Friday Flix: L.A.’s Mean Streets, Circa 1898
This week’s pick for most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing themes with this blog…
Searching: YouTube!
Keywords: “Los Angeles + Landmarks”
The Result: How times have changed! Modern downtowners fret about hailing a cab to get from place to place. Nineteenth century Angelenos had to hoof it in every sense of the phrase, as evidenced in the above 28-second clip captured by Edison’s newly invented Kinetoscope.
The Backstory…
During the 1880s and 1890s, L.A.’s population swelled rapidly to more than 50,000, severely taxing its cowtown-era infrastructure. In his online book, Letters From the People, former history professor Ralph E. Shaffer describes the hue and cry over downtown shabbiness routinely found in the city’s editorial pages during this period:
“Throughout the 1880s letter writers, many of them acknowledging that they were recent arrivals in the city, decried traffic congestion, unpaved streets, roadways blocked by piles of building supplies, inadequate street lighting, the lack of sidewalks or of clutter on those that did exist, the need for bridges across the river and for roads to neighboring cities.”
Shaffer adds that these “intolerable” conditions continued well into the early 1900s, with frequent accidents involving horses, trains and streetcars.
Hmmm. On second thought, maybe times haven’t changed all that much.
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