Quote:
Originally Posted by Bristolian
In the early '80s I worked at a Chevron Station in El Porto, on the edge of El Segundo. It had a great ocean view.
This is it when it first opened about 1960
My photo
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I know that station :-) It's actually in El Segundo on the edge of El Porto.
El Porto (Spanglish or Engliguese for The Port I guess) is just 34 acres and runs N/S between 38th and 45th, with the Pacific and the refinery forming it's other two borders. The streets are numbered, but the alleys have names. Unincorporated county land until 1980 (when it was annexed by Manhattan Beach), it was
noir central for the South Bay. The Sheriff's Dept didn't bother patrolling much, b/c who was gonna drive all the way down there for such a tiny patch?
google maps
Anyway, when I was a kid the words "El Porto" could strike terror in a mother's heart. It was supposed to be the vilest den of iniquity
ever, where "nice girls" (and boys)
never went. I'm told it still has kind of a shady rep.
Billy Haines and Jimmy Shields summered in El Porto for years, a safe place to hold parties and flaunt convention. Safe until 1936 when, it was said,
Jimmy got in some trouble that was too much even for El Porto, or maybe it was just used as an excuse to get rid of the Wisecracker.
I learned about prostitution, under-aged drinking, drugs of bewildering variety, gambling, "unnatural behaviors" and even white-slavers from repeated warnings against El Porto. What a bunch of hysteria.