History Keepers: Eleven Stories that Moved Los Angeles

For more than two hundred years, our community, our Los Angeles, has been molded and shaped by its people. In small ways and big, individuals impact the city, inching us collectively one way and then another. This exhibition tells eleven compelling stories that are part of our city’s complex fabric. Some are stories of promise, others are of despair.

The Sunset Limited

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Union Station Historical Society 

           Garden Court Apartments, Front Entrance, 1976 

 Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

Two of them aren’t specifically about people. One is about a train with staying power, and another is about a building that despite a promising pedigree came to a violent end. But they still have something to teach us about both loss and endurance. 

Special issue of La Raza, September 3, 1970, with cover photographs by Raul Ruiz of the Silver Dollar bar where Ruben Salazar was killed

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Records on the Homicide Investigation of Ruben Salazar, USC Libraries, Special Collections                                         

The objects on view come from university libraries, museums, and nonprofit organizations. We invited caretakers of these collections to bring forward objects and share with us the histories that they illuminate. The librarians, historians, archivists, collectors, volunteers, and local citizens who maintain these collections are the keepers of our history. They devotedly research, organize, store, and repair these items and make them available to the public in person, online, in exhibitions, and through publications.

In the retelling, these stories that have shaped our city move us emotionally in the present, helping us to understand how we got to where we are, and perhaps better see where we are going. Should we ever forget or lose sight of our past, we need only return to these primary source materials to once again illuminate our history.

Courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections

Ruth Strout McCandless with Nyogen Senzaki

History Keepers: Eleven Stories that moved Los Angeles

August 4, 2017 – October 1, 2017

El Tranquilo Gallery & Visitor Center Olvera Street

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument

Tuesday-Friday 10am- 3pm Saturday/Sunday 9am-4pm
Learn More

Los Pobladores: Celebrating the Founding of Los Angeles

Millard Sheets, Mural Painting Depicting the Founding of Los Angeles, c. 1931–39

California Historical Society Collections at USC Libraries

On September 4, 1781, forty-four Hispanic men, women, and children of Native American, African, and European descent departed from Mission San Gabriel Arcángel accompanied by two mission priests and four soldiers. Los Pobladores (the settlers) walked nine miles to a location on the banks of the Porciúncula (Los Angeles River). There they established El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles (the town of the Queen of the Angels).

Every year since 1981, the City of Los Angeles commemorates this official founding by recreating the journey of Los Pobladores along the historic route they traveled two hundred years earlier. On Saturday, August 27, 2016, walkers and bikers celebrate the city’s 235th birthday. Their journey begins at Mission San Gabriel and culminates at El Pueblo Historical Monument, a 44-acre park in downtown Los Angeles near the site of Los Pobladores’ original destination.

This year, as part of the city’s founding celebration, the California Historical Society and LA as Subject present the exhibition “History Keepers: Traversing Los Angeles” at El Tranquilo Gallery on Olvera Street, El Pueblo. In this exhibition, unique and curious objects from around the region bring our multifaceted city to us. Each tells a story about Los Angeles—how we move through the city and how the city moves through us.

Telling Los Angeles’ History through Artifacts

Featuring objects and images that depict landscapes; urban planning and architecture; travel, tourism, and mapping; airways, railways, roadways, and freeways; tunnels, canals, and bridges; cityscapes and streetscapes, “History Keepers: Traversing Los Angeles” is a cornucopia of the region’s geographical, environmental, cultural, and historical landscape. Should we ever forget or lose sight of our past, we need only return to these primary source materials to discover again where we came from and perhaps even where we are going.

Knife and Trunk of Tiburcio Vásquez, c. mid-1800s

San Fernando Valley Historical Society

In the mid-1800s the legendary, controversial Tiburcio Vásquez—son of a prominent Californio family—traversed the passes and foothills of the state, robbing and terrorizing inhabitants and romancing others. Remembered for his womanizing and crimes purportedly committed in the name of justice for his people, the bandido/outlaw—and folk hero to some—traveled with this trunk packed with his personal effects. This knife is all that remains of its contents.

Anton Wagner, Looking from Wall Street between 8th and 9th Streets, 1932

California Historical Society

In 1932 a German PhD student arrived in Los Angeles. Anton Wagner wanted to determine how this American city and its environs had become a booming metropolis of two million people from a small, dusty mid-nineteenth-century town. Wagner researched the region’s history, critically examined its geography, interviewed its civic and business leaders, and covered the area of greater Los Angeles on foot.

Lantern Slide, c. 1890–1950

Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum

Like other forms of “armchair travel,” viewers of magic lantern images were transported to destinations around Los Angeles without ever leaving their seats. Long before Technicolor or Kodachrome, they gathered in darkened spaces and saw Los Angeles in vibrant, even surreal, color. It was a trick accomplished with limelight, lenses, and hand-tinted glass slides, but to a nineteenth-century audience it might as well have been magic. Indeed, the projector responsible for these proto-cinematic effects came to be known as the magic lantern.

Copter Tested as Traffic Director, 1953

Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives, UCLA Library Special Collections

Accidents, traffic jams, and car chases are accepted realities for modern Angelenos. As we drive across the city, we often rely on reports from helicopters to alert us to traffic conditions. In this photographic print published in the Los Angeles Times on December 9, 1953, Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker and pilot Joe Mashman hover over the Civic Center. They are testing out the helicopter’s potential use by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in directing city traffic—particularly, as the accompanying caption notes, “along the freeways.”

 “Sunset Junction” Footage, 1927

Automobile Club of Southern California Archives

Click on the link above to view rare footage by Auto Club of Southern California engineer Ernest East of the junction of Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards in 1927. As the film shows, traversing the city’s streets afoot and by car in the early years of the automotive age was not for the timid.

Klaus Staeck, Und Neues Leben Blüht Aus Den Ruinen

(And New Life Blossoms from the Ruins), 1980

Center for the Study of Political Graphics

This poster features an image of Los Angeles’s Four-Level Interchange, connecting the 101 and 110 Freeways, in northern downtown Los Angeles. Officially the Bill Keene Memorial Interchange, it is the first stack interchange ever built. Since the 1950s it has become an iconic international symbol of modern urban development, calling attention to the way urbanization and car culture around the world too often result in destruction of neighborhoods, pollution, and other threats to the environment.

Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org

An exhibition by the California Historical Society and LA as Subject

Presented in partnership with El Pueblo Historical Monument and the El Pueblo Park Association

August 5–-27, 2016

El Tranquilo Gallery & Visitor Center

634 N. Main Street (entrance on Olvera Street, W-19)

El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, Los Angeles, California

Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 am–3:00 pm

Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm

History Keepers: Anton Wagner’s Los Angeles, 1932–33

 

Looking from Wall Street between 8th and 9th Streets, 1932

Los Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner, PC 17, California Historical Society

They are Los Angeles’s history keepers. They research, organize, store, repair, and care for historical artifacts and make them available to us online, at exhibitions, through publications, or in their homes. This summer, from August 5 to August 27, the California Historical Society celebrates Los Angeles’s history keepers with an exhibition at the historic El Pueblo National Monument.

A series of blogs brings our online visitors a sample of objects in the exhibition. Here we feature the work of Anton Wagner, who visited Los Angeles from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Wagner’s ancestors resided in Los Angeles since 1890 and were actively involved in the city’s affairs.

Los Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner

History Keeper: California Historical Society

In 1932 a young German PhD student arrived in Los Angeles. Anton Wagner wanted to determine how this American city and its environs had become a booming metropolis of two million people from a small, dusty mid-nineteenth-century town.

Mission San Fernando, Date Palms, Adobe Wall, 1932

Los Angeles: 1932–33 by Anton Wagner, PC 17, California Historical Society

During his penetrating investigation, Wagner researched the region’s history, critically examined its geography, interviewed its civic and business leaders, and covered the area of greater Los Angeles on foot. His comprehensive and illuminating study—most likely the first to present the geographical-historical development of an American metropolis—was published in Germany in 1935. The book—translated as Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Form of the Southern California Metropolis—contains only a small number of the 400-plus photographs Wagner took to help document his findings.

Cover (left) and Interior Page, Map of the Greater Los Angeles Area (right)

Anton Wagner, Los Angeles: Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien (Leipzig: Bibliographisces Institut, 1935)

In today’s downtown Los Angeles, Wagner would find 8th and Wall Streets the center of the commercial flower market—nothing like the residential bungalows he captured in the panorama above. But to him, it was not just the character of the landscape that had made Los Angeles an “insatiable city,” it was also the people. The two were inextricably linked. Still, could he have imagined, while traversing the city in the early 1930s, the phenomenal growth that would occur by the close of the decade, when the population increased by more than a quarter million?

Anton Wagner, Looking across Pershing Square from 6th and Olive Streets, 1932

California Historical Society

Pershing Square TodayCourtesy http://happeningindtla.com/listings/pershing-square/

History Keeper: California Historical Society

The California Historical Society holds one of the state’s top historical collections, revealing California’s social, cultural, economic, and political history and development through books and pamphlets, manuscripts, newspapers and periodicals, photographs, fine arts, costumes, prints and drawings, maps, and ephemera. At our headquarters in San Francisco and our outposts at the University of Southern California and the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, we hold millions of items in trust for the people of California. 

Exploring Anton Wagner

Anton Wagner’s photographs will be available online through the CHS website this Fall. On October 15, CHS archivists will speak about Wagner’s work at the LA as Subject Archives Bazaar at the University of Southern California. Over the next two years, the California Historical Society, with partner organizations, will explore the relevance of Wagner’s work to the study of American metropolises today and his legacy to Los Angeles.

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An exhibition by the California Historical Society and LA as Subject

Presented in partnership with El Pueblo Historical Monument and the El Pueblo Park Association

August 5–27, 2016

El Tranquilo Gallery & Information Center

634 N. Main Street (entrance on Olvera Street, W-19)

El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, Los Angeles, California

Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 am–3:00 pm

Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm

History Keepers: California Centennial Transportation Plate

California Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949

Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen

They are Los Angeles’s history keepers. They research, organize, store, repair, and care for historical artifacts and make them available to us online, at exhibitions, through publications, or in their homes. This summer, from August 5 to August 27, the California Historical Society celebrates them with an exhibition at the historic El Pueblo National Monument.

A series of blogs brings our online visitors a sample of objects in the exhibition. Here we explore a unique object that commemorated Los Angeles’s centennial featuring a depiction of an unusual mode of transportation in the late nineteenth century.

California Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949

History Keeper: Phyllis Hansen

California Centennial Transportation Plate (detail of back), 1949

Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen

In 1949, California celebrated its centennial of statehood. Vernon Kilns, one of Los Angeles’s premier pottery companies at that time, produced a series of themed commemorative plates for the occasion. There were six in the series, all in brown on white.

The plates were a creative collaboration between Mrs. Armitage S. C. Forbes—the “Bell Lady” of El Camino Real and “Mother of the Campo de Cahuenga”—and California artist/historian Orpha Klinker, who did the renderings.

“Wedding Party Arriving Home in Carreta,” detail,

California Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949

Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen

The transportation-themed plate depicts a wedding party on an oxen driven, wooden wagon, also known as a carreta, an early method of transport during the mission period. Surrounding this central image are other depictions of historical modes of transportation unique to Southern California. Perhaps the most unique of all the depictions are the camels that arrived at the Drum Barracks in Wilmington in January 1858.

“Ship of the Desert”: The U.S. Camel Experiment, 1856–1866

As a mode of transportation, few would guess that camels in California would qualify. Yet, in 1857, due largely to the efforts of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, 75 camels were imported from Egypt to the United States as an experiment in serving the U.S. Army in the Southwest. One group of camels was selected to pack supplies from Los Angeles to Fort Tejon in California; others to transport military supplies to forts in Utah, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico.

Gwynn H. Heap (illustrator), Loading the Camels for Transport to America, 1857

Published in Report of the Secretary of War, Communicating, in Compliance with a Resolution of the Senate of February 2, 1857, Information Respecting the Purchase of Camels for the Purposes of Military Transportation (Washington: A. O. P. Nicholson, printer, 1857)

Courtesy National Archives

“Camels Secured for a Gale, page 180 of Report of the Secretary of War (1857),” 1930

Published in A. A. Gray, Francis P. Farquhar, and William S. Lewis, Camels in Western America 

(San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1930)

In January 1858, the first train of pack camels arrived in Los Angeles. Their task was to carry supplies and provisions to Fort Tejon in the Tehachapi Mountains. As a 1902 historical record of Southern California noted, “For a year or more afterwards it was no uncommon sight to see a caravan of these hump-backed burden-bearers solemnly wending their way single file through the city.” 

Encampment with the Camels on the Descent towards Carson Valley, c. 1860

Vischer’s Pictorial of California (View No. 47)

California Historical Society

Camel at Drum Barracks, San Pedro, California, during the Civil War, c. 1863

Attributed to Rudolph D’Heureuse; courtesy of the Drum Barracks Garrison & Society

“Camels arrived in California in 1858 at Drum barracks, Wilmington, Calif.,” detail,

California Centennial Transportation Plate, 1949

Private Collection of Phyllis Hansen

The Camel Experiment ultimately failed. The camels’ eccentricities—unfamiliar and untrainable by its riders—and with their incompatibility with horses confined them to the forts in the Southwest. The onset of the Civil War led to the end of the Camel Corps, which disbanded in 1863.

In California, camels were brought to the military reservation at Benicia, where they were lodged and later auctioned off. Today the Camel Barns at the Arsenal house the Benicia Historical Museum. Still others were turned loose, to roam at will over the region. As the writers of the 1939 WPA Guide to California: The Golden State observed:

Within recent years a camel frisked about the neighborhood of Banning, making such a nuisance of himself that he was hunted down by a posse and shot. This was undoubtedly an aged survivor of the government caravans that cross the desert prior to the Civil War. . . . Some wild camels were sighted on the desert as late as 1980, and even now newcomers [to Banning] are solemnly assured they can expect to run into them at any moment.

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Projects Manager

skale@calhist.org

Sources

Jefferson Davis, Reports upon the Purchase, Importation, and Use of Camels and Dromedaries to Be Employed for Military Purposes (Department of War, 1857)

Francis P. Farquhar, “Camels in the Sketches of Edward Vischer,” California Historical Society Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Dec., 1930): 332–35

Federal Writers’ Project, The WPA Guide to Los Angeles: The Golden State (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2013)

Walter L. Fleming, “Jefferson Davis’s Camel Experiment,” Popular Science Monthly, 174 (Feb. 1909): 141–52.

A.A. Gray, “Camels in California,” Quarterly of the California Historical Society IX, no. 4 (December 1930): 229–317

J. M. Guinn, “Camel Caravans of the American Deserts,” Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California and of the Pioneers of Los Angeles County, 5 (1900–1902): 146–51

James Miller Guinn, Historical and Biographical Record of Southern California (Chicago; Chapman Publishing company, 1902)

Michael K. Sorenson, “A Most Curious Corps,” Military Images Magazine (March/April 2006)

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An exhibition by the California Historical Society and LA as Subject

Presented in partnership with El Pueblo Historical Monument and the El Pueblo Park Association

El Tranquilo Gallery & Visitor Center

634 N. Main Street (entrance on Olvera Street, W-19)

El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, Los Angeles, California

Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 am–3:00 pm

Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm

History Keepers: Backyard Residential Incinerator

Backyard Residential Incinerator, 1946-55
Courtesy of Nat Isaac

They are Los Angeles’s history keepers. They research, organize, store, repair, and care for historical artifacts and make them available to us online, at exhibitions, through publications, or in their homes. This summer, from August 5 to August 27, the California Historical Society celebrates Los Angeles’s history keepers with an exhibition at the historic El Pueblo National Monument.

A series of blogs brings our online visitors a sample of objects in the exhibition. In this blog, research into the city’s history of refuse collection and disposal leads one history keeper to acquire this old backyard incinerator—and successfully find it a home in a permanent collection.

By Nat Isaac, Los Angeles Sanitation Historical Project

As all historians know, you don’t just pass up on a treasured relic of the past, especially one such as this that tells the story of L.A.’s trashy past full of issues ranging from environmental protection to traffic, to organized crime to mayoral politics.

In the 1940s Los Angeles was searching for ways to minimize the costs of rubbish collection and disposal as well as reduce smog levels. Burning refuse was then a standard method of disposal in municipal incinerators and several open pits on the outskirts of the city. In 1944 the city’s main incinerator fell into disrepair and was permanently closed. This led to a crisis in the refuse industry. Home backyard incinerators, a firmly established practice since the turn of the twentieth century, became an even more popular method of disposing trash.

While burning trash meant less garbage trucks—and less traffic—on the streets of the city, it also meant more pollution in the air.

Burning Dump, 1945

Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

“Like a miniature Vesuvius,” the Herald-Examiner reported on August 2, 1945, “this open dump belches forth clouds of eye-irritating smog to pollute the atmosphere of the entire Los Angeles County. Scores of open dumps like this one would be eliminated through a county-wide incinerator and rubbish collection system.”

In the fall of 1954, the city council approved an increase in the daily hours of rubbish burning from four hours to seven hours. Rubbish could now be burned from 6 am to 10 am and from 4 pm to 7 pm. Although only a small contributor to Los Angeles’s overall smog, backyard incinerator smoke was very visible and its odors persisted for quite some time. As a result, residents began attributing high smog levels and poor health quality to the smoke from these units and complained to the air control district, local councilmen, and county supervisors about them. 

End of the Backyard Incinerator, 1954

Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

“Backyard incinerator with a large black bow with the letters ‘R.I.P’ on it marks the end of the backyard incinerator in Los Angeles,” noted the Herald-Examiner on October 20, 1954.

Backyard Incinerator Ban, 1954

Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

“W. G. Ney and Loy E. Moore, owners of the Peerless Incinerator Company, 1854 W. Washington Blvd., display their inventory of backyard incinerators as they hear reports of banning all incinerators,” the Herald-Examiner reported on October 20, 1954.

The County of Los Angeles addressed these complaints in 1955 with a phased-in ban on backyard incinerators. To Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson, the writing was on the wall. If the ban were applied city-wide, the garbage would have nowhere to go but to privately-owned dumps, which were known to be corrupt through involvement with organized crime.

Poulson immediately requested the county to delay implementation of the ban pending discussions on a more efficient garbage collection system for the city. He then began investigating private waste haulers and dumps for racketeering violations while at the same time proposing a new tax-funded municipal garbage collection program for the entire city that would ensure city-owned landfills and collection trucks for years to come. Such a municipal collection program, he saw, would avoid the need for dirty backyard incinerators, corrupt haulers, and privately-owned dumps. 

Hearing Conducted by Mayor Poulson, 1955

Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

At a hearing conducted by Mayor Norris Poulson and his investigation into rubbish collection racketeering, reported the Herald-Examiner on June 20, 1955, “The crowd heard testimony that threats have been made against persons who tried to dump their own rubbish. This was described as “a customary threat.”

As the mayor continued holding hearings on organized crime’s involvement with garbage collection haulers throughout 1955, public sentiment shifted in favor of his proposed municipal collection program. However, without adequate funding for such a program and with an expected increase in rubbish from the city-wide ban on backyard incineration, Poulson found himself in a difficult position.

By the summer of 1956, the city had started to phase in trash collection in areas where incinerator use was being slowly phased out. Poulson brought the proposed municipal collection program to a City Council vote on June 15, 1956. However, the council deadlocked, with six in favor and six opposed.

Ban on Residential Incinerators, 1957

Los Angeles Public Library; Herald-Examiner Collection

“All refuse burning will end October 1 when Air Pollution Control District’s ban on residential incinerators becomes effective,” reported the Herald-Examiner on July 1, 1957.

The mayor had no choice but to put the matter to a vote by the public, and on April 2, 1957, the residents of Los Angeles approved a new tax to fund a municipal garbage collection program for the city. Poulson won the battle against privately-owned haulers and dumps while enabling the ban on backyard incinerators to move forward. Later that year, on October 1, 1957, a total ban was placed upon incinerators by the county’s Air Pollution Control District, establishing the current way the city handles trash.

City Starts Combustible Rubbish, 1957

Los Angeles Public Library; Herald-Examiner Collection

“Loader Fred Mosely and driver Henry Lind are shown at Washington Boulevard and Arlington Avenue with one of 57 new garbage trucks put in use today as the City starts its combustible rubbish collection,” reported the Herald-Examiner on April 8, 1957.”

Residential Incinerator, 1960
Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

As the Herald-Examiner reported on June 25, 1960: “Patrolman Terzo explained to a new resident that incinerator burning has been banned within the Los Angeles basin since Sept. 30, 1957, and that the fire should be extinguished immediately.”

I first came across the old incinerator (depicted above) at an estate sale for a house that was listed for sale in mid-city Los Angeles in June 2007. It looked exactly like the images I had seen in my historical research on the collection and handling of trash in Los Angeles as part of my 26 years of work at Los Angeles Sanitation (LASAN). Unfortunately, the incinerator was not part of the estate sale, but rather a fixture of the house. Nevertheless, I was determined to get it as a potential item in LASAN’s collection. The only question was how? As my wife and I were already in the market to purchase a house and this one had a nice charm to it (as well as an incinerator), we purchased the house. Since then, the incinerator was carefully cleaned, disassembled, and reassembled after which it will patiently await a final resting place in the LASAN collection located in the Los Angeles City Archives.

History Keeper: Los Angeles Sanitation Historical Collection

Los Angeles Sanitation Historical Collection encompasses a history of and historical records related to municipal collection programs for refuse, recyclables, dead animals, and yard trimmings throughout the City of Los Angeles from its inception to the present day. The collections are located in the Los Angeles City Archives.

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An exhibition by the California Historical Society and LA as Subject

Presented in partnership with El Pueblo Historical Monument and the El Pueblo Park Association

El Tranquilo Gallery & Visitor Center

634 N. Main Street (entrance on Olvera Street, W-19)

El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, Los Angeles, California

Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 am–3:00 pm

Saturday and Sunday, 9:00 am–4:00 pm