SkyscraperPage Forum - noirish Los Angeles

Viewing Page 1063 of 3004

SkyscraperPage Forum (https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/index.php)

- Found City Photos (https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=23)

- - noirish Los Angeles (https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=170279)

Quote:

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire (Post 6563108)

:previous:

The church is the Westwood United Methodist, still there at Wilshire & Warner.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-_...2520PM.bmp.jpgGSV

Let me see if I can add to the confusion here. The accident was supposed to be at 10400 Wilshire. The Westwood
United Methodist Church is at 10497 Wilshire, which is about a block away.

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...ps5907acc0.jpg
Google Maps

On ER's photo, the accident seems to be very close to the church and on the same side of the street.

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...ps4dee5a44.jpg
USC

I'm guessing that the 10400 Wilshire address is wrong.

And GW - after looking at this photo for a while, it doesn't appear like there is enough space in the front wheel well to make much more than about a five degree turn.

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...ps39dbb4b3.jpg
Richard Wojcik at https://www.facebook.com/VintageLosAngeles?ref=stream

Hotel Angelus, SW corner 4th and Spring

First, a trivia question: How did the Hotel Angelus get its name? (answer at bottom)

A few prior posts:

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=2410
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=3957
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...ostcount=14653
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...ostcount=15458

The banner on the 4th Street side reads, "The Angelus" Will Open December 15, 1901:
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...b.jpg~original
Huntington Digital Library -- http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single.../id/3529/rec/3

Looking north on Spring, c. 1910:
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...c.jpg~original
USCDL -- http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/si.../id/7126/rec/6

Looking east from the State Normal School, c. 1910-19, we see the Angelus dirtying LA's air:
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...7.jpg~original
USCDL -- http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/si...id/3590/rec/15

The Angelus De Anza, 1939, looking west on 4th St.:
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...0.jpg~original
USCDL -- http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/si...d/21095/rec/11

4th Street east from Broadway, no date:
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...9.jpg~original
Huntington Digital Library -- http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single.../id/8687/rec/6

North on Spring, June 1956; blade sign already removed:
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...9.jpg~original
Huntington Digital Library -- http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single.../id/8683/rec/5

4th Street entrance, June 1956. Note the Auction sign in the window; the hotel was torn down by October 1956 (http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single...d/8682/rec/5):
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...6.jpg~original
Huntington Digital Library -- http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single.../id/8686/rec/2

And the answer to the trivia question . . . the Hotel Angelus -- which allegedly had a 700-year-old Turkish rug -- was named after a painting!:
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...d.jpg~original

http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...1.jpg~original
The 1910 Trip of the HMMBA to California and the Pacific Coast by George Wharton James (Bolte and Braden Company, San Francisco, 1911) @ HathiTrust -- http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...ew=1up;seq=117 and http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...ew=1up;seq=119

FW-- Great story on the Angelus. I guess it was better than a hotel called the Sower or the Gleaners. I remember the story of Salvador Dali discovering that the couple in the painting were actually looking at a baby coffin, and that it turned out Millet had painted the basket over a baby coffin to make it more appealing to buyers. Dali painted his own versions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FredH (Post 6563413)

Let me see if I can add to the confusion here. The accident was supposed to be at 10400 Wilshire. The Westwood
United Methodist Church is at 10497 Wilshire, which is about a block away.

On ER's photo, the accident seems to be very close to the church and on the same side of the street.

I'm guessing that the 10400 Wilshire address is wrong.

And GW - after looking at this photo for a while, it doesn't appear like there is enough space in the front wheel well to make much more than about a five degree turn.

I'd say the report was that there was an accident in the 10400 block of Wilshire, rather than a specific address. And after all, the accident was a block long... Also, camera lenses can foreshorten distances....

Nashes weren't known for the turning radiuses or handling--like a lot of cars of the era, very softly sprung. Tom McCahill commented via Wig-Wag below that "It goes around a corner like a rhinoceros on a wet clay bank". Sounds about right. The enclosed front fenders not only didn't catch on, Nash dropped them a few years later. Nash and Hudson tried hard to innovate with their bulbous designs, but got themselves into design cycles they couldn't afford to change when they quickly began to be seen as old-fashioned and even comical--and, like Pontiacs, dreaded old-man's cars.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality (Post 6562630)

I can't remember if we've seen this or not. I really love the blues.

Los Angeles 1951
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/843/3av8.jpg
Richard Wojcik at https://www.facebook.com/VintageLosAngeles?ref=stream

Nash and Rambler so often seemed to target an ill defined customer base. When it comes to grilles, the '47 (below) clearly went for the more-is-better approach. Same with zeppelin shapes and lengths. They also went to the other extreme with the Nash Metropolitan.

Ads like this one from September '47 probably had "limited" appeal.
http://jpg1.lapl.org/00104/00104464.jpg http://jpg1.lapl.org/00104/00104464.jpg

http://oldcarandtruckpictures.com/Am...arch18cBut.jpg http://oldcarandtruckpictures.com/Am...arch18cBut.jpg

'49 Nash 600 Super
http://blog.hemmings.com/wp-content/...ash_02_700.jpg http://blog.hemmings.com/wp-content/...ash_02_700.jpg

Another Adventures of Superman shot ('51?)
http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/4249/51nash.jpg http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/4249/51nash.jpg

'55
http://chuckstoyland.com/metro/histo...og%20FRONT.jpg http://chuckstoyland.com/metro/histo...og%20FRONT.jpg

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wig-Wag (Post 6563267)

I believe that this is the model, if not the specific year, that Popular Mechanics automotive journalist Tom McCahill in describing its cornering abilities made the comment: "It goes around a corner like a rhinoceros on a wet clay bank".

Cheers,
Jack

Er, if you're looking for Tom McCahill reviews (and they are fun to read still), he wrote for Mechanix Illustrated, not Popular Mechanics.

Cheers,

Earl

-Very interesting post on the Angelus Hotel FW. I never expected to see such a close-up of the main entrance (and in color!). I love it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flyingwedge (Post 6563444)

4th Street entrance, June 1956. Note the Auction sign in the window; the hotel was torn down by October 1956 (http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single...d/8682/rec/5):
http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/...6.jpg~original
Huntington Digital Library -- http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/single.../id/8686/rec/2

It seems there was an Angelus University at one point in time. I found this a few weeks ago on ebay.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/102.../834/ogod1.jpg

Notice that they used the same Millet painting in their logo.
There doesn't appear to be much information on the internet about this school.

...file this under mimetic architecture.

I'm not sure if we've seen this before. If we have, it's cool to see it again.*

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/102...0/836/mz4c.jpg
http://www.retronaut.com/2013/01/mim...n-los-angeles/

*so-cal-bear points out that we have in fact seen this before.
__

http://www.trbimg.com/img-53644000/t...8-20140502/588
(LATIMES.COM)

Quote:

Union Station's complexity grows 75 years down the line

By Christopher Hawthorne

May 3, 2014, 5:00 a.m.

The remarkable vintage photographs of Union Station's opening in 1939 show the streets and sidewalks around the new building packed with a huge and expectant crowd. Those of the interior reveal a vast, high-ceilinged waiting room, with impeccably dressed passengers sitting not on hard wooden benches but in individually upholstered lounge chairs.

Do not be fooled by these pictures. While it is easy to think that they depict some Golden Age of rail travel in Los Angeles, the truth is that the Golden Age of rail travel in Los Angeles is just getting underway.

In the decade after Union Station opened in 1939, it handled about 13,000 rail travelers a day. Today that number is roughly 75,000.

It will keep climbing in the next few years as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which bought Union Station in 2011, expands the subway and light-rail network in L.A. County and remakes the station and the surrounding area under a new master plan. And the figure will jump again if high-speed trains begin running between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Union Station, designed by the prolific John Parkinson and his son, Donald, in a retrograde but winning blend of Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean, Moorish and Art Deco styles, wasn't advertising the importance of rail to 20th-century Los Angeles when it opened as much as mourning it. It was clear by that point that the private car and air travel represented the future.

What the giant crowds were celebrating, as much as anything, was the fact that the richly appointed piece of civic architecture, caught for nearly two decades in legal battles between the city and the railroads that twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court, was finally finished. Had the delays stretched another year or two, into the teeth of the Second World War, it's possible that construction might have been put off indefinitely.

The story of Union Station, which marks its 75th anniversary on Saturday, is that kind of story: Contradictory, surprising, far more layered than most Southern Californians realize.

There are certainly buildings in Los Angeles more imposing or innovative, and there may be a handful more beautiful. But it's hard to think of another landmark that has played such a pivotal role in so many aspects of the city's growth and evolving self-image.

Imagined as early as 1909 as a way to unify the operations of the three dominant rail companies in Southern California (hence its name), the station was a major civic monument that was also paid for largely with private railroad money.

And though the details of its interior look as impressive today as they did when the station was new, the building was constructed by executives whose desire to build a shrine to the glories of rail travel and of Southern California itself was tempered by a steadfast attention to the bottom line.

Cincinnati's 1933 Union Terminal, a grand exercise in Art Deco architecture, cost $41 million. Union Station, finished six years later, cost $11 million.

Its architecture, spare and Spanish on the outside and ornate and eclectic on the inside, draped the building in nostalgia for some mythic pre-modern Los Angeles. It borrowed details from a wide range of earlier landmarks, including the Santa Barbara County Courthouse and Riverside's Mission Inn.

As a piece of urban design, however, Union Station was ruthlessly modern, a powerful engine for an urban-renewal plan that displaced hundreds of residents of L.A.'s original Chinatown and served as a precursor to later "slum clearance" efforts in Chavez Ravine and on Bunker Hill. In facing almost due west, the station not only announced the end of the line for American territorial expansion but helped the city turn its back on the Los Angeles River.

It didn't seek to undermine the growing car culture. It actively supported it. The 200-foot gap between Alameda Street and the station's front doors was a suburban distance, not an urban one, leaving plenty of room for parking.

More to the point, by going up when and where it did, Union Station influenced the location of key highway interchanges in and around downtown. As Matthew W. Roth writes in "Los Angeles Union Station," a new book published by the Getty Research Institute, which has also organized an anniversary exhibition on the station at the Central Library, "the consolidation of track operations at Union Station set in motion the process of bridging the Los Angeles River with a freeway — and, in turn, the routing of the freeway network."

The decision to put the building across Alameda from the historic Plaza, between City Hall and the river, "exerted gravitational force on the layout" of the freeways, Roth writes. The choice of site "pulled the Santa Ana Parkway to the east and the Hollywood Parkway to the north and thereby set the locations of other nodal structures, including the Four-Level Interchange and the San Bernardino Split."

Those facts, he argues, "should give pause to accounts of the city's transportation history framed primarily as a contest between road and rail."

After the war the city began building its public monuments almost exclusively in the modern style, their flat roofs stripped of red tile. Union Station, this last gasp of revivalism, was different not just in form but in sensibility. It was a final tribute to the collective — to the romance of the crowd — in a city that would spend the rest of the century, in architecture as in planning policy, celebrating the private individual.

Still, this was no clanging, overcrowded train shed. As William Bradley points out in another book marking the building's 75th birthday, "Los Angeles Union Station: Tracks to the Future," the architects were keenly interested in avoiding "the hubbub normally associated with train stations."

The clock tower has never sounded: It was built without chimes. No billboards were allowed on the property, streetcars were pushed to either end of the station and utilities were hidden underground.

In the air-conditioned interior, the team of architects (led by Donald Parkinson after 1935, when his father died, and featuring the designer) pushed the ticket booths and the telegraph office far from the waiting room, to keep the ambience surrounding those lounge chairs as tranquil and civilized as possible.

Union Station has been newly polished and touched up in advance of this weekend's milestone by the Pasadena firm Architectural Resources Group. Though there is still room for improvement — the recent decision to cordon off chairs for ticketed Amtrak passengers only is a significant blow to the station's role as a civic space — on the whole it is looking better under Metro's ownership than it has in many years.

If Metro can find the right tenant for the stunning but long-vacant Fred Harvey restaurant, the revival of downtown will have officially jumped the 101 Freeway and reached Union Station.

Just after the building opened in the spring of 1939, the design journal Pencil Points, a reliable supporter of modernist architecture, published a short essay by a correspondent in Los Angeles, Paul Hunter. He didn't waste time stating the obvious: That the station looked old-fashioned, out of step, to many local architects.

"As far back as the late Twenties, Spanish was no longer considered a smart architectural style, and it is not used much any more even by the speculative builders," he wrote. "When it was generally learned that the railroads had voted to clothe the steel frame in Spanish dress, the more progressive members of the profession threw up their hands."

The significance of the station lay not in architectural decoration or symbolism but in the way it reshaped a huge section of downtown Los Angeles and consolidated a set of ambitious ideas about how the city as a whole ought to grow. Then as now, its nostalgic architecture was merely a mask.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com

-----------------------------------------

Union Station at 75

Where: Union Station, 800 N Alameda St., Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday

What: Self-guided tours, model trains, exhibits, live entertainment. Free train rides to Glendale and back for first 500 people per hour.

Contact: http://www.metrolinktrains.com

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...07,full.column

Seen here on page 479. I typed "noirish Los Angeles *** piano supply company"

On the Google machine and this came up. I knew I've seen this before here.

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...70279&page=479

Quote:

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality (Post 6563684)

...file this under mimetic architecture.

I don't believe we've seen this before.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/102...0/836/mz4c.jpg
http://www.retronaut.com/2013/01/mim...n-los-angeles/

-anyone know where this was located?
__

Thanks for this article Lwize!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lwize (Post 6563740)

Union Station at 75
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...07,full.column

Happy Birthday
Los Angeles Union Station!

http://waterandpower.org/Historical_...ion_ca1939.jpgLAPL

http://waterandpower.org/Historical_...ation_1941.jpgLAPL

This post was interesting CBD.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CityBoyDoug (Post 6562636)

"When Did You Write To Mother?"

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...ps009c9b22.jpg

To my mind, a No Smoking Please sign in 1942 is pretty radical!

__________________________________________________________________

Ceiling of Los Angeles Union Station, February, 1943.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u9BNNDIQEb...tion,+1943.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u9BNNDIQEb...tion,+1943.jpg

And since you were a sailor, CBD:

Sailors at Union Station, Los Angeles, 1945.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9...zanuo1_500.jpg
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9...zanuo1_500.jpg

US Navy and Los Angeles

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martin Pal (Post 6563845)

And since you were a sailor, CBD:

Sailors at Union Station, Los Angeles, 1945.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9...zanuo1_500.jpg
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9...zanuo1_500.jpg

Thanks Martin. Since the photo is dated 1945, I would imagine those tired sailors are anxious to get home and back to their regular life. War is over.

Martin wrote: To my mind, a No Smoking Please sign in 1942 is pretty radical!

I have to agree but I suspect that religious services were conducted in that same hall...hence the No Smoking sign.
:):tup::)

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/102...0/836/mz4c.jpg

Quote:

Originally Posted by so-cal-bear (Post 6563764)

On the Google machine and this came up. I knew I've seen this before here.

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...70279&page=479

Like the search box, another ridiculously clunky feature of the skyscraperpage setup is that locating the page is one thing; it does not necessarily mean you've found what you're looking for. For instance, rather than the piano post being on page 479, it is actually on page 585 if you're signed in...which is total pages to date (right now it is 1063) minus 479, which equals...584. Oy vey...

Anyway, here's the link to page 585:

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...piano&page=585

Better still, a direct link to the piano post:

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=9561

Quote:

Originally Posted by so-cal-bear (Post 6563764)

On the Google machine and this came up. I knew I've seen this before here.
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...70279&page=479

-my bad so-cal-bear.
__

Have we seen this bit of mimetic architecture?

"Shutter Shak", Los Angeles
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/842/4yej3.jpg
http://www.nmsapartments.com/

-note the huge flash cube on top. lol
__

A look inside Earl Carroll's, circa 1942.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/838/xrcd.jpg
Kodachrome slide/ebay
__

..speaking of Earl Carroll.

I posted this photograph earlier in the thread of the 60-foot wide double revolving stage under construction in 1938.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/845/1dcz.jpg
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=5754

The other night I watched Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) on TCM. Towards the end of the movie Sarah Jane (passing for white)
is a showgirl at the Moulin Rouge (previously the Earl Carroll Theater) on Sunset.

There's a short, but impressive scene with Sara Jane on the revolving stage. The girls are shown reclining on lounge chairs that automatically move up and down...tilting back...then forward, as they glide by. It was so cool.

here's a still of the scene
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/836/8blj.jpg
http://press.anu.edu.au/apps/bookwor...561/ch03.xhtml

-that's Sarah Jane coming around the bend on the right. :)

I had a feeling it was filmed at the nightclub but I wasn't sure.
I just read on IMDB that the scene was indeed filmed at the Moulin Rouge at 6230 Sunset Boulevard
on the old Earl Carroll revolving stage from 1938!
__

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tourmaline (Post 6561461)

Circa '25, An imposing Patriotic Hall

http://catalog.library.ca.gov/exlibr...IJJI2SE6J7.jpg http://catalog.library.ca.gov/exlibr...IJJI2SE6J7.jpg

USC dates this picture as circa 1927.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...gueroa1927.jpg
USC Digital Library

Two young boys selling newspapers.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...ueroa1927b.jpg
Details of pictures above.

On the left is the Noble Co.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...ueroa1927c.jpg
Detail of pictures above/LAPL.

It looks like the Patriotic Hall and one or two building either side are all that remain from the original picture.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...igueroaGSV.jpg
GSV

'Death in a Gutter'.

March 15, 1952
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/845/26wa.jpg
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/co...id/33079/rec/2

Lover kills woman's husband.

victim: Clifton B. Medart 41 yrs old.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/843/r7vy.jpg
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/co...id/33079/rec/2

the lover/suspect: Earl J. Lewis
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/838/gsmk.jpg
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/co...id/33079/rec/2

the wife: Mrs. Laura Medart, 34 yrs. old
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/835/pbe2.jpg
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/co...id/33079/rec/2

I hate to say it, but what was the lover thinking? She's no Lana Turner.
__

Viewing Page 1063 of 3004