Los Angeles River, finally providing relief to the area.

Slide 2 is the old Compton City Hall - one of my favorite historical buildings, often hit by floods but finally killed by the Long Beach earthquake of 1933.

Slide 3 shows a Security Savings & Trust Bank branch, while Slide 7 shows Star Cafe. Both were on Compton’s Main Street, which was later renamed Compton Boulevard.

All photos except Slide 2 from @uclalibrary are from Cal State Dominguez Hills.  3,7,10-14 by George R. Watson for the LA Times.

**UPDATE** Since writing this caption, I’ve realized that these show at least two floods. Slides 2,3,7,10-14 are 1927, while Slides 1,4-6,8,9 were taken between 1936 and 1938.   

forgottenmadness_la

18h.

If anybody is wondering about that 1926 label on Slide 2, it has been applied to the physical copy that is archived with Cal State Dominguez Hills. I'm including it here as I believe it might be wrong. Los Angeles Public Library has this same photo dated as 1928, which I think is also wrong (it's in their Security Pacific National Bank Collection, which librarians have told me contained many errors and left much to be desired when they took custody of that archive and they've been making corrections wherever they can). And, while i don't mean to doubt the records of Cal State Dominguez Hills, their collection contains another photo of this same building submerged by this same flood and that one is labeled as the flood of 1938, which would have been five years after it came down, so I just don't trust the 1926 label. I do see that there was some flooding in 1926, but the flood photographed in the rest of these images is more consistent with that in photo 2. Just a feeling. If I'm wrong and it was indeed taken in 1926 during a lesser flood, then on this day, it would likely have looked just like it does here or worse.