Downtown LA’s historic Angels Flight railway may be running by Labor Day ... We sample the LAPD’s old daily newspaper, a window into a time when cops weren’t supposed to smoke in uniform, and when a stolen car might be traced by the make of its battery or speedometer ... The other dinosaur museum in Southern California, the Alf Museum in Claremont ... A huge new exhibit at the Hammer of an artist overshadowed by Pollack, De Kooning, and Rothko. (Photo: LA Public Library's Security Pacific National Bank Collection)
LA City Archive: The LAPD's 'Police Bulletin' opens window on policing 60+ years ago
LA City Archivist Michael Holland writes for Alive!, the city employee paper, and shares his columns on the treasures from the archive with Off-Ramp. Most recently, he told us about Mayor Fletcher Bowron's role as a cheerleader for the Japanese-American internment.
The beginning of the work day for a police officer hasn’t changed over time. Roll call was where he found out what he had missed and what was important to know during his shift. And it’s where he’d pick up a copy of the daily Police Bulletin. In the city archive, we have copies of almost every bulletin issued from 1907 through 1949.
Besides the mug shot and description of a wanted person…
Runaway boy, Robert J. Rutherford, American, 15 years, 5-foot 6-inches, 130pounds, brown eyes, fair complexion. Wore khaki coat, corduroy pants, army shoes and tweed cap. When last seen was riding a Black Beauty bicycle.
There would useful information about educational opportunities for officers:
Police school instruction. Wednesday August 23 at 2pm “Pickpockets and their Habits” by Detective Sergeant Thomas O'Brien.
And also not so subtle pronouncements from the Chief of Police about personal and professional conduct (make sure to listen to the audio - LAPD Chief Charlie Beck reads this one for us!):
Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. Living in a state of adultery during the last 12 months. Smoking while in uniform, entering pool rooms in uniform when not on duty, remaining seated in streetcars while pay passengers are standing, are things that bring discredit to the uniform.
Heroic actions and tributes to fallen officers:
I witnessed yesterday one of your traffic officers risk his life to save that of an elderly lady by running in front of a streetcar and lifting this woman out of the way. She would have been crushed to death. I must say that men like this deserve great credit for such noble deeds.
It’s really amazing that they have survived at all. They were printed on cheap thin paper intended for that day’s use and thrown away. Our collection of bound volumes have allowed them to be viewable more than a century after they were printed. The “paper policeman” according to one annual report, consisted of 645 copies per day and were distributed locally to public officials. Police chiefs and sheriffs in other parts of the country were sent complete packages twice a week.
So, how would the cop on the beat use the bulletin? Let’s say he came upon a reported stolen car. The typical 1922 stolen car would be described with the following information:
Ford touring, 1921 model, license #399-709, motor #4557-877, Goodrich tires, black body, gear and wheels.
In those days, the individual auto parts such as the speedometer and the battery would be listed by name or model. Imagine trying to describe your own car with more than a make and model today. What brand of battery do YOU have?
One of the things that a beat cop was supposed to know was whether any of the businesses in his territory were up to no good. The Police Commission was in charge of issuing or revoking licenses to pawnshops, bars and a host of merchants. The bulletins regularly asked the officers, "Do you know of any reason why a permit should not be issued to any of them?"
The bulletins almost always carried a photo of a runaway juvenile or someone’s missing spouse. The serial nature of the bulletins sometimes revealed a safe return a few issues later – but not always. But someone wrote me recently that they had googled a missing teenager featured on a bulletin. The runaway shown in 1922 had served in the Second World War and had been a model citizen and had died only recently. Was it the same kid from the bulletin? We’ll never know .
Will we be riding Angels Flight by Labor Day?
Wednesday, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti made an announcement that historic preservationists, tourists, and downtown residents have been waiting and hoping for for years: Angels Flight, the historic little railway that goes up Bunker Hill, will reopen in a few months. The key is a public-private partnership that turns over operation of the funicular to an international infrastructure company.
This deal seems like Angels Flight's best chance to recover from the blows it's taken in the last couple decades.
Angels Flight was opened in 1901 to ferry passengers up and down Bunker Hill.
It closed in 1969 -- they called it "urban renewal" when they razed Bunker Hill -- and the cars were mothballed until the railway was brought back by a non-profit in 1996. It ran fine until a fatal accident in 2001 - the first one ever in Angels Flight history. After that, it was periodically open and closed -- mostly closed -- because of disputed safety issues.
Now, the foundation that runs Angels Flight is giving a 30-year operating agreement to ACS, an international infrastructure firm that's bidding on the people mover project at LAX, and a presumed competitor for the downtown streetcar City Councilmember Jose Huizar is promoting.
The North American CEO of ACS, Nuria Haltiwanger, says her company is making this long commitment to help the community, but also hopes to make a profit. She says they'll probably charge a buck a passenger, and LA Metro will kick that down to 50-cents for people with a TAP card. ACS gets to keep any revenues up to a certain point, she says, then above that will share with the Foundation.
Importantly, the PUC has signed off on the safety upgrades Angels Flight needs, with a target date for re-opening on Labor Day.
Angels Flight has appeared in countless movies, most recently in "LaLa Land," which you might have heard of. Here's what I think is a scene from that movie.
Wait, that must be a fan reenactment ... the dancing is too good.
A man who grew up on Bunker Hill says 'Get Angels Flight running again!'
"Angels Flight has been closed almost two years now, and it just breaks our heart every time we go by." — Richard Schave
The two cars of the Angels Flight funicular railway in downtown Los Angeles have been stuck for years, figuratively and in reality. What looks like a good old-fashioned bureaucratic impasse has kept the historic railway from being reopened to the public for two-plus years now, and boosters are trying a second-order solution.
In a Change.org petition, the Angels Flight Friends and Neighbors Society is asking Mayor Eric Garcetti to nudge Sacramento politicians into switching the agency that oversees Angels Flight from the PUC to CalOSHA.
"Angels Flight is one of the great historic attractions of our city, a palpable link between the lost Victorian neighborhood of Bunker Hill and the vibrant new Downtown below. It is heartbreaking to see the cars and track structure as they are today, dusty and tagged with graffiti. Please, will you step in personally to help cut the red tape in Sacramento and San Francisco so that a pathway to a solution can be identified?" — Angels Flight Friends and Neighbors Society petition
Last week, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) voted to look into getting Angels Flight going again.
(In an undated photo, Angels Flight in its original location, next to the Third Street tunnel at Hill Street. Credit: LAPL/Security Pacific National Bank Collection)
Angels Flight ran without a hitch from 1901 to 1969, when it was dismantled as part of the remaking of Bunker Hill, when the run-down neighborhood was razed in the name of progress.
(1969: Working at night, the archway for Angels Flight at Hill Street is being prepared for moving day when it will be put in storage for future use. LAPL/Herald-Examiner Collection)
In 1996, it was moved down the street and ran again until a fatal accident in 2001 — the first in its history. It reopened again in 2010, and ran until 2013, when a mechanical problem occurred that led an investigator to shut it down.
Gordon Pattison, 69, remembers riding Angels Flight every day as a child — he even had a favorite seat that he still considers "his seat," and he claims what he calls "effective ownership" of the railway. "Effective ownership," he says, "really gets down to who gets to decide the fate of a neighborhood. Is it the people that own the property, the politicians, the business owners? And what I say is that the people who live in the area who make use of the facilities every day, those people have part ownership in it, too, and should have a say in the fate of that neighborhood and the fate of things like Angels Flight."
(1969: "The Castle" and "The Saltbox," historic Bunker Hill homes owned by Pattison's family, sit on blocks awaiting their removal to Montecito Heights. They later burned in arson fires at the Heritage Square site. LAPL/Herald-Examiner Collection)
Listen to the audio above to hear Angels Flight booster Richard Schave (of Esotouric Tours, and a founder of the Downtown Art Walk) and Pattison talk about the need to get Angels Flight moving again — not only as a link in the city's mass transit system, but as a vital link in L.A.'s history — and to hear Pattison's memories of growing up on the Bunker Hill. It's a history fewer and fewer people are living witnesses to.
Normal = 'Lack of imagination' at Jean Dubuffet's Hammer Museum exhibit
Off-Ramp arts correspondent Marc Haefele reviews Dubuffet Drawings, 1935-1962 - "the first in-depth museum exhibition of Dubuffet’s drawings" - at the Hammer Museum through Apr 30. It was organized by the Morgan Library & Museum, and curated by Isabelle Dervaux, Connie Butler, and Emily Gonzalez-Jarrett.
Jean Dubuffet, subject of a new exhibit at the Hammer Museum, seems to have spent many of his painting and drawing years unlearning what he learned in art school. At the same time, Dubuffet taught himself lessons of his own, including how to draw like a psychiatric patient, or like a child … but one who brings a ferocious, fresh intellect to his work.
Dubuffet, who lived from 1901 to 1985, said, “Normal means lack of imagination.” So, he sedulously evaded what was normal for a modern painter, even one working in Paris and New York. As the 1900s closed, his work was occluded by the likes of Pollack, De Kooning, and Rothko. They retain their pioneering prominence in the public eye, but Dubuffet was more pioneer than they.
But now he’s roaring back. The Hammer is showing almost one hundred Dubuffet works from the 1930s to the 1960s, borrowed from private and public collections in France and America, organized by New York’s Morgan Library. Most of them are drawings. All of them have a lot to say.
Dubuffet generally avoided the purely abstract, so you can see figures in his works, but they’re done in a way many found irritating, provocative, even enraging. For example, “The Farmer’s Wife” (at the top of this page) looks like a black and white negative of the set of SpongeBob SquarePants. The wiry style makes his "Visit to the Dentist" look like a torture chamber.
Although the exhibit reaches back to 1935, Dubuffet’s true leap into artistry began after 1940. After a few years toying with folk art, puppets, and the like, he sold his business - he’d been a wine broker - and finally committed himself to making art.
His early results are quite impressive, particularly his brightly-colored 1943 views of Occupied Paris Metro cars full of polychrome commuters, complete with creepy “No Smoking” signs in German. The arrangement of the subjects shows a skill that Dubuffet must have learned in his early art studies, but he’s also retained the eye of the child … the commuters have the innocent, inept geometry of children’s drawings.
His 1943 “Jazz” drawings, on the other hand, can only be described as “hip.” They represent a specific performance at Paris’ famous Hot Club de France, and, while the notes on the wall at the Hammer don’t tell you so, Dubuffet was depicting Django Reinhardt’s Hot Club Quintet. The faces of the musicians are all limned with a uniform lumpiness, as the performers’ poses surge with the action of the music. You can also feel danger and urgency— the Hot Club was a center of Resistance activity, and some of its employees died in concentration camps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF6uZxmomJU
Toward the end of the war, Dubuffet dove deep into his individual quest for expression. He began drawing and scratching figures on dark inked surfaces, and writing within his work, sometimes scrawling obscene messages on pieces of blurred newsprint. Subsequent portraits involved incising and scratching, as well as a pseudo-childish style of huge heads and tiny necks. Rarely, they burst forth in joy, as they do in his 1946 “Four Personages.”
After the claustrophobic confinement of the war years, he traveled to Algeria, and his works change from brown, gray, and tan – and depressing -- into the freedom of a tropical countryside full of new colors and figures … and new media: he increasingly works with textures and common materials like glue, dirt and sandpaper. It was a period of incredible austerity, refinement, and abstraction.
But in the end of this incredible decade, in the early 1960s, we see Dubuffet revert to a prodigiously colorful, joyful series of street scenes, full of people, cars, and sly store signs. It is a bright-hued return to the feeling of his early work, but matured by his intervening 20 years of introspection and exploration.
Off-Ramp Recommends: Creature's last weeks at the Broad
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You only have a few weeks left to check out the latest show at the Broad museum. “Creature” is the second special exhibition since the museum opened. The exhibit draws from the Broad permanent collection. More than 50 works fill the museums first-floor galleries presenting representations and approaches to figuration of the self.
The display includes sculptures, photographs, mixed-media works and paintings by more than 25 artists including Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami, Ellen Gallagher, Damien Hirst, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The artworks explore the human experience, some drawing inspiration from cultural representations of how living things change over time while others examine the human body.
LA Times art critic Chris Knight praised the way the exhibit unravels: “The best part is the way individual objects are placed to talk to one another in the galleries. That’s not as easy to pull off as it looks.”
“Creature” won’t be around much longer. Make sure to visit the Broad before the exhibit ends on March 19th. Admission is free, but it’s recommended you request tickets in advance. You can always wait in the standby line outside of the museum, which is available at the museum every day except Mondays, when the museum is closed.