L.A.’s Haunting Past Relived in Black and White

“So here’s to Los Angeles,” writes Ray Bradbury in his introduction to “Imagining Los Angeles: Photographs of a 20th Century City” by Amy Dawes, Michael Diehl, Carla Lazzareschi and Stacey R. Strickler (Los Angeles Times Books, $29.95, 175 pages). “May it never be described.”

Bradbury’s salute to Southern California is full of irony--”Imagining Los Angeles” is, in fact, an ambitious and even audacious effort at describing Los Angeles in all of its complexity and diversity through the medium of old-fashioned black-and-white photography. The book began as a scavenger hunt through a fabulously rich but often neglected historical resource--the photographs that are salted away in newspaper morgues, library stacks, museum collections and institutional archives all over Southern California. Some 175 duo tone photographs are reproduced here, and they offer an experience of Los Angeles that is sometimes dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, but always fascinating.

A few of the photographs, such as the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, are often reproduced and thus deeply familiar. “There it is--take it,” said William Mulholland so famously as water from the far-off Sierras poured into the arid San Fernando Valley. Many more are rare and surprising, such the so-called “nativity scene” of what was to become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena--the day in 1936 when a handful of Caltech students gathered in a scrubby arroyo and achieved a controlled rocket flight for 46 thrilling seconds. And some of the photographs depict scenes so recent that they come out of yesterday’s papers: An apocalyptic shot of a fallen overpass on Interstate 14 on the day of the 1994 earthquake is a reminder of the harsh reality beneath the California dream.

The photographs have been chosen and arranged with a certain barbed wit. A shot of hopeful suburbanites panning for gold in San Gabriel Canyon in 1935, for example, is paired with a photograph of a casting call at the Bronson Avenue gate of Paramount Pictures in 1930. Women at work in a citrus packing plant in Claremont in 1935, all of them wearing starched white headgear that make them look like nuns or nurses, are contrasted with the women on an assembly line at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach in 1941, where the workers all seem to resemble Rosie the Riveter and the long rows of shiny bomber nose-cones resemble futuristic beehives.

Not every image in “Imagining Los Angeles,” however, is offered for its nostalgic appeal. A 1960 photo of Chavez Ravine shows how a whole neighborhood was literally scraped off the face of the Earth to make way for Dodger Stadium, and a 1966 photo of Bunker Hill reveals the price of urban development. We see a couple of charming if down-at-heel Victorian houses in the foreground as the 42-story Union Bank building rises in the background, a glyph that signifies how Los Angeles sometimes tends to devour itself.

Now and then, the book allow us to glimpse the ethnic and cultural diversity that has always characterized Los Angeles, even if it mostly escaped the attention of newspaper photographers in an earlier era. We see Latina tortilla-makers at El Sol del Mayo factory in 1930, for example, and Japanese American children who lined up for a parade in Little Tokyo in 1929, waving both American and Japanese flags. A photograph of jazz pianist and singer Lionel Hampton on the stage of the Cotton Club in Culver City in the 1920s--”plantation melodies, jazz, dancing and dining” was the club’s slogan--reminds us that the music scene in Southern California has always been a place where races and cultures mingle.

Still, the grimmer realities of Southern California history are not overlooked. The book includes a sobering shot of white police officers guarding a group of young Mexican American men who were arrested in the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, a deeply disturbing photo of Vermont Avenue on the day when Japanese American families were rounded up and sent to internment camps and a picture of a man getting a shoeshine at a stand that somehow survived amid the burned-out ruins of Watts during the 1965 riots.

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If there is a subtext to “Imagining Los Angeles,” it is the genius of Los Angeles for re-imagining and reinventing itself. Again and again, we come upon photographs of scenes so fanciful that we take them to be a set on a studio back lot, and then we discover that we are looking at something quite real: the spire-topped and be-flagged offices on Spring Street in 1898, a 1911 photograph of the Grand Lagoon that Abbott Kinney built as a tourist attraction in Venice, the glamorous young starlets who decorated a Department of Water and Power float to celebrate the arrival of electricity from Boulder Dam in 1936, and the monumental floodlit gateway to the Hollywood Bowl in 1940.

“Los Angeles is perhaps the quintessential 20th century metropolis,” sums up Carla Lazzareschi. “It did not merely grow dramatically during the last 10 decades; rather, it exploded.”

Entirely aside from its sheer entertainment value, the book is a measure of the blast effects of that explosion--what we were, what we have become and how we got here are powerfully communicated in “Imagining Los Angeles.”

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Among the most celebrated figures of Hollywood in the ‘50s and ‘60s is Ernest Lehman, whose work includes such enduring classics as “Sabrina” and “North by Northwest.” As if to remind us that screenwriters are writers, a collection of his short fiction, long out of print, has been released as “Sweet Smell of Success: The Short Fiction of Ernest Lehman” (Overlook Press, $15.95, 240 pages).

The title story of the collection was the basis for the movie of the same name starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster and is now being retooled as a Broadway musical, appropriately enough for a man whose writing and producing credits include the film versions of “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” “The King and I” and “Hello Dolly!”

Here, however, Lehman reveals his own reverence for words on the printed page in his tale of an ambitious publicity man and a ruthless gossip columnist.

“It never did any good to tell myself that this was just a piece of paper with some ink marks on it, that these words would soon be as forgotten as yesterday’s headlines,” muses publicist Sidney Falco about a column by J.J. Hunsecker in “Sweet Smell of Success.” “Because I knew how much weight these words carried wherever they were read.”

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.