Who knew the LAPD staged large spectacles in the 1930s culminating with giant 4 hour shows at the Coliseum? Not me. Tax dollars at work?
The caption at calisphere/UCLA is "Trucks in the L.A.P.D. parade heading towards the Coliseum, Los Angeles, 1937."
There are many interesting things in this photo. We are on post-realignment Spring St. looking south, with the Hall of Justice in the middle distance, and the Hall of Records peeking out beyond it. At the right edge of the photo there is a uniformed man holding a tenor saxophone. More puzzling than the police saxophonist is the presence of a truck labeled “Bacone College Red Men.”
Bacone is a small liberal arts school in Muskogee, Oklahoma serving native Americans. It was established in 1880 by Baptist missionaries to the Cherokees and looks like it will go out of business this fall for lack of funding. Trivia note: some years ago, they changed their mascot from “Red Men” to “Warriors.”
I have no idea why they would be invited to participate in an LA police parade, but there they are, dressed up in Hollywood-Indian-style outfits.
At the upper right of the photo, next to a decaying house, a sign says “It’s in the” and nothing more.
I wondered where that house might be. Here is a 1941 UCSB aerial:
…which shows it to be in the vicinity of #416-#426 North Broadway; these houses were discussed by
Flyingwedge and others on
page 2119 and no doubt elsewhere.
Here is the Sanborn:
lapl.org
Two reverse views looking north:
both UCLA via calisphere.org
Another view looking south:
UCLA via calisphere.org
Here's a group of leering policemen at the beginning of the route. The Villa Roma Café was at 400 Sunset, at the north exit of the Broadway tunnel.
UCLA via calisphere.org
The LA Times of 7/10/1937 had a front-page article about the parade.
and
both LAT via newspapers.com
As the article next to the parade picture suggests, things were already beginning to unravel for Mayor Shaw. (He was recalled the next year.) Dickens couldn’t have dreamed up a better name for a Church-lady-anti-vice crusader than “Mrs. A.A. Blatherwick.” Poor Mayor Shaw.
At the time of this parade, the Times was still firmly in Shaw’s camp. The paper gave favorable publicity to Chief of Police Davis and his cronies, and subsidized pro-police stunts like this parade.