Dateline>City of Angels

Talk about dumb! Not much more to say about this party crowd, except that sadly we’ll probably be reading about them in the post-hurricane missing-person reports.

In light of the historic events shaping the national political scene both yesterday and today, I thought it appropriate to choose a video that illustrates how far we’ve come over the last century and a half. A remarkable figure in Angeleno history, Biddy Mason helped break barriers for African Americans as well as women in a day and age fraught with prejudice and obstacles. I only wish this short two-minute teaser delved deeper into her amazing story.

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.

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!

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.