OK, here's a strange and noirish tale from 1940. As the caption says, this is "Chloe Davis, 11-year-old daughter of Mrs Lolita Davis, who is thought to have killed three of her children before being hammered to death by Chloe".

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...1.jpg~original
http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...hloeDavis2.jpg
eBay

There's quite a bit about this case online, so I'll try to pick out some of the details. On April 4, 1940, a bloodied 11-year-old Chloe Dibble Davis went to a neighbor's house to phone her father and ask him to come home immediately. He returned to his house at 1211 W 58th Place from a nearby grocery store where he worked as manager to find most of his family dead or dying. As Chloe led him through the house, she showed him her 3-year-old brother, Marquis (sometimes referred to as Mark), and 7-year-old sister, Deborah Ann, on the kitchen floor. Both had been bludgeoned. Chloe then pushed her father to the hallway where her mother, Lolita Davis, was lying dead on a mattress after being bludgeoned and burned. Finally, Chloe took her father to the bathroom where her 10-year-old sister, Daphne, was found with blood and brain matter splattered on the walls, floor and ceiling. At this point, Frank Barton Davis ran into the street screaming. Chloe followed and told her father to "brace up". The two younger girls were still alive when police arrived, but unconscious. Both died soon after reaching hospital, although Daphne apparently told doctors that Chloe had carried out the attacks.

After being treated for her superficial head wound, Chloe was held on suspicion of murdering her mother and siblings. The police and their psychiatrist, Dr Paul De River, were surprised by the detached way Chloe recounted the details of the killings. Chloe claimed that her mother believed that her children were inhabited by demons. Her mother had then beaten three of her siblings with a hammer and slashed her own wrists. When Chloe discovered her brother moaning in pain on the kitchen floor, she asked her mother is she should put him out of his misery, which she did. Chloe's mother was still alive at this point, and she asked Chloe to keep hitting her until she could no longer talk. Only when the house went quiet did Chloe calmly go to the neighbor's house to call her father.

Chloe is described as having above average intelligence and behaving like a 15- or 16-year-old, but it was her disconnectedness that confused investigators. When she was taken back to her home from the police station for a re-enactment, Chloe is said to have waved at her schoolmates on the lawn. She then took the police around the house, coolly explaining what had happened, and stopping to point at some books, telling them "I'm a bookworm. I read all the time."

Despite early suspicions that Chloe had carried out the attacks, Judge W Turney Fox ruled that Chloe's strange behavior and participation had been due to her mother's domination. Although he accepted that Chloe had beaten her mother and brother, the coroner's jury determined that both had died from their original injuries. Her father, Frank, also admitted that his wife had been to see two doctors and a psychiatrist for her illness, and had asked him to buy some chloroform to pour on the children when the demons came to torture them. In the end, Judge Fox ruled that Chloe was not responsible for her actions, and that they were carried out under the complete domination of her mother. He then ordered that Chloe should live with her father at the home of relatives or friends approved by the probation office.

Chloe Dibble Davis died in Indiana in 1987. She married three times, and had three children by her first husband. Her last marriage was only a few months before her death.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...hloeDavis3.jpg
Various pictures from derangedlacrimes.com


Further reading:

Deranged L.A. Crimes - Sole Survivor

The Mind of a Murderer: Privileged Access to the Demons that Drive Extreme Violence by Katherine M. Ramsland

Beyond Bizarre: Chloe Davis & Her Murder-Coaching Mom - 1940

Chloe Dibble Davis on familyorigins.com

I've been meaning to follow up on this. I think that Pinocchio has had a rhinectomy and been covered up with makeup, but the bulge for his face still exists.

I got (and annotated) this shot from GSV:
http://almostrandom.com/nla/greatwesternhoagie.jpg

amy!

Thank you very much!

History repeats itself......?
 

LA under-construction building burns to the ground, December, 2014. Real life mimics art.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...ps9cf96fcb.jpg
LATimes


MGM "Gone With The Wind"... ''Atlanta" burns to the ground in 1939, Culver City. Old MGM back-lot movie sets used in massive movie fire effect.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...ps7b6756ce.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...ps275dca93.jpg
MGM

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...pse556e230.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...psfdf241f7.jpg
MGM ~ Vivien Leigh & Hattie McDaniel

That is exactly what I said when I saw the pictures. By the time we drove by, all there was left was smoke

http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/l...8796397152.jpgABC7

Symbols of Los Angeles: freeways and palm trees.

http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/k...ire-img-02.jpgABC7

Orsini, Visconti, Medici...
 

Lately, one noirisher took photos of this section which was still empty or just starting under construction. The topic was the remaining stairs leading to Mignonette street. I don't know how to research back. Dear HossC, you are the master of the thread on that, please do !
I also remember Ethereal saying he « wouldn't like to live next to the 110 » in those luxury Orsini, Visconti, Medici etc. apartments.
How could they build residential buildings on that narrow space between Fremont and the 110 ?

^ Alvaro, I believe you're referring to my series of pics. I was the one that became semi-obsessed with it last year and beat that drum good and loud, lol.

--Here's the post with all my photos: http://skyscraperpage.com/forum/show...ostcount=15393
--And here's my post where I lay out my noticing the remains and touch on the history of the site: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...ostcount=12415

Also: wow, what a spectacular fire! This thing at its peak (peek?) was utterly massive, with reports of flames reaching 700 feet up into the night sky. As a fire captain in an LA Times article put it, all that bare wood goes up real good. I mean would you look at this shot!

http://imageshack.com/a/img538/5131/hyrFMs.jpg
Photo from the LA Times

The investigation begins........
 

An apartment building of similar construction and maybe a bit larger project burned to the ground in Houston a few months ago. Its fire was an accident cause by an A/C installers torch.

These types of structures are cheap to build and all the materials extraordinarily flammable, thanks to the unbridled use of chipboard and soft fir studs. My personal opinion is no city anywhere should approve construction of such structures. Nothing but dangerous fire traps! Note the chances are any Holiday inn Express, Best Western, or LaQuinta Motel/Hotel built in the last 5 years is of similar construction type and of similar materials. Cheap and Dangerous!

This here is Earthquake Country
 

The building codes around here are exceedingly stringent, and they get more so after every earthquake, as more is learned. It's impossible to build a frame structure cheaply, or dangerously, around here—unless someone's paying off the inspectors.

As someone has mentioned quite recently in these pages, wood-frame construction is the most suitable method for such a structure hereabouts, in terms of safety and durability.

Frankly I'm not intimately familiar with current building codes in Los Angeles, but as one who was educated as a Geologist before focusing on other directions I have no problem in saying there is no such thing as a multi-story building of wood frame construction that can survive even a moderate Earthquake without suffering significant or even catastrophic damage. They don't even do well within a couple of hundred feet of faults of far less stress potential than an Earthquake, which is why the State of California has a statewide moratorium on new construction of any nature within 300 feet of a known fault line. And that is without even considering the fire hazard from broken natural gas lines that can easily occur with an Earthquake. Broken gas and water lines from Earthquakes = out of control fires! In the case of the fire that took out the apartment building under construction there apparently was insufficient water available to even seriously fight the fire without Earthquake damaged water mains. As for cost comparisons with other materials, it goes without saying every construction project is typically built with the least costly materials acceptable to local building codes.

It seems to be a slow news day on NLA, so ...

If there are ever any typos in my posts, I blame my assistant here :).

The seller dates "this Los Angeles Dog" using a typewriter picture at 1929. Neither the dog nor his owner is named, so I don't know if this was a one-off for the cameras or a trained performing animal.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...1.jpg~original
http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...2.jpg~original
eBay

Italian style
 

kznyc2k : your LIVE post was so interesting, now it has become even more!!! On your photos, we saw those Visconti, Orsini, Medici buildings in the distance (on Sunset) which style is (as CityBoyDoug says) irrelevant to Downtown Los Angeles. It would fit with Hollywood.

Sam Cooke
 

50 years ago today singer Sam Cooke, was shot dead in a south LA motel. [IMG]http://i292.photobucket.com/albums/m...a33c2c3dde.jpg[/IMG]

Bertha Lee Franklin who shot Mr. Cooke was cleared of all chardges.
[IMG]http://i292.photobucket.com/albums/m...anklin2200.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i292.photobucket.com/albums/m...ke-Coroner.jpg[/IMG]

Fairfax south of Rosewood. 1-6-37 Los Angeles

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/537/b54q9e.jpg
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reverse
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/661/qhrA8R.jpg


close-up, left side
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/910/uLbTeU.jpg



close up, right side
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/540/U6bJ7d.jpg

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"Los Angeles Electrical Exposition 1936."

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/911/Vpq5H3.jpg
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What's the girl representing with the cross on her chest....fluorescent lighting?
I'm not sure where this exposition took place.
__

"Pacific Electric car in Santa Ana."

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/537/Y9P6bG.jpg
flickr / metrolibrary

Any idea what the workmen are doing at the bend in the track?

__

Tomorrow is National Poinsettia Day.

As mentioned in posts from around a year ago, poinsettias were grown in fields around West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, most notably by the Ecke family, and sold along roadside stands on Sunset Blvd. among other locations.

Apparently Albert Ecke, a vegetarian and nature lover, along with his family, owned and operated a health spa in Germany and around 1900 was moving to Fiji with all of them to open another one (?) but at some point when traveling through Los Angeles decided to stay there.

Speaking little English, Paul Ecke, later known as Paul Ecke Sr., quickly adapted to his new environs and translated for his father, Albert, during their trips to the wholesale markets. The family lived on a ranch on Hayworth Avenue, where they initially cultivated mostly fruits and vegetables. By 1915 they were growing poinsettias.

http://legacy.utsandiego.com/uniontr...es/met-way.jpg
Union Tribune / photo from the Ecke family

Caption: Paul Ecke Sr. took over his father's business in 1919, selling off the dairy he had run with his sister and focusing his energy on field-grown poinsettias.

http://media.utsandiego.com/img/phot...0_r620x349.jpg
Paul Ecke III, former owner of Ecke Ranch poinsettia farm, shows a sign from the 1920's for one of his family's old poinsettia packing sheds in Los Angeles. It was among the many artifacts he discovered in the past year while preparing his family's records for an archiving project at Cal State San Marcos. This photo was taken in April 2013. / Bill Wechter/U-T San Diego

Because of the growing urbanization in Hollywood, the Eckes moved their ranch to Encinitas in 1923.

According to dailybreeze.com, the Plush Horse Inn opened at 1700 Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach on August 3, 1960 (the seller dates the slide below as 1959). The article says that the original business included a restaurant called the Plush Horse, and a coffee shop called the Plush Pony. The article also names several of the businesses that have occupied the site since 1980, including Annabelle's Discotheque, a French restaurant called Renaud's, the Strand nightclub, the Club Caprice, and finally a gourmet grocery store owned by Bristol Farms.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...lushHorse1.jpg
eBay

This view from the other side shows the hotel in the background. It's now the Palos Verdes Inn.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...lushHorse2.jpg
dailybreeze.com

Here's the building during its time as Bristol Farms.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...lushHorse3.jpg
citysearch.com

There have been some alterations over the years, but the building is still easily recognizable. Yelp indicates that the Bristol Farms store/restaurant is now closed (their signs as seen in the picture above are gone in the GSV images after 2008), and I can't see any signage for a current business.

http://i809.photobucket.com/albums/z...lushHorse4.jpg
GSV

There are more pictures of the inside and outside of the building over the years on facebook.com/StrandRedondoBeach.