StAthanasius/St Paul's
 

They're great, but I was more impressed by ProphetM's actual placement: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...ostcount=12573

These are good too when the current site hasn't been "lost".:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-M...452%2520PM.jpg
http://www.lamag.com/citythink/timef...1/second-round
(Dempsey inspecting Hotel Barbara staff)

Dustin Snipes makes it look so easy....

This is what I'm talking about when I say I want to build a 3D map of L.A. with a time slider. You could see what lies on every square foot of L.A. from the 1870's to the present...

It would require modeling every structure ever built in L.A. but that's the fun of it!

It would also require digitally replacing huge amounts of earth that were carted off somewhere. Fort Moore Hill and Pound Cake Hill are practically gone.

Angels Flight Station House Pavillion
 

Hi kznyc2k, Did you ever find the answer? Thx

Cool, but would have been cooler if they didn't put it in the wrong spot. :haha:

As tovangar2 linked, (thanks for the linkback, tovangar!) it wasn't on that corner, but further east. Tonight I will see if I can whip up one of those overlays that's more accurate.

Believe me, I've thought about it. How many other vertical changes in the Los Angeles topography can people think of? The Downtown Hills have to be just the beginning.

Modern LA Noire
 

.

If I knew how I would post the screen shots from Bing Maps birds eye views that clearly show the blurred out house as being at least 50% destroyed by fire. It's hard to see the full extent of the damage but it's pretty bad...since the photos used to piece the views together are not all taken at the same time the north and south views show that house as burned while the views from the east and west not only show that house intact but also show the next one over (forth house from the corner) as intack. If someone would take a look and post you will see what I mean. And maybe tell me how to do it myself...

Hotel Cecil Hart Of Main St.
 

On the news today a body was found in one of the water storage tanks on the roof of the Hotel Cecil which is on Main between 6th and 7th streets. The body is probably of a young tourist who stayed at the hotel, she went missing on the 31st of Jan. Residents are concerned about the water they showered, brush their teeth with and drank, you think. Main Street is not the best place for a young female to be staying alone. [IMG]http://i597.photobucket.com/albums/t...pse5da62d1.jpg[/IMG]
LAPL Photo

St Athanasius/St Paul's
 

Your history of accuracy has been outstanding ProphetM and is much appreciated :-)

Now we've focused on it, St Athanasius/St Paul's is jumping out at me from so many pix. The 1870 view below (looking south down Main) was of interest because I've never noticed the second tiny church before just to the east of St Athanasius (LAHS is on the right margin) Can anyone identify it?:


https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6...515%2520PM.jpg

http://waterandpower.org/museum/Earl...20(1800s).html

^^^^^^
How creepy!

____________________________________

Episcopal churches...

When I saw this picture, I thought 'oh, another one.'

6th and Hill looking east.
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3234/2...c65a67b4_o.jpg
Metro Library Archive

The Metro Library Archive labeled this as being circa 1890, but I knew this had to be after 1906, being that the Hotel Hayward is in the background---plus the women's fashions (I even commented on the flickr account). This same picture is also on the LAPL website, and they have it labeled as circa 1900. By the way, that H. Jevne Co. building still exists today, though it looks kinda different. The Hotel Hayward also still exists, but was expanded.

Anyway, it turns out, this is a Methodist Episcopal Church (Protestantism baffles me!).

http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics46/00042634.jpg
LAPL

1906
http://jpg3.lapl.org/pics37/00068224.jpg
LAPL

The Hollingsworth Building. No more 3-story wooden Victorian structure.
http://jpg2.lapl.org/pics18/00018623.jpg
LAPL

And of course it's catty-corner to Pershing Square, everyone's favorite.

1926... no more Methodist Episcopal Church.
http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater2/00015143.jpg

Apparently, this building housed the Los Angeles Central Library from 1914-1926, when the present (Richard Riordan) Central Library opened.
http://jpg1.lapl.org/00078/00078960.jpg
LAPL

Sarah Bixby Smith remembers the Hayes visit 1880
 

Right there with you buddy, only it's all of Monotheism that baffles me. I'm like....what?


In other old news:

Looking up something else in Sarah Bixby Smith's Adobe Days, I read again her very brief description of her childhood memory of the visit of President and Mrs. Hayes to Los Angeles in 1880, the first US president to come to California. A grandstand was set up in front of the Baker Block and, after the speeches, Mrs Hayes was taken across to the "fashionable parlors" of the St Elmo Hotel by the ladies of the town for tea. That evening there was a public reception followed by a formal dinner at the Horticultural Pavilion "destroyed a few years later by fire". Smith recalled seeing Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera, "HMS Pinafore", at the Horticultural Pavilion just a year after its 1878 debut in London.

Smith wrote that the Pavilion, "a barn-like, wooden building", forerunner of Hazard's and the Auditorium Building, was opposite from her first LA home, a house on Temple near Charity. The Pavilion was across Temple "on top of a hill that is now gone". It was built under the auspices of the Horticultural Society. Prudent Beaudry donated the land for it in 1878. E.F. Kysor was the architect.

I don't recall ever seeing a picture of the Horticultural Pavilion before, but found one taken ca 1878-1879 from our first high school on Poundcake Hill.
The Pavilion is on the southern slope of Fort Moore Hill on the right. This is an early shot of the building as it's not landscaped yet and the steps have yet to be built down to Temple. :
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-g...349%2520PM.jpg
uscdl (url)http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/si...0/rec/1099/url)

Sand St runs behind the Pavilion, out of shot to the right in the image above, with the Protestant Cemetery north of that. The Pavilion was built on it's own little block, with two small access streets running south off Sand Street which met in front of the building. The one on the west was "Pavilion" and the one on the east was named "Stockton".

Horticultural Pavilion, looking south. Temple is at top with Sand st running along the bottom edge, separating the Pavilion from the cemetery. Stockton is on the left (east) side of the Pavilion and Pavilion St on the right:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-B...0%252520PM.jpg
calisphere


The other venues:

Baker Block in 1880:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-X...211%2520PM.jpg

St Elmo Hotel in 1890. In 1928 Smith wrote that the St Elmo "is still standing, but fallen to very low estate":
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k...055%2520PM.jpg
usc (previously posted by e_r, #1907)

Main looking north from Temple, 1882, showing the relationship between the St Elmo (now marked "Cosmopolitan Hotel" at the roofline)
on the west side of the street and the Baker Block, on the east. The St Elmo/Cosmopolitan is across from the Bella Union Hotel.
The Downey Block is at lower left on the NW corner of the then intersection of Temple, Spring and Main:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-r...936%2520PM.jpg
waterandpower.org/museum

That was then. Now:

First Los Angeles home of the Bixbys/Horticultural Pavilion: Temple looking west, mid-block between Hill and Grand: Hall of Administration on the left,
RC Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on the right:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-p...559%2520PM.jpg
gsv

St Elmo/Bella Union/Baker Block. Main looking north: Federal Courthouse on the left, Fletcher Bowron Square/Entrance to Civic Center Mall on the right.
(the Vickry-Brunswig Building, 1888, may be seen in the distance on the left at the Plaza.)
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-J...807%2520PM.jpg
gsv

The main things that you need are a web site that will host photos for you, and a photo editor on your computer. These are easy to come by for free. My method uses a free Google Plus/Picasa account since I already have a Google account for Gmail, and the Picasa photo app on Windows 7. I hope this is brief enough:

I start the Picasa application and also load up whatever I want to take a picture of - Google Street View, Bing Maps, etc. Using the Print Screen button copies a picture of your screen to the clipboard. If Picasa is open at the time, it automatically puts a copy of that picture into a screen captures folder. I then crop out the menus and junk like that using Picasa, and upload it to my Google Plus account, into a folder of my choice.

I'll tell you a secret: a photo album on Google Plus and a Picasa web album are actually the very same thing, with two different addresses to get there. Personally I much prefer the Picasa Web albums interface and options to the Google Plus version. So after uploading, I use a browser to go to my Picasa web albums - picasaweb.google.com. (I don't use the link that the Picasa app shows after uploading, because that goes to the Google Plus version.) I browse to the proper folder and picture, where there is a "link to this photo" option. There's an 'embed image' box, and formatting options below it. I pick the size of my photo from a pulldown menu, and use the 'image only' checkbox. Then I copy the link that it creates for me, and I can come over here and use the 'insert image' button in the forum (the icon with mountains on it), and paste the link.

One more secret to Picasa: the 'image size' pulldown menu has pre-determined sizes, but you can actually make the image any size you want. After pasting the link here, look at the URL. One section says /s800/ or /s640/ etc. which gives the length of the image in pixels, and you can change it to whatever you want. I typically pick s1000 for this forum. If you change it to s0 it will post the image at the original size you uploaded it to Picasa.

I realize the above is very specific to Picasa/Google, but the process is very similar with other tools.
1. Use Print Screen to take a photo of your screen (there's a keystroke combo to do it on Mac)
2. Paste that picture into an image editor
3. Crop the image
4. Upload it to the image hosting of your choice - Picasa, Photobucket, Flickr, imageshack, etc.
5. Grab an embed link provided by your photo hosting site, and use the 'insert image' button here to put it in your post.

OK, per my earlier post, here is my attempt at bringing the St. Athanasius church building forward in time by 120 years.

I decided to keep the utility pole in the foreground, the building at the back of the church which seems like it may be connected, and all the buildings attached at the left which would be lined up along New High Street. The modern building at left is the northwest corner of City Hall. There is still a bit of a hill on that corner so it lined up fairly well. The back end of the church is hanging out onto Spring Street. I lined up the curb on the Temple Street side, although I'd think that with today's wider streets, putting the church on top of the sidewalk would probably be more accurate. I also edited out a couple modern trees in the foreground lawn & sidewalk which would otherwise have looked very weird, being only half-there!

Ta da!

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-2...athanasius.jpg

What a gorgeous, clean job ProphetM! Thank you so much :-)

I have such trouble visualizing the missing hills in the modern city, with the possible exception of Normal Hill, which I can "see" when there. Your work is amazing. You should see the people crowding around my computer! Thx again.

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/9...01129smogd.png

Is this maybe the most noirish image ever?

taken from USC

Tovangar, thank you for reminding me to find this! I forgot all about it these last few weeks (work busy blah blah) but having finished re-reading it I found the quote in two seconds. So without further adieu here's what Jim Dawson has to say on pg. 33 of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill:

Also, to ProphetM: friggin awesome job! I knew when I saw that image of the church superimposed in the wrong place that it wouldn't be long before someone would put it in its proper location, and you did it better than I could have ever imagined. Bravo!

Very cool.

In agreeement
 

Yes I agree with Sheriff Paul and may I add very LA
JoeW

What an atmospheric photo
 

What an atmospheric picture kznyc2k. The guy in the hat looks most noirish.

Was there any caption or history to the picture?

The lone chair is intriguing...someone expected to be there for some time.