another fine example of what four wheels and a motor can be!!!:D

One look at these and I think the temperance ladies would head for the nearest saloon….

Thanks for the explanation.

I wonder if it's still there, entombed in place. To deconstruct/demolish an underground facility like that would probably be nearly as expensive as building it, so it might have been cheaper just to seal it up, and pave over the top of it. Or maybe it's still in use today as a bathroom for underground utility workers?

Many people here are able to post USC photos that aren't broken up into visual gibberish. The people who post broken-up USC photos must be doing something, or not doing something, that results in the photos posting that way.

Personal computer settings.
 

Addnly in Arnold Hylen's images of Calif. State Library you will find the Hopperstead House up adjoining site of the tower atop Court Flight - Mrs. Hopperstead battled for it's removal --More unnamed homes as well on N.Hill St that were immmediately to south of Bixby home and down to very precipice above the stairs and Hill St.Tunnel - Have fun nailing these down- never appeared here yet -- I have no ability to post any images myself----

Courts Flight
 

from the oerm website,the docents have said that the cars were in the valley somewhere.Im thinking the same hands that had angels flight for 25 plus years has the court cars.I remember in 94/95 right before they rebuilt angels,the observer ran an article about the city trying to find a place to install courts flight.....

I really like Beelman's Supeior Oil Building, '56, but the later, similar ones not near as much. I think it's the quality of the materials used on the exteriors.

There's more Beelmans here: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...ostcount=10244

Sometimes it's hard to decode why one likes a building. My three favorites here are Union Station, Central Library and Griffith Observatory, probably partly because I've known them inside out since childhood. I asked my youngest son, when he was by earlier, what his favorites were and he named the same three, for the same reasons.

There's a little love letter to Union Station at the opening of "Cry Danger" (1951). It gives me a charge every time I see it, even though it doesn't show the exterior or the main concourse:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-M...148%2520PM.jpg
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...422%2520PM.jpg
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8...552%2520PM.jpg
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-V...749%2520PM.jpg
RKO/netflix



It would be interesting if you had "looked a little deeper into her life". That or given us any facts in support of your assertion that she wasn't "any more of a wonderful spouse than her husbands were". Her behavior would have had to have been truly norish to best or equal her first husband's. That would have made a very good read indeed, but instead of facts we got insinuation and error ("involvements with various Reverend Smiths"). Neither the posted 1915 newspaper article (which contains at least one mistake, but firmly describes her as the wronged party), nor the linked 2012 John Crosse article, have anything that would actually cause her to be branded with a scarlet letter. We all like a good noiry story, so where is it?

No need to get hysterical GW, no one's gained pre-approval over your posts, or is trying to. I'd just like you to spill the beans on Bixby Smith if you've got 'em.

As far as I still know, the main interest in Bixby Smith's life, then and now, would seem to be her childhood memories of 1870s-1880s Southern California contained in "Adobe Days", her efforts, as president, to return The Friday Morning Club to Caroline Severance's Progressive ideals, including the resistance she encountered, and her great circle of Progressive friends and acquaintances which connected her to the most forward thinkers of the 10s, teens, 20s and 30s (and which was in marked contrast to Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler and the other self-described "men of vision" in Los Angeles). Her two 15+ year marriages, one to a tiresome cad, the second to a man who was merely boring, don't hold much interest, unless we are to tar women with the sins of ex-husbands.



Nice early photo re Bixbys and Court Flight. There was some discussion, back on page 129 as to exactly what it shows:

I find it quite facinating that with ALL the changes over the years, Fort Moore STILL is home to a Los Angeles High School. Great article here: http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_fo...s-angeles.html

If you clicked on the link I provided above, you'll find a great article on the "Lost Hills of Los Angeles" with some great photos, many which have been seen here before, but I am puzzled by the last photo. Says "what remains of Ft. Moore in 1980 yet it is clearly taken looking south on Grand Ave from Sunset, or rather the east end of Moore Hill where the new high school is.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8439/7...852aef55_o.jpg
union station, 1939

A woman speaks with a porter outside the baggage waiting room at Union Station
What's not to like about this beautiful shot?

USC digital archives/Dick Whittington collection

From your link:
The was obviously pre OSHA days...
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_fo...lebroadway.jpg
L.A.'s first high school being transported across Temple Street and Broadway. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.

Do tell, Sarah...

http://imageshack.us/a/img442/3030/sbscompletye.jpg
The Daily Trojan, 12-8-1927; USCDL




In Material Dreams Kevin Starr notes, refreshingly, that "[Sarah Bixby Smith] refused to be bitter over this abandonment by the man whose children she had supported and whom she had kept in such comfortable circumstances for these many years." It seems to me that she wouldn't have considered herself morally superior to her husbands and that she was intelligent enough to consider herself their equal in terms of being self-determining--that she would not have considered herself a victim, but a fully aware, self-determining participant in her own life. I hadn't thought that she was so weak-willed that she just couldn't say no to duplicitousness or to hopping into the sack with Paul Smith while she was still married to her first husband, or to any of their "caddish" behavior, or that she would have preferred to be considered as something other than a saint if her life were to be discussed 100 years later.

Per Artful Lives by Beth Gates Warren, "...[Paul Jordan] Smith was...offered a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, and because he was in the midst of a rather scandalous divorce (his second), he gladly seized the opportunity to escape [his previous post]. In due course, however, Smith's personal conduct once again provoked the public's ire. This time it was because of an affair he was conducting with the wife [Sarah] of the minister in whose Berkeley pulpit he had been substitute preaching. Smith, who indignantly maintained that the whole incident was a case of mistaken identity, took the opportunity to hyphenate his name.... However, the administrators at the University, unconvinced of his moral rectitude [which didn't seem to bother his new lover, Sarah, Mrs. Arthur Maxson Smith], insisted he forfeit his career as an academic. Jordan-Smith reluctantly complied, and as soon as his latest lover [Sarah] could obtain a divorce, the couple married and moved south to Claremont."

And according to Starr, "... the San Francisco newspapers spread the story of the two Reverend Smiths and the one Mrs. Smith across the front pages...". All of which is readily available to anyone who wants to find a fuller picture of the great, though not inhuman, lady. Little digging required.

There are quite a few pages describing Sarah marital exploits in Starr's book,
which can be read online here.


I do wish I had a picture of Kevin Starr's description "of an evening on Los Feliz Boulevard: over pasta and red wine, with everyone, including the plumpish Sarah, dancing Nijinsky-like at the end of the evening, Jake Zeitlin leading the dance like an Hebraic satyr cavorting on a Samarian hillside to the cymbals and lyre of a passing caravan."


Now if I had called you "hysterical"....

I have thus far avoided becoming a kibitzer in this exchange but let me add my voice to your more full-throated description of Sarah who I became acquainted with through her own book and then Warren, Starr and several articles I isolated in my research leading up the Betty Katz/Edward Weston posts. It was an enormously interesting time. Side note: ultimately Paul Jordan-Smith became the Book Editor at the Los Angeles Times and an author of some distinction in his own right.

The house at right was the home of lawyer/banker Orra E. Monnette...

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/8...iremonette.jpgLAT Feb 8, 1912



The shot above is of the north side of Wilshire--the Monnette house at 3101 can be seen at left. It was apparently just as Bullocks rose (the Specials are newly in place), as part of your set of pics, as was the shot below, the well-vegetated lot at right being where the store would be built on the south side of the street.

More dreadful husbands (father and son, even)...


http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/8...tedivcompl.jpgLAT


Orra E Monnette lived at 3101 Wilshire Blvd with his first wife; after their divorce, he married his secretary and moved to Oxford Drive... The couple had a child, and then there were more marital fireworks, resulting in his getting fired from the presidency of the stuffy Citizen's Bank and Trust Company, founded by Russell J Waters (see also this post and this one, among others).


Ah, but the couple rediscovered their love--or else she realized that there may not be so much in the way of alimony coming from a jobless ex... or she reconsidered life as an impecunious rather than rich divorcee...and maybe he figured that he would be better off with a spouse when looking for new employment... anyway, they got back together for whatever pragmatic reasons couples find to reconcile, if it wasn't a rediscovery of passion. (Btw, it appears that, despite the reunion, he didn't get his job back at Citizens.)


http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/4...ncilecompl.jpgLAT


As for the complicated marriages and divorces of Orra's father, Mervin J Monnette... it seems that this entire blog could be papered with articles from the Times and San Francisco Chronicle and other papers about his and his wives' affairs and comings and goings during the 'teens. Mervin was also an officer of Citizens' Bank--it seems that the old bank had had enough of the Monnette scandals by the time Orra got fired...

an odd, archaic word. perfectly suited here. I'm wondering if you see the serendipitous quality also.




For the Love of Books: The Adventures of an Impecunious Collector, by Paul Jordan Smith

(Oxford University Press, 1934)