Dateline>City of Angels

A few decades ago, a SoCal day at the beach often meant a trip to Santa Monica’s Pacific Ocean Park (POP), a 28-acre seaside amusement extravaganza designed to rival Disneyland. Featuring a Sea Circus, pier, funhouses, thrill rides, and even a few outer-space themed exhibits, the park opened in 1958, attracting more than a million visitors its first year.

Despite its early success, 1965 redevelopment of the surrounding area curtailed street access to the park, strangling attendance figures and forcing closure two years later. Except for some underwater pilings from its dismantled pier, no traces of POP remain today. It has completely vanished into the sands of time, leaving us nothing but childhood memories.

As the world celebrates the Beijing Olympic Games, it seems only fitting to serve up a pop quiz paying tribute to the City of Angels’ Chinese community, which has overcome tremendous adversity over the last 156 years…

The Question: Centered around North Broadway, New Chinatown is among L.A.’s most popular tourist attractions. However, as the name implies, it’s not the city’s original Chinese settlement. So where was the first Chinatown, and what occupies that site today? (Click the continuation link to find out.) Read more

If this past week’s 5.4 Chino Hills quake rattled your nerves, you’d best brace yourself for The Big One that experts say has a better than 99 percent chance of striking California by 2038. To help prepare you, here’s an 8-minute excerpt from a PBS documentary focusing on the San Andreas Fault and highlighting a few of the real shakers from our past.

This week’s pick for most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing themes with this blog…

Searching: Daily Motion
Keywords: “Los Angeles + History”

The Result: Daily Motion’s search engine must be broken. As noted above, I entered “Los Angeles + History” and this is what popped up. Do they mean to imply that this is a traditional Angeleno pastime? Likely not, since there’s no mention of the City of Angels anywhere in the video. (Although I personally maintain that L.A. bars do serve up the world’s best Margaritas.)

Whatever the case, it’s a fun change of pace — and an especially appropriate suggestion for Friday happy-houring after a very long week. Salud!

Famous as the film capital of the world and home to L.A.’s mythic “Boulevard of Dreams,” Hollywood has come a long way since its founding in 1886. Carved from lands that once belonged to Ranchos La Brea and Los Feliz, the area was known to the region’s Californios as “La Nopalera” because of the huge cactus patches that grew there.

So here’s this week’s question: Why the change in monikers? How did modern Hollywood get its name? Click the continuation link for the answer… Read more

Don’t call ‘em a rehash. Think of ‘em as Summer Reruns — or better yet, “encore presentations.”

One of the downsides of blogging is posting an item you’re really proud of, only to watch it slowly creep down your homepage and eventually disappear into the Twilight Zone of your site’s archives, never to be seen again.

So why not resurrect a few oldies but goodies every now and then? (Especially during a busy week that makes researching and writing fresh content extra difficult?) The posts below rank among my personal all-time favorites and coincidentally all appeared a year ago this month.

If you’re a return visitor who caught them the last time around, enjoy reliving the adventure. If you’re part of a newer audience viewing them for the first time, all the better…

• Tarts and Misdemeanors — A glimpse at a deliciously sordid tidbit of history surrounding L.A.’s Hall of Justice.
• No Bull, The Ring Was Here — Uncovering a buried piece of L.A.’s Spanish-Mexican heritage in modern-day Chinatown — a post that will have you shouting Olé!
  
• Things to See and Tear Down in L.A. — Believe it or not, some readers missed the tongue-in-cheek tone of this post and thought I was really suggesting we bulldoze these landmarks.
• Parker Mystery House — Site of a particularly gruesome episode in our region’s history of sensational crime, murder and scandal.
• History, Murder and Intrigue in the 90201 — More murder and grave scandal, this time from the wood-paneled halls of Beverly Hills’ famous Greystone (aka Doheny) Mansion.

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.

The Film: Sunset Blvd., the 1950 film noir classic co-written/directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson.

The Scene: After leading two repo men on a high-speed car chase along a winding stretch of Sunset Blvd., down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (Holden) ditches them with a quick turn into an old, rundown estate. Mistaken for a “pet mortician” by the mansion’s bizarre owner (Swanson), Gillis tries to explain his intrusion into her reclusive world as her identity begins to dawn on him…

“You’re Norma Desmond… You used to be in silent pictures… You used to be big.”

“I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

The Question: What was the address for this legendary exchange, (a) in the film, and (b) in real life? (Again, no fair Googling up hints.) Click the Read More link to see the answer… Read more

Question: Ask someone where you’ll find California’s steepest streets and they’ll likely guess San Francisco, where roadways like Filbert and 22nd sport a 31.5-percent grade. Hilly as the City by the Bay may be, however, it’s got nothing on the City of Angels, which actually lays claim to not one, but five of the state’s meanest climbs. Can you name them and the neighborhoods in which they’re found? Hit the “Read More” link to jump to the answer. And no fair peeking or Googling for hints… Read more