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Picture Yourself Here 50 Years Ago
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5575 Reads
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 This city is older than it lets on. Beneath the vibrant, digital, go-go-powered generation-next veneer of modern Los Angeles and the Hollywood makeup job are sinews of old brick and bones of mid-20th-century iron.
For evidence, check out YesterdayLA.com, a trove of last-century postcard views that show Los Angeles coming of age and beginning to show signs of its future as a city of the world.
There are views of Westwood Boulevard in the 1950s, Angel's Flight during what appears to be the late 40s (to hazard a guess based on the clothing) and Douglas Aircraft in Lakewood ...
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Curated by Aaron T. Jacobs, a research fellow in the Vanderbilt University biochemistry department, YesterdayLA is a catalog of downtown, the westside, Orange County and other parts of greater L.A. (Sadly, the sections on Hollywood and LAX are "Under Repair." And be warned, the high-res scans - some as fat as 600dpi - take a while to download).
While it's fun to see beaten 40s-era cars tooling downhill from Westwood and the domed bank building that now houses Eurochow, the collection also hints at the sort of patrician, white-dominated attitudes prevalent in the pop-culture view of itself that L.A. presented to the world:
A postcard of Olvera Street is captioned (on the back, we presume) "Olvera Street, Los Angeles, California. Taco stands, Night Clubs, and Gift Shops all operated by Mexicans in their colorful native costumes."
And the cutline on a portrait of City Hall and the new Civic Center points to the robber-baron city-building that went on around the time the barrios and bodegas of Chavez Ravine were being leveled to make way for Dodger Stadium: "Civic Center, Los Angeles, California. Newly constructed Civic Center taken from the Japanese quarter."
Go take a look. This stuff's a treat.
(Special thanks to Dennis Wilen, godfather of the Web405 list for web-workers, for pointing LAVoice toward this site)
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Wednesday, October 06, 2004 - 10:53 PM
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