0Here is another Leonard Nadel photo taken for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. The caption is "Exterior view of a three story slum dwelling with City Hall in the background."
Calisphere.org - lapl.org
I wondered what might be learned about this building and its history.
There are a few clues: the number 406, two business names (Bradley's Leather Processing and Flora's(?) Cafe), and the position of City Hall. Bradley's Leather shows up in various 1950s and 1960s city directories with addresses in South Central, so no help there. I tried to match the orientation and shadows on City Hall with Google Earth views using its time-of-day/shadow slider bar and settled on:
Google Earth
If Nadel's picture was taken in the morning, we are looking west. So I looked at a bunch of 1950 Sanborn maps of the 400 blocks of streets east of City Hall and found:
lapl.org
The Sanborn map shows that the 406 Commercial address is a leather processing company, and 402 is a restaurant. The bay windows of the tenement, and the turret on the NW corner of Alameda and Commercial match and are circled in red, so we are looking at the SE corner of Alameda and Commercial. One imagines that the fragrance of fried food and leather finishing did not add much to the charm of living there.
The building dates from about 1890. It is called the Alameda Building on the 1894 Sanborn, where it presciently houses the Salvation Army at 410 Commercial. The upper two stories were the St. George House lodging rooms.
lapl.org
One can get a flavor of the St. George clientele from the LA Times:
ProQuest via ucla.edu
The LADBS database has nothing on the Commercial St. addresses, but does have numerous items on the Alameda side, for numbers 516-522. They tell a story of decay that had set in already by 1920. In that year, a remodel permit was issued:
LADBS
I don't like the sound of a "scuttle hole," sounds like it's for the convenience of rodents. The rooms must have been pretty small to squeeze 18 per floor in a building with a 100' x 50' footprint. Each would have been about 12' x 12'.
In 1939, a few years before Nadel's photo, the St. George House had become the Oriental Hotel. That year, an alteration was approved "to put Back Porch in good order: 1) to tear out all lumber that is now infested with termites and dry rot, 2) placing of concrete footing for 5 posts which supports two floors of porch, 3) to replace 5 new 6" x 6" Posts approximately 16 feet long which supports the outside edges of said Porch." These are easily seen in the photo.
The building was replaced by a gas station in 1954.
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