1917 (1916) (1918)(1910-1920) (1920-1930) Table of Contents
Carolyn Elayne Alexander Images of America: Venice, Arcadia: San Francisco, CA 2004 (1999), 128pp., 1917, See Text
Fred E. Basten Santa Monica Bay: The First 100 Years, A pictorial history of Santa Monica, Venice, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga and Malibu, Douglas-West Publishers: Los Angeles, CA, 1974, 227 pp., 1907, 1906, 1905 See Text
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp. See Text
Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn's "Denishawn" School Brochure, 1917 See Images
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1877, 1917, See Text
Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts), 1917 See Text
Ocean Park Branch of the Santa Monica Public Library, 2601 Main Street (designated Santa Monica Landmark). Greek Revival design Carnegie Library. Built 1917-1918 on land donated to the City by the Tegner family. See Image and Text
Sea Gulls, Southern California Post Card, 495 Van Ornum Colorprint Co.: Los Angeles, Cal. KR Franked with a one cent Washington Green and cancelled at Redondo Beach August 10, 1917 See Image and Text
Santa Monica Planning
Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour,
2003.
44. Ocean Park Library, circa 1917-1918
See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1919, 1918, 1917, 1916, 1915, 1914, 1913 See Text
Note:
U.S. enters World War I, April 6, 1917, 1987
Documents
Carolyn Elayne Alexander Images of America: Venice, Arcadia: San Francisco, CA 2004 (1999), 128pp., 1920, 1917, 1914, 1903
[p.41 "In 1917, Cesare La Monica took up the baton for the Venice Band, whose members were Italian immigrants. La Monica was a well-known and loved musician in the Santa Monica Bay district, but when World War I was declared, he was arrested as a "slacker." He explained that he had not known about enlistment and immediately volunteered."
Fred E. Basten Santa Monica Bay: The First 100 Years, A pictorial history of Santa Monica, Venice, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga and Malibu, Douglas-West Publishers: Los Angeles, CA, 1974, 227 pp., 1934, 1931, 1917,
"By legislative act, approved April 10, 1917, the State of California made a grant to the City of Santa Monica, in trust for harbor and other public purposes, of the tidelands and submerged lands within the boundaries of the city and below the mean high tide line. This made the city's waterfront activities possible, including its breakwater (built in 1934) and yacht harbor for which Santa Monicans voted a $690,000 bond issue in 1931-despite the Great Depression." p. 97
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp.
Chapter XXV Characters Make a Town
"[p. 319] . . .
"[p. 323] . . .
"Perhaps the most famour character our pueblo ever produced was General Harrison Gray Otis [ -1917], whose fight against union labor attracted world-wide attention. I approach with hestitation the task of writing about him. I have read so much written about him by profound young authors who seemed to know him so intimately, without every having seen him. I will say frankly at the start that all I know about General Otis is that I worked with him and under him for twenty years and for about five years of that time was his personal assistant. He had a fondness for the military; I was his aide-de-camp.
"The general was born in Ohio of New England ancestry. As a young man he was a printer (yes, and belonged to the union.) When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the same regiment in which McKinley was a soldier.
"At the time of the World War, when we were teaching young boys to hate Germans, inviting them to thrust bayonets into hay figures by telling them, "Now he has raped your sister," I asked the general if he hated the Confederates. He was furious."Certainly I did not hate them. What do you think I was, a hired murderer? I was a soldier. Had I hated them, I should have refused to fight." [p. 323]
"[p. 324] In the seventies he came out west as a government official in charge of the sealing industry in the Alaska Islands. From there he drifted to California and became editor of a small paper in San Francisco.
"In Los Angeles, two printers had started a little weekly paper called the Mirror, out of the wreck of a disastrous venture that two young men had tried in the way of a daily paper. General Otis came to Los Angeles and bought it. The Times was started in 1884, the office being in an old brick building at the corner of Temple and Main. They had a ramshackle printing press that ran by water power from the city zanja. From time to time the pipes got clogged with fish and the press had to stop.
"When I first knew him the Times was in the small building which was dynamited by the McNamara brothers. His wife, Eliza A. Otis, was a reporter, running the first column of comment ever printed in the pueblo. His daughters were clerks in the business office.
"At this period when they wre picking the fish out of the printing press, there came into the organization one who was destined to be one of the most remarkable men of the West. His name was Harry Chandler. He was born on a New Hampshire farm. A student at Amherst, he took a dare to jump into an ice pond in mid-winter, and contracted tuberculosis. All alone he came to California. He got a job herding horses and peddling fruit in the San Fernando Valley. He was so skillful a trader, swapping old cook stoves for apricots on the trees, that in his first summer, he made five thousand dollars, big money in those days.
"He became the general's son-in-law and the financial genius behind the Times. In later years he was to become a millionaire with great land interests, cattle, cotton, oil.
"It was his inspiration that turned the Imperial Valley from a desert into the truck garden of America. His idea to [p, 325] bring the Olympic Games to Los Angeles, to make the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena into a great scientific center. Between Chandler and General Otis there always existed an almost touching faith and friendship.
"I went to work for the general just after he came back from the Spanish American War. He had commanded a brigade in the Philippines. After I had been with the paper a few weeks, he sent for me one day. He was writing at his desk and did not look up, leaving me shivering with fear on the edge of the rug. At last he looked up with a scowl, "What do you want?"
""You sent for me, sir," I stammered.
"Do you work here?"
" . . .
"[p. 326] [Examples are given of General Otis' journalistic integrity.]
"[p. 326] A working man himself, the general's sympathies were always with labor, although not with unions. If an editor had a dispute with a printer, his cause was lost before he started . . .
" . . .
"I am not going into the long bitter labor fight that lasted forty years and ended with the dynamiting of the Times building in which disaster twenty-three innocent men who had nothing to do with it were burned to death. Labor leaders have told me since that the general had cause for complaint at first, and that his rebellion against the union had been in the first instance justified. I reported the plea of guilty of the two McNamaras who set the dynamite, and [p. 327] was on the inside of the whole story, but I have not desire to dig it up here.
"[p. 327] . . .
Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn's "Denishawn" School Brochure, 1917
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1977, 1917
Civic Center-High School
"Santa Monica's Civic Center, including the City Hall, County Building, School District Offices, Civic Auditorium, and Rand Corporation, is located directly south of the downtown district in an area long inaccessible because of the deep arroyo now occupied by the Santa Monica Freeway. Finally opened to development in the mid-'20s by completion of the Main Street Bridge, the area was considered a prime location for some type of public use and was eventually selected as the site for a new Civic Center.
"The Civic Center today includes a number of historical and noteworthy features, among them the following:
"1. Main Street Bridge. An open spandrel arch bridge completed in the mid-'20s. Remarkably similar plans for such a bridge were originally proposed in 1917 by Erminci Gamberi, a merchant on Second Street, to provide a better connection between Ocean Park and Santa Monica.
Ocean Park
"35. Ocean Park Branch Library, 2601 Main Street, 1917. One of the few remaining Carnegie Foundation Libraries in Southern California. Built with a $12,500 Carnegie Grant and designed by architect Frank Kegly, the building was designated a Santa Monica City Landmark in 1977."
Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts), 1917
The Great War
"On September 5th, 1917, five months after America's entry into the European war, the first Venice volunteers left for an Oregon encampment led by Abbot Kinney's son Sherwood. [Of the over 80 locals who served in the First World War, only Charles Dewey, lost his life due to enemy action.]
" . . .
"It was illegal to sell liquor to members of the military forces, but Venice's cafes and nightclubs gained a reputation as regular violators of this wartime prohibition. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution asking the federal government to step in and close Venice's saloons and liquor stores."
Ocean Park Branch of the Santa Monica Public Library, 2601 Main Street (designated Santa Monica Landmark). Greek Revival design Carnegie Library. Built 1917-1918 on land donated to the City by the Tegner family. Photographed 2001 by Cynni Murphy
http://www.smpl.org/archive/3942/IMG0028.JPG
Sea Gulls, Southern California
Sea Gulls, Southern California Post Card, 495 Van Ornum Colorprint Co.: Los Angeles, Cal. KR Franked with a one cent Washington Green and cancelled at Redondo Beach August 10, 1917. The card is addressed to Miss Audry Hegner, Box 312, Claremont, Cal. "My Dear Audry Grandma Congratulates you for your birthday and will keep your and Andreas little present until she sees you again. Grandma and Aunt Anna are at the beach and the birds on the other side are flying all around. I suppose you've seen them at Venice when you were there. Grandpa and Uncle Nic are coming to see us Saturday afternoon, your loving Grandma.
Santa Monica Planning
Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
44. Ocean Park Library, circa 1917 -1918
2601 Main Street
Architects: Kegley & Gerity
Designated 3 May 1977
"The Ocean Park branch library is the last Carnegie Library remaining in Santa Monica, and one of the few small Carnegie library still operating in California. The architecture is a simplified variation of Classical Revival design, characterized by symmetry, a central entrance and a continuous roofline. The original facade was retained during a major remodel and expansion in 1985.
"The library site was donated by the Tegner* family where the original Tegner home once stood. In 1902, Charles A. Tegner opened a small real estate and insurance office in downtown Santa Monica, which is still operating after 100 years." p. 19
Amanda Schacter
(ed.) Santa Monica Landmarks Santa Monica Landmarks
Commission, 1990.
12 Ocean Park Branch Library
2601 Main Street
Built: 1917 -1918
Architects: Kegley & Gerity
Designated 3 May 1977
"The Ocean Park Branch Library is the last Carnegie Library remaining in Santa Monica, and one of the few remaining examples of a small Carnegie library left in California. The architecture is a simplified variation of Greek Revival design. The library site was donated to the City by the Tegner* family, and was the site of the original Tegner* home. The building for library was a gift of the Carnegie Foundation. This library first opened February 4, 1918. The building was closed for remodeling in the mid-1980's at which time a rear addition to the building was constructed."
Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1919, 1918, 1917, 1916, 1915, 1914, 1913
"Tom Prior and Fred Church leased space on Ocean Front Walk between the Fraser Pier's two entrances. They planned to introduce a new concept in amusement park rides, a racing carousel. They called their ride the 'Great American Racing Derby'. The inside portion of the ride was a standard carousel with 62 jumping horses and menagerie animals. However, on the outside rim of the 72 foot diameter machine were forty racing horses grouped four abreast in ten distinct races. The horses, which were set in six foot long tracks, would move back and forth as the side rotated, sometimes nosing ahead to gain the lead, other times suddenly falling back. The ride would slowly gain speed until it reached 25-30 mph, then the bell signifying victory for each of the lead horses would ring and the ride would slow down to a stop. The winners of each race would receive free repeat rides.
"I was impossible to determine ahead of time which horse would win since the cables that moved the horses back and forth criss-crossed beneath the platform. The cable pulling the outside horse in one row might be pulling the second horse out in the row ahead. . . . "
[Prior and Church opened their ride February 4, 1917.]
