Quote:
Originally Posted by MichaelRyerson
I happened to be looking at a photograph the other day (which we've seen here) which showed, among other things, the scattered remains of the Fremont Hotel including the front stairs, a curved affair of some beauty. As thought trains go, what followed was not surprising. I thought for a few minutes about how many times we've seen the Fremont, talked about it, measured other buildings from it, oriented the point-of-view by it, estimated the date of an image by it's appearance. It now seemed especially sad to contemplate this largely vacant lot even though, I'm sure, the useful life of the Fremont had come to an end. In some small way, it was similar to the feeling of having to put down a long-time pet when the deteriorating quality of their life demands it. An essentially bitter moment in an otherwise sweet association. But nonetheless, seeing those stairs brought to mind the thousands of feet that had trod them, going in or coming out of the Fremont. And then it occurred to me, a question that has always haunted me is where did the people go? Where did they end up, the people who were forced off of Bunker Hill? Or was the Bunker Hill diaspora sufficiently gradual as to allow them to simply be swallowed piecemeal by the city? Or did they find themselves in common eddies, arriving in cheap hotels, retirement homes or County Hospital in waves, a cohort of the disenfranchised. Has anyone ever published a study of this largely involuntary emigration. It seems like a worthy thing to know about.
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Wow, Michael, you're a man after my own heart! (Did that sound creepy, at all?) Anyway, my biggest interest in all of the photos of old LA has always been the people. The long-since-gone faces of ordinary people who happened to, by simple chance, appear in photos of old buildings and neighborhoods in Los Angeles. I also wonder what happened to these blurry people. Some may have become famous (or infamous). Did any of these street scenes catch an image of the Black Dahlia's murderer? Or maybe a simple laborer whose grandchildren still live in LA? In these old photos, the "real" Los Angeles emerges....the very people who designed, built, envisioned, lived in, or were simply held captive by, the great expanding metropolis. And every single tiny, blurry image of every background person tells a story, unknown to us. Every single one of them had their own hopes and dreams and demons stalking their every waking hour....just like the rest of us. The more things change, the more they remain the same.