1984 (1983) (1985) (1980-1990) (1990-2000) Table of Contents
Dana Goodyear The Enthusiast, The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, pp. 84-127, 1971, 2007a See Text
Bruce Henstell* Sunshine and Wealth: Los Angeles in the Twenties and Thirties, Chronicle: San Francisco, 1984. 132pp., 1938, 1930s, 1924, 1920s, 1919, 1915, 1912, 1890s, See Text
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1984 See Text
Roger Jones Windsurfing: Basic and Fun Boarding Technique Harper & Row: San Francisco, 1985, 128pp., 1984 See Text
Lee Dembart Pioneer Mathematician Mark Kac Dies, Los Angeles Times, Oct., 1984 See Image and Text
Kenneth Libo and Irving Howe We Lived There Too St. Martin's: NY, 1984, 347pp., 1984, 1913, 1853, 1850s See Text
Los Angeles 1984 Summer Olympic Games: $0.13 Torch Post Card See Image
John Muir Elementary School: Mrs. Keller's Grade 5, 1983-84 See Image
Harriet and Fred Rochlin, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1984. 1907, 1900s, 1892, 1877 , 1854, 1853, 1850s See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier: A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1984 See Text
Documents
Dana Goodyear The Enthusiast, The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, pp. 84-127, 1971, 2007a
" . . . "
Bruce Henstell* Sunshine and Wealth: Los Angeles in the Twenties and Thirties, Chronicle: San Francisco, 1984, 132pp. 1938, 1924, 1920s, 1919, 1915, 1912, 1890s,
" . . .
"The Pacific Electric. A visitor arriving in Los Angeles in the 1920s would have been immediately impressed by the size of the Pacific Electric, Southern California's streetcar system. Biggest in the world! some native was sure to boast, with 1,000 miles of track connecting cities from San Fernando to Balboa. In 1924, 109,650 passengers rode the rails. Via a PE Big Red Car or a Yellow Car of the Los Angeles Railway, which operated within L.A. city limits, it was only an hour from the surf at Santa Monica to downtown and another forty-five minutes to Pasadena. There was a subway, and there was Mt. Lowe, the magical incline railway behind Pasadena that lifted you up the sheer face of a mountain and then twisted around until you reached the summit and the Alpine Tavern. You could see clear to Catalina and everything in between.
"The native was sure to suggest to the tourist that the best and cheapest way to see Southern California was aboard a Big Red Car. There were 6,000 trains each day over 115 different routes, and the basic fare was five cents. . . . Or the beach cities, Hollywood and Beverly Hills along the Balloon Route. . . .
"In 1915, the president of the PE called Los Angeles an "electric railway paradise." It was. Graceful new cars glided over miles of unobstructed right of way, past spectacular scenery, delivering passengers in, as the company boasted on its logo, speed, safety, comfort. Yet, by 1920, for all its apparent health, the system had begun to die. Its death throes were spasmodic and ultimately irreversible.
"Los Angeles was growing up too fast. There were too many people to serve and they were taking up residence in places increasingly distant from the tracks the PE operated. . . . " p. 23
{p. 27 photo of the Ocean Park Beach ca.1920?}
"The Beaches. . . . On the July 4 weekend in 1925, for example, three-car streetcar trains arrived every four minutes through the day and every one was jammed. . . . " p. 27
" . . . Now, on the night of June 30, 1919, {U.S. enacts National prohibition} . . .
"A long line of cars crowded the roads to Venice and special three-car trains of the Pacific Electric were in service to convey the estimated 100,000 drinking men and women who wanted to bid farewell to inebriation while at the sea. At the Ship Cafe alongside the Venice pier, tables were $300 each. Harlow's the Strand, the Ocean Inn and every other watering hole in Venice and neighboring Ocean Park locked their doors by 10:00 p.m. against the endless crush of revelers." pp. 58 & 59
"In early May, 1938, the impending opening of the Rex was announced. . . . Airplanes inserted the ship's name into the skies above Los Angeles and big ads were inserted into the papers. "OPEN MAY 5th, and every afternoon and evening thereafter. Cocktail bar. No cover. Popular priced meals at all hours. Cuisine by Battista, formerly of Trocadero and Victor Hugo's - ALL THE THRILLS OF BIARRITZ, RIVIERA, MONTE CARLO, CANNES - SURPASSED." . . .
"We don't want it!" . . .the Santa Monica Evening Outlook . . . "The gambling barge Rex will be no asset to Santa Monica." Mayor E.S. Gillette [forbid] Tony [Conero] to have a brass band on the Santa Monica Pier the day the ship opened.
". . . A fleet of thirteen water taxis was kept busy ferrying people back and forth. The Rex was open twenty-four hours a day, and there was seldom less than a 1,000 people aboard, and 2 -3,000 during the peak hours." pp. 67, 68
"Venice-by-the-Sea, Venice of America as it was called, was the creation of a true eccentric, Abbot Kinney. Kinney's family made a fortune in the Gilded Age with a daring new product: cigarettes. Kinney's wealth freed him to search for a cure for the bane of his existence: insomnia. His search eventually led him to the healthful environment of Los Angeles, which he credited with curing him of the scourge.
"Kinney became not only a resident but a booster. He authored a lengthy monograph on the eucalyptus tree which thrived in Southern California. With Helen Hunt Jackson, he wrote a study of the downtrodden Gabrielino Indians. And Kinney became a developer, purchasing a large tract of land immediately south of Santa Monica which he platted as the resort city of Ocean Park." pp. 104, 105
" . . . Still further north, on the boundary line between Ocean Park and Venice, was built Fraser's Million Dollar Pier, which opened in 1912. Later a second pier connected with it, Lick Pier.
" . . . The Ocean Park or Fraser Pier burned twice in the 1920s." p. 106
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985 , 1984
"The future ended September 20, 1984. They closed down Ship's coffee shop at midnight, and the bulldozers came in the morning.
" . . .
"Ship's had been finely tuned to the car culture of Southern California . . . A pavilion in a parking lot, its bold shapes and colorful spaces beckoned to drivers far down the street by offering a protected oasis in the midst of the noise and hustle of traffic. . . ." p. 15
" . . . It completed the revolution of Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, the Futurists and the Constructivists, the Expressionists and the Bauhaus. And its accomplishments had been dismissed as "Googie."
"So the future finally ended that night, a long process over more than a decade. They had started to build the past again. . . . the coffee shops has told us about ourselves by showing us . . . what we once thought our future would look like. By the time it was torn down, we had changed our mind about what our future would be. While it remained we could be reminded of what we had once believed, and reflect on why our future had changed so much." p. 16
Roger Jones Windsurfing: Basic and Fun Boarding Technique Harper & Row: San Francisco, 1985, 128pp. 1984
"The acceptance of boardsailing into the 1984 Olympic Games was a tribute to the sport's unique qualities, in that other water sports of longer standing have repeatedly been denied Olympic status." p. 10
Mark Kac
Kenneth Libo and Irving Howe We Lived There Too St. Martin's: NY, 1984, 347pp., 1984, 1913, 1853, 1850s
" . . .
"Whereas San Francisco had grown into a full-fledged city in a few years, Los Angeles remained a dusty little cow town until well after the Civil War, When Harris Newmark arrived via Nicaragua in 1853, there were no more than a few thousand settlers living in an assortment of flat-roofed houses spread out helter-skelter from the town's center into the flatlands beyond. What follows are Newmark's recollections of those early days, taken from his memoirs, Sixty Years in Southern California (c. 1913) . . .
"After heavy winter rains mud was from six inches to two feet dep, while during the summer dust piled up to about the same extent. Few city ordinances were obeyed; for notwithstanding that a regulation of the City Council called on every citizen to sweep in front of his house to a certain point on Saturday evenings, not the slightest attention was paid to it. In to the roadway was thrown all the rubbish: if a man bought a new suit of clothes, a pair of boots, a hat or a shirt, to replace a corresponding part of his apparel that had outlived his usefulness, he would think nothing , on attiring himself in the new purchase, of tossing the discarded article into the street where it would remain until some passing Indian, or other vagabond, took possession of it., So wretched indeed were the conditions, that I have seeen dead animals left on the highways for days at a time. . .
"The principal industry throughout Los Angeles County, and indeed throughout Southern California, up to the sixties, was the raising of cattle and horses - an undertaking favored by a people particularly fond of leisure and knowing little of the latent possibilities in the land; so that this entire area of magnificient soil supported herds which provided the whole population in turn, directly or indirectly, with a livelihood. The live stock subsisted upon grass growing wild all over the county, and the prosperity of Southern California therefore depended entirely upon the season's rainfall . . . If the rainfall was sufficient to produce feed, dealers came from the North and purchased our stock, and everybody thrived; if, on the other hand, the season was dry, cattle and horses died and the public's pocketbook shrank to very unpretentious dimensions . . . " p. 177
John Muir Elementary School: Mrs. Keller's Grade 5, 1983-84
Harriet and Fred Rochlin, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1984. 1854, 1853
Solomon Nuñes Carvalho [1815-1897],
" . . . Another memorable sojourner was Solomon Nuñes Carvalho [1815-1897], oil painter, photographer, and daguerreotyper, who spent one extraordinary year in the Far West. From September 1853 to September 1854 he participated in a historic and treacherous expedition, which he recorded in oil paintings, daguerreotypes-the first taken of the Far West-and a trip diary and letters upon which he based Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West. The book opens with a description of his first meeting with the organizer and leader of the journey, which occurred on August 22, 1853.
"After a short interview with Col. J.C. Fremont, I accepted his invitation to accompany him as artist of an Exploring Expedition across the Rocky Mountains. A half hour previously, if anyone had suggested to me the probability of my undertaking an overland journey to California, even over the emigrant route, I should have replied there were no inducements sufficiently powerful enough to have tempted me. Yet in this instance, I impulsively, without even a consultation with my family, passed my word to join an exploring party, under the command of Col. Fremont over a hitherto untrodden country in an elevated region, with the full expectation of an arctic winter . . . I know of no other man to whom I would have entrusted my life under similar circumstances.
"Colonel John C. Fremont, celebrated American soldier, explorer, and politician, planned the arduous winter journey, his fifth and final expedition in the West, to demonstrate the feasibility of a year-round transcontinental rail route along the thirty-eighth parallel. Carvelho's task was to provide Fremont with daguerreotypes to illustrate the proposal.
" . . .
"Cared for by the Mormons, Carvalho recuperated, then continued on to Los Angeles. He spent from June until September in the City of Angeles, where on the invitation of Samuel and Joseph Labatt he participated in the organization of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the first Jewish organization in Los Angeles. The Labatts in turn helped Carvalho start a photographer's and artist's studio to earn money for his trip home.
" . . ." pp. 175, 176
Gertrude Stein,
" . . . In the early 1900s Gertrude Stein, figuratively, swam far out to sea, caught an incoming wave, rode it to shore, and planted her flag triumphantly in the twentieth century. Of her abundant achievements, none superceded her early understanding and enthusiastic espousal of the baffling new age. She sensed the character of the emerging epoch, said Stein, because she was a westerner and had a pioneer's affinity for the new. Like other westerners who went east (to Paris) to find the timeless West within the mind (as literary critic William Gass put it), Stein was most extravagantly a westerner when far from home.
" . . . Stein described her longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas, the granddaughter of a Jewish forty-niner, to be "as ardently Californian as I." The pair met in Paris in 1907. Their relationship was partially revealed in the best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein's rendition of her dutiful but acerbic mate's views of the great and obscure who passed through their ménage.
" . . .
" . . . In 1892 Gertrude went to live with her relatives in Baltimore (after her parents' deaths) and then enrolled at Radcliffe to be near Leo (her favorite brother) who was studying at Harvard. Three years later . . . the pair established themselves in Paris . . . at 27 rue de Fleurus (sic). . . Leo began collecting the works of Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso. . .
" . . .
" Alice Babette Toklas was born in San Francisco in 1877 . . . and was raised in Seattle . . . she enrolled in the University of Washington to study music, hoping to become a concert pianist. . . . sent to live in San Francisco . . . her friends Michael and Sarah Stein, Gertrude's brother and sister-in-law . . . traveled to Paris in 1907 . . . The forty-year union ultimately yielded a controversial body of novels, plays, poems, essays, and criticism; friendships-enduring and ephemeral-with some of the twentieth century's cultural pathfinders . . . " pp. 188, 189, 190, 191
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier: A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1984
Chapter 6: City Owned Pier (1974-1990)
" . . . in January 1984 . . .
"Sinbad's restaurant was physically moved back forty feet, then forward forty feet to repair the pilings beneath it. . . . Few realized that Sinbad's had been moved to its present location from its old location next to the billiard's building when the La Monica Ballroom was built in 1924.
" . . .The PRC board selected Gail E. Markens [as director of the Pier Restoration Corporation] . . . " p. 163
". . . design contest team winner, March 1983, Moore, Ruble, and Yudall, with the landscape architectural firm Campbell and Campbell, proposed a 5000 square foot children's park with a concrete boat and dragon, a two hundred seat bleacher structure to accomodate volleyball spectators, and an extension of the pier deck east of the carousel connected by stairs and ramps to the Promenade below. Metal framed pavilions, would flank the bleachers . . .
" . . . " p. 164
" . . .
" . . . the carousel managed to open in mid-August on the closing weekend of Los Angeles' 1984 Summer Olympics.
" . . . Roy Cruickshank operated Skipper's, a fast food business in the northwest corner of the carousel building . . .
". . . [during renovations] he operated out of a popcorn cart in front of the carousel . . .
" . . . Ernie Powell* commented, "I'm of the theory that tells us a stronger pier is all we need. That's a less expensive way to go."
" . . . " p. 165