I apologize if these have been posted before.
http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/vie...198/zz00288b0t
This is a most remarkable image, from the negatives of the
Los Angeles Daily News collection at UCLA. To me, it is as noir as it gets.
The date is October 9, 1936. I think the view is from the site of the Los Angeles Transit Lines building, looking north up Broadway.
Frank Shaw is mayor, his brother Joe in the corner pocket is the man to see at City Hall. Buron Fitts is running scared in his last (successful) campaign for DA against Judge Palmer and the reformers. Roosevelt is about to win a second term.
The occasion is the Hoover Dam Inaugural Festival, celebrating the arrival of a new source of electricity for Los Angeles. The caption states: "Downtown Los Angeles was flooded with 7.2 million candle-power lights, and engineers claimed that the display was visible from 100 miles away."
Not having the knowledge of DTLA that many of you possess, I was puzzled by the diagonal street angling into to Broadway from the lower right. I looked more closely at the Google street map of the Broadway/Olympic area and saw a very faint diagonal property line mimicking the missing street. A check of a contemporary street map explained what had happened. Broadway Place has been discussed here by
BifRayRock and
MichaelRyerson and others.
There are many, many things of interest in the photo.
I will only note the billboard at the lower left, urging a "Yes" vote on Prop 4 to "Stop Tideland Drilling Forever."
The Tidelands Controversy was a long-running public policy dispute between coastal states and the Federal government over who owned the Outer Continental Shelf, which oil companies sought to lease for drilling.
The Federal government viewed the oil as a valuable national resource, not to be controlled by a few (easily corruptible by Big Oil) state governments. The coastal states saw the federal position as yet another encroachment by an overbearing tyrant on free enterprise and States' Rights. Eventually in the early 1950s, a Congress sympathetic to States' Rights (on this and other matters) quitclaimed the oil rights within 3 miles of the coast to the states. It left the rest (which ironically turned out to contain the vast bulk of the resources) to be managed by the federal government.
1936's Prop 4 belongs to a long line of doublespeak ballot initiatives in California.
It was sponsored by the "California Beaches Association," which was funded in turn by the Standard Oil Company. It proposed to "save the beaches" from drilling by preventing drilling on land (that already had been determined not to contain oil!). It set a generously low price on state oil royalties, and as a sweetener, proposed to spend half the resultant money to revive the moribund state park system, in bad shape due to the Depression. The other half was to go to the general fund. The
Times, unsurprisingly, was all for it but on November 3, 1936, Prop 4 was narrowly defeated.
This next photo, from the same source, could stand some photoshopping by the experts here
The caption says it is "an Electrical Display" from the same occasion. One hopes it was planned.
http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/vie...198/zz00288b2v