Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This was an unusual purchase at the most recent card show. I generally only buy location cards for places I know and am especially fond of. (For some local New Jersey ones you can find posts here and here.)
Although I have visited LA on many occasions, and I have a very close friend there who I love to visit, I have never become fond of the city. It is so enormous that even despite having covered a lot of territory over time, I still don’t really carry even rudimentary map of it in my head, although I guess I have pieced together some areas. Between the Met and Jazz at Lincoln Center I found myself out there on a more or less semi-annual basis, maybe more like every three years, up until Covid. I traveled less for Jazz after Covid and not back to Los Angles before leaving at the end of ’23. I don’t drive and even if I did, I still wouldn’t drive there, which to my mind always seems like just a lick and a prayer from getting killed let alone lost.
For all of that this hand painted night scene of an old Los Angeles with these green street cars (the one nearest us is labeled Hollywood) and glowing lights, just had to come home with me. It is far from a Los Angeles time any of us could know and it is amazing to consider one with such old buildings, small streets – public transportation! The huge moon hangs in the sky and streetlights and windows glow.
I can’t help but get drawn in and can imagine that this is a Los Angeles with some allure, what it might have been like to be there on a warm and sultry evening. Horses (some blurry with movement) remain a feature with several carts and a few carriages are being drawn by them. People throng the streets and sidewalks. Hard to see but the few women are in long dresses. I assume the photo was actually taken during daylight and (very effectively) painted into a night scene later.
Other than the partial sign for Parlors on the left, the others are largely lost in the printing and perhaps painting process. On the right the awning is for an undisclosed Studio (photo perhaps?) and to the back on the left there is a sign on the side of a building which appears to be for LA Clothiers. Unfortunately, even with a loupe the others are indecipherable.
The colors, which I sort of assume were striving for some accuracy, are great with the reddish building, the blueish one and then the green street cars – all illuminated by yellow and orange toned lights. The moon (a complete fiction?) is huge and shines down on this street with an illusion to a few clouds, no stars were attempted. The street blurs into the horizon, lined with streetlights, and appears to go on infinitely into the distance.
A quick internet search actually reveals that some of these more massive buildings are extant today. If and when I make it back out there I might like to see Spring Street. This card was never used and was produced by the Newman Post Card Co. Los Angeles and San Francisco.
My favorite son and export of Los Angeles is of course Kim who fondly remembers coming into consciousness there. He fondly describes his first memories of the world taking place in a bungalow in a residential area. (That too seems to exist as his father sent him Google photos of it not that many years ago.) Kim may have seen this card first – I don’t remember – but we agree it was a worthy if unusual purchase.
