More Oil!

The last time I sat down to write on this blog, it was due to a series of coincidences that made me want to better understand Union Oil. Attending a party on top of what used to be the Standard Oil building and watching Daniel Day Lewis play an oil man in There Will Be Blood a few days later led me to look into Union's pipeline to Wilmington, the huge oil refinery (and it's orange Jack-o-Lantern), and the series of high rises Union owned downtown.

Well as usually happens on the LA History blog, that initial oil entry has led to another. More oil! This time, it's an oil story that's been sitting underneath my feet.

My earliest curiosity on this blog, what the digits in our phone number meant, led me to discover this housing tract was one of the original developments in what came to be known as Carson. Built in the mid-fifties, we were given a phone number from the Wilmington branch of the phone company. That branch had been spun off from the original San Pedro branch, and thus San Pedro, Wilmington, and Carson all have 83x-xxxx phone numbers.

As cul-de-sacs go, ours is truly the deadest. Not only is there only one way in and one way out, we have a virtual moat around the development. On the South side of a major thoroughfare, we've got what used to be a can factory to the West, to the East is an alley separating us from the next development, and to the South are the railroad tracks of the BNSF Harbor Subdivision.

The Harbor Subdivision was originally built to connect downtown to Port Ballona in Playa Del Rey. Then when Redondo Beach built a better port, it was extended there. This is all pre-1900. Those two ports would be eclipsed by Los Angeles building it's own port in San Pedro, but the line continued to be useful in the 1920s because of the oil fields in the South Bay. So the line that was jutting out to the ocean curls back in through Torrance, through my back yard, and on into Wilmington and Long Beach. The line makes a giant crescent through western Los Angeles county.

On the other side of the Harbor Subdivision railroad tracks is the much larger Carousel housing tract, a 50 acre development built twenty years later. The owner of that property for the 50 years before the development was Shell Oil.

Wooden tank farm in Signal Hill, 1920s. These tank farms were all over the South Bay after the oil fields and refineries cropped up. Some still stand. Others, like the one on the property south of my house, were developed into housing as 

Now not only are oil refineries just something I grew up with, but tank farms are as well. There's still a tank farm on Crenshaw and Lomita Blvd, across from the Torrance Crossroads development and not too far from Torrance Airport. Their used to be a spur from the Harbor line called the Torrance Oil line that went from the airport, past the tank farm, and onto the Harbor line. I went to school down the street at the Catholic church.

I've now learned their used to be a tank farm just south of my house. It became an issue when owners of homes in the Carousel tract had ooze bubbling up in their yards. Shell had built the tank farm in the 20s, and it was basically giant concrete bathtubs with wood roofs. The old Shell refinery still stands 1.5 miles to the East (along Wilmington blvd) though it is now owned by BP. That refinery has the capacity for processing 266,000 barrels per day.

The Shell crude oil holding facility just on the other side of the train tracks, was sold to the developer as is, and it was the developer's job to clean up. Well that didn't happen, and cases of cancer in humans and adults on the tract are abnormally high. Ground water tests have shown serious amounts of methane gas and benzine. There are 285 homes in the Carousel tract.

When the pipelines were built out here, and the oil fields were discovered in Wilmington and Signal Hill, there weren't that many regulations. Techniques were, well crude. Not only is oil (be it through refineries, tank farms, and derricks in residential neighborhoods) still a major part of South Bay life, but the areas where conversion has been tried haven't always been successful. It's easy to see the link between some areas of the South Bay, and the angry townsfolk who were had by Daniel Plainsview.

Sources:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/27/local/la-me-carousel-shell-20100427
http://ci.carson.ca.us/MeetingAgendas/AgendaPacket/MG51973/AS51986/AS51990/AI52017/DO52081/DO_52081.PDF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbor_Subdivision
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-09-22/local/me-3068_1_medical-offices
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-03-21/local/me-693_1_torrance-crossroads
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-09/shell-bp-to-close-sell-oil-refineries-in-europe-u-s-table-.html
http://blogs.kqed.org/ourxperience/2011/06/03/carson-residents-fight-shell-oil/

Oil!

Two weeks ago, Major League Soccer had it's championship game - The MLS Cup. As a beat reporter for the LA Galaxy, one of the teams in the Cup, I got to go a bunch of MLS sponsored events, including a rooftop party in Downtown LA. The Standard is a luxury hotel with a rooftop bar and beer garden, a part of a chain of similar hotels. 

Not a very inspiring building, built in 1955 as an office and headquarters for the Superior Oil Company. It's a functional high rise, an impressive height for 55 and showing a coming architectural trend of function over form.

The architect was Claud Beelman, who also designed the Eastern Columbia Building and the Garfield Building downtown. He has several buildings listed on the National Register of Historical Places. However, this isn't going to be a post about architecture. 

I happened to catch There Will Be Blood a few days after, and was intrigued by Southern California's oil history. Superior Oil seems to be a latecomer if they built their headquarters in '55, but Union Oil and Standard Oil were here since the turn of the century. In the movie an oil field under Signal Hill is referenced, and the Huntington family made their money on oil. Anyhow, it seems a subject ripe for digging into, so let's go ahead and do so. 

The Union Oil company was founded in Santa Paula, CA. Their headquarters in Santa Paula is a National Historic Landmark, but they only used it for ten years, between 1890 and 1900. At the turn of the century, they moved to Los Angeles.

When they came in 1900 they only needed one room, in the 312 Tajo Building at first and Broadway. The company had to move three times as they kept expanding. Eventually they moved into their own building. 

The Union Oil headquarters from 1911 to 1923 was the Bartlett Building in the Spring Street Financial District. At the base of the Bartlett Building were the Rush Drug Co., Hull's Grill, and Lamar's. It's a 14 story building, and when it was completed in 1911 it was the tallest building downtown. 

So what happened about 1910 that made Union Oil such a big player? They made a deal with the Independent Producers Agency, a group of small oil producers, to build pipelines from Kern County to Union's oil facilities on the Pacific Coast. This was the historical event fictionalized in There Will Be Blood, and I'm assuming was recounted in Upton Sinclair's book Oil! which the movie was based on and lends its title to this post. 

Before that deal, the Independent Producers had to pay high shipping costs to send their oil back east via railroad, and then take low prices per barrel from Standard Oil. Suddenly, so many lines from There Will Be Blood make sense! 

"So Standard offered us a million dollars for the Little Boston leases, and I told H. M. Tilford where he could shove that, and we made a deal with Union! On the pipeline! And that whole ocean of oil underneath our fields!" 

So what's the union in Union oil? That would be the union of small oil companies owned by Wallace Hardison, Lyman Stewart, and Thomas R. Bard. Hardison was born in Maine, and followed his brother to the oil fields of Western Pennsylvania. That area became the home base of John Rockefeller and Standard Oil. If this was a Pennsylvania history blog, that'd be a segway into the Rockefellers and all their contributions to that part of the country.

But we're about LA history, and the important thing to note is that because Rockefeller controlled the Pennsylvania oil fields, that drove a lot of oil men out to Southern California to prospect. Oil was discovered in Santa Paula in 1883. Hardison came out with Lyman Stewart, and their original company was called Hardison & Steward Oil Co.

Stewart's contribution to society is funding the publication of The Fundamentals, which became the holy book of the Fundamentalist Christian movement.

The third member of their union was Republican Senator Thomas Bard. He assisted in the formation of Ventura County, officially split from Santa Barbara County in 1873. He also helped build the town of Port Hueneme.

So the three of them form Union Oil and they become an alternative to Standard Oil for the California independent oil prospectors after the pipeline is built from Kern County. With regards to that pipeline, the discovery well of the Kern River Oil Field was dug by hand in 1899. It's the fifth largest oil field in America.

Huge discovery wells, Union Oil pipelines, gee this is all sounding familiar. Kern was originally a mining area, which isn't surprising as many of the early oil men used mining techniques and hoped to get lucky. When I saw the Kern oil field was dug by hand, before the pipeline workers really would just dump oil into big holes until it could be barreled and shipped.

Now, Union Oil was established 1890, and then Standard Oil entered California in 1900. At that time Union and six other companies had all been flourishing in California for around a decade or so. Standard was founded in 1870, so it's likely that the Kern field is what got them to come out to California.

Union was Standard's biggest competitor, especially after the 1910 oil pipeline. I keep mentioning that pipeline, and that it went to the Pacific Ocean, but I haven't said where it went. Well any resident of Wilmington or San Pedro should be able to tell you about the oil refineries down by the port. Union Oil built their 200 acre refinery in 1916 in Wilmington, then four years later built a four acre site at the harbor for receiving and shipping oil.

That birds eye view of the harbor shows the gigantic campus of the Wilmington Refinery in the forefront. While the campus is in Wilmington, most San Pedro residents know of it as the Great Pumpkin. Since 1952, the refinery has painted one of its three million gallon storage tanks as a big Jack-O-Lantern. Local kids can go down on Halloween to see it up close and get candy corn.

Here we've got a couple of workers looking at a model of the refinery. These days, the refinery has been split between three different oil companies. That's how gigantic the campus is! 

You can see the new Union Oil Building on the left there in the picture, it's the one with the sign reading Union Oil Bldg. There's also a Bullocks in front of that. This is looking south on Hill Street, as it crosses 7th Street. Or looking North. But that's definitely Hill St. 

The 12 story building was necessary for a company for $100,000,000 at the time according to the LA Times. It was designed by, wait for it, Claud Beelman. However, this one didn't make the Historical Register of places. Funny how all of this started with a party, and still all the connections can be made, yeah? 

Union's greatest achievement was the discovery of the oil field in Santa Fe Springs in 1919, which really put the company on the map. The biggest oil field in Los Angeles wouldn't be found until 1932 in Wilmington, which is the third largest oil field in America behind Purdhoe Bay, Alaska and the East Texas Oil Fields. 

That's enough ink spilt about the oil spilt in Southern California. As always, I've only scratched the surface and I'm sure I'll be inspired for more entries to come. Now I know how a rooftop party, There Will Be Blood, and a oil tank painted like a pumpkin are all connected. 

Googie Restaurants In Los Angeles

Since this blog has started to center around buildings and maps, I've had to invest energy in understanding architecture and cartography. I'm sure we'll get back to maps at some point, but right now it's all about buildings. Architecture plays such a role in the "history by sight" that I've been doing on this blog, but that also requires me to be able to identify different types of architecture. Which I can't do.

I can do some research into architectural periods, so I can at least fake it. For instance there was a classical revival known as Beaux-Arts that hit America in the late nineteenth century and influenced many buildings on the Berkeley campus. Given that it's called the Coliseum, I'd lump Memorial Coliseum in the Beaux-Arts category, with it's peristyles. The USC campus, however, fits more into the Art Deco style that was big through the roaring 20s. Then there was Streamline Moderne that influenced the Pan Pacific Auditorium, and finally the movement we're going to get into today - Googie.

Beaux-Arts and Art Deco were about building impressive, long lasting structures, things get simpler and sleeker in Streamline Moderne. What I understand about Googie is that it's designed to catch your eye, to engage in non-verbal communication with this new beast - the automobile driver.

I've been making a lot of noise these last few weeks of how cool downtown used to be with its theater district. Even in those pieces, I had to concede the separate theater district in Hollywood, and the suburban theaters popping up all over the landscape. Los Angeles transitioned quickly, like blink and you miss it quickly, from a centralized city to a bunch of suburban hubs connected by a central concept.

Much like Downtown and Hollywood, these suburban commercial centers had theaters, department stores, restaurants, and coffee shops. The idea with Googie was to develop consistant and striking signage and architecture to make a restaurant instantly recognizable. Some of these restaurants are still operating, like Pann's in West LA.

I was lucky enough to eat at Pann's this past weekend, and it's definitely a treat. It's gotten new coats of paint, but otherwise it's the same place the opened back in 1958. It's got everything I want from a California 50's diner: rock walls, angular architecture, and a fun Jet Age sign. 

That's the other big component of Googie. We're going to space! We're going to have flying cars and jet packs! Let's build a Space Needle and a Theme Building at the airport! Of course, LA and Seattle were super on board with the moment, as they had the large aerospace industry that I'm gonna have to write about someday. 

We snagged some original menus from Pann's take a look at this: 

The prices can be deceiving. That De Luxe Dreemburger adjusted for inflation costs $9.03, for a 1/2 of beef that sounds about right for a restaurant burger. The 1/4 pound Dreemburger costs $6.28. 

The half spring chicken is all fried chicken, and is still the centerpiece of their menu today. So naturally it's what I ordered. Good food, and it all cost less than the $13.74 the inflation calculator says it should be. 

That family night special actually sounds like a great deal. It's the same chicken meal, but without soup. I had clam chowder with my meal, and by the chicken got there I was too full to really make a go of it. 

The family that owns and still operates Pann's has quite a Los Angeles restaurant history. George Poulos (truncated for extreme Greekness, the original family name is Panagopoulos) learned to cook in the military, then in '47 at The Pantry downtown. He first managed a restaurant at Yum Burger on Manchester blvd across from Inglewood High School. The Poulos family finally opened Pann's in 1958. 

Of course, '58 is fairly late for a style that dates back to 1949. That's when the Bob's Big Boy in Burbank opened up, the home of the Double Decker burger (which is also quite tasty). In 1951 you have examples with Johnie's Coffee Shop on Wilshire, and the first Norm's restaurant. Which leads me to my next example (which I've also eaten at).

Downey is home to a lot of restaurant history, with the oldest standing McDonalds and the original Taco Bell. It also boasts this great Googie treasure, Bob's Big Boy once Johnie's Broiler once Harvey's Broiler. Harvey's (then Johnie's then Big Boy) opened in 1958, the same year as Pann's. Now Johnie's shouldn't be confused with the Johnie's downtown, but it is a great coincidence. It's possible they were under the same ownership, but I can only find circumstantial evidence of that. It's convincing circumstantial evidence though. That S curved arrow in the Johnie's Coffee Shop photo is also in the Johnie's broiler parking lot, and they're spelled the same which is an irregular spelling for Johnny. 

Many of the same great features as Pann's, big circular booths, rock walls. They filmed part of an episode of Mad Men there, when Don and his kids are in California and Bobby spills the milkshake. Filmed part of Pulp Fiction at Pann's (as well as the now gone Holly's). 

Johnie's was just one of the great coffee shops, operated as a restaurant up until 2001. By the time I was in high school and driving around, they were selling cars on the property. It was declared a landmark, then illegally torn down. Bob's Big Boy, who at one point had declared bankruptcy, bought the property and rebuilt it to the original specifications, but with the Bob's signage. 

Anyhow, that's a quick look at a couple suburban Googie restaurants I've had to fortune of dining in. 50's diners like Johnny Rockets always end up looking like midwest Streamline Moderne 40s diners playing music from the 60s. Shades of the restaurant in Back to the Future, I imagine. When I think 1950s, I think Googie, and the quirky little coffee shops it begat. 

***Update***

Seems I missed an important point when I first wrote this article. It's not just that Pann's and the original Norms, and Johnie's Coffee Shop all look like each other, they were all designed by the same firm. At the time the firm was known as Armet & Davis. John Lautner is the architect who designed the coffee shop Googie's which coined the term for this architectural style, but Armet & Davis have quite a few landmarks to their credit. 

Johnie's Wilshire was the first of their biggest contribution block to Googie architecture. That place was commissioned in 1955, in '56 they designed three restaurants in the LAX area; Pann's, Holly's, and Falcon Coffee Shop. 

This original menu is probably the closest we'll get to seeing Holly's, which has been demolished and is now an autozone. Holly's and Pann's almost feel like sister restaurants, don't they? We know they used the same architect, but their menus look like they were designed by the same person, and both menus feature a Dreemburger. Why ee? I don't know if I'll ever get an answer to that question. 

Holly's offered their Dreemburger for 45c to Pann's 80c, so clearly Pann's was the higher end option in area eats. Holly's also offers a Dreemburger De Luxe, like Pann's, but also 35c cheaper. The biggest difference I see in the menus is Holly's doesn't offer a chicken dinner, they're strictly steaks. 

If you click on the menu, you can see the devil in the details. Holly's has the rock wall, and plenty of light from the all glass front. It's longer than Panns, so instead of a square with a triangle hat, it looks more like a rectangle with a triangle flourish on the end. 

We'll be here forever if I try and show every building Armet & Davis designed, but their next building was the original Norm's in West Hollywood. However, now you know about the four really cool restaurants they designed before the ubiquitous Norm's. 

Baseball In Los Angeles - The Hollywood Stars

There's one major sports venue in pre-1950s Los Angles I'm yet to write on. It's the companion piece to Gilmore Stadium; Gilmore Field. Gilmore Stadium, Gilmore Field, the Farmer's Market, and Pan Pacific Auditorium were all within spitting distance from each other on Fairfax. I've been debating on whether or not I should write on the Hollywood Stars. There were two different Stars franchises, and didn't get their own park until 1939. However, the Stars did win some pennants, and are responsible for some baseball firsts so what the heck. Let's learn a bit about Los Angeles' other baseball team.

The first Stars franchise was one of those vagabond franchises that just has a hard time finding a home. They were a charter member of the PCL as the Sacramento Salons in 1903, moved to Tacoma in 1904, returned to Sacramento in 1905, moved to Fresno in 1906. Left the PCL, came back in 1909 in Sacramento, then moved to San Francisco in 1914. The team was sold to a Utah businessman, who moved them to Salt Lake for the 1915 season.

Salt Lake was their first permanent home. They played as the Salt Lake Bees for eleven seasons, until their owner Bill Lane moved them to Los Angeles in 1926. They were the Hollywood Bees for a year, then renamed the Hollywood Stars.

Now, given my love of Hollywood, you'd think I'd be all over a team during Hollywood's Golden Age calling themselves the Hollywood Stars. However, the Stars never played anywhere near Hollywood, spending their entire existence as tenants in Wrigley Field. When the Angels doubled the Stars rent in 1935, the Stars left for San Diego, becoming the San Diego Padres.

Really, the only legacy of that first Stars franchise is the name. The Stars did manage to win two pennants in 1929 and 1930, but never caught on. Like the Los Angeles Angels major league franchise at Chavez Ravine, they were just something to watch when the real team was out of town.

The Padres, however, lasted 32 years in San Diego, and would eventually give their name to the new National League franchise.

The second Hollywood Stars began as the Vernon Tigers in 1909. Vernon was one of the few wet cities in LA county, and thus a great place for a baseball team. They too won two PCL pennants, but didn't really establish a rivalry with the Los Angeles Angels, especially after the first Hollywood Stars moved to Wrigley Field. The Tigers instantly picked up stakes and moved to San Francisco, but couldn't really establish a rivalry with the Seals either.

So the now Mission Reds moved back to LA in 1938, taking on the Hollywood Stars name. After one season, the Stars were sold to a local management group including Robert H. Cobb, of the Brown Derby restaurant and Cobb Salad fame.

These owners realized just slapping the Hollywood name wouldn't be enough, they needed to be a Hollywood team. So the Stars played one year in Wrigley Field then moved to Gilmore Stadium for a year as Gilmore Field on the same lot.

Gotta love the view of downtown, and that vintage neighborhood ballpark feel. Gilmore Field opened up in time for the 1939 season. The Stars won three pennants at Gilmore Field, and became heated rivals with the Los Angeles Angels. Gilmore Field could seat 13,000, was 335 to left and right, and 407 feet to dead center. 

Not the most glamorous park from the outside, but it fits with Gilmore Stadium's functional style. The Hollywood Stars are responsible for some innovations, such as dragging the field in the fifth inning (making it, like the seventh inning stretch, a good time to hit the concession stands). They began televising home games in 1940, coincidentally, this whole Gilmore lot would eventually become CBS Television City. 

That last note is actually more significant than I realized. When the Hollywood Stars broadcast their home opener on March 30, 1940 this as just the second baseball game ever broadcast and the first minor league game. It was broadcast by the Don Lee Broadcasting station W6XAO. Don Lee was a Cadillac dealer in Los Angeles, who partnered with Cal grad Harry Lubcke to start a VHF station. 

By 1940, Don Lee had purchased RCA cameras from back east, and was broadcasting at 441 lines at 30 frames per second. Television was still a hobby at this point, there were only about 300 receivers in the area. Still, many celebrities turned out for the broadcast, including radio comedians George Burns and Gracie Allen ("Goodnight Gracie"). A shop window in Long Beach had a set tuned to the game, beginning a tradition that electronics stores would use to sell TVs as the fad caught on. 

As for W6XAO, it was granted a commercial license as KTSL in 1948 (The second LA station behind KTLA). It's frequency was originally 1, but chanced to 2 when the FCC decided to reserve 1 for low wattage community TV. CBS and the LA Times were the owners of KTTV 11 (49% CBS, 51% LA Times). The Times refused to sell their majority share, so CBS bought KTSL and changed it to KNXT to match their LA radio station. 

Those who grew up in Los Angeles probably remember KNTX, as channel 2 kept that call-sign until 1984 when it was rebranded KCBS. 

So the station that would become CBS, broadcasts a baseball game from Gilmore Field, then two years later it's razing the lot to create CBS Television city, the main branch of CBS's television operations. And just to show the Stars weren't the only ones on board with this television thing, here's the LA Angels in the Don Lee studio, filming an experimental broadcast in 1939.

I never really know where these entries are going to go. I learned so much researching this. 

Indoor Sports In Los Angeles - A History

Over the last week, I tried to show the rise of USC football from on campus diversion to the city building a giant bowl, and the Rose Bowl game following the same trajectory. How that lead to a demand for professional football, and that those efforts would eventually attract the NFL. Then I tried to show for pro baseball started up in Los Angeles at the turn of the century, around the same time as the National League and American League back east, and eventually the Brooklyn Dodgers taking advantage of the market the LA Angels created (then the AL naming their LA expansion team after that minor league team).

For the final piece of the LA sports puzzle (at least as far as this series is concerned) we again turn to collegiate athletics, the rise of UCLA and USC basketball, and minor league hockey in Los Angeles. The Pacific Coast Conference started sponsoring basketball in 1915, the same time that USC returned to playing American football.

This time UCLA got the leg up on USC. I didn't even both mentioning UCLA in the football article, cause I try and ground these pieces in Los Angeles buildings, and UCLA didn't start playing at the Coliseum until 1928 when it joined the Pac conference, and didn't move to the Rose Bowl until 1982. There aren't any houses that UCLA football built. That is a bit of a disservice, as they did come up in the LA pro football article, so they obviously had an impact on LA Football, just not LA buildings. Before playing at the Coliseum, UCLA played it's home football games at Moore Field, which presumably was on the UCLA campus.

I hope I mentioned in the USC Football article that they got their name Trojans during the rugby years, before a game against Stanford. Cal and Stanford were the power schools then, enough to convince the schools around them to switch from football to rugby and back to football. Before that USC were known as the Methodists or Wesleyans, probably to distinguish themselves from the Jesuits at St. Vincents (now Loyola) or the Presbyterians at Occidental.

Anyhow, it should be no surprise that while USC got their nickname from Stanford, UCLA got theirs from Cal. As the University of California Southern Branch, UCLA played it's first year of football in 1919, and called themselves the Cubs relative to the California Bears (Cal was also known as the Bruins around this time, but it was Bears that stuck). In 1923 they started going by Grizzlies (the bear on the California flag, and where UC got it's nickname, is a Grizzly) and in 1925 they brought out a coach from the University of Minnesota to upgrade their program. In 1928, the Grizzlies were ready to join the Pac conference, but at the time Montana was a member and they were the Grizzlies. So Southern Branch, which had changed its school name to UCLA in 1927, became the UCLA Bruins in 1928.

Now the Bruin basketball program was started in 1920, one year after their football program. The Bruins won conference championships in 1921, 22, 23, 25, 26, and 27; so you can see why they wanted to join the Pac conference. They needed better basketball competition than the local schools could offer, and that also explains the efforts to beef up their football program.

However, after joining the PCC, UCLA wouldn't win another basketball title until 1945. So this is a bit of a fakeout, I just felt bad for old UCLA. Yes, in the 1920s-30s, it was USC that dominated area basketball. They won their first PCC title in 1928 and would win three more before UCLA won their first. Of course, the basketball power in the early PCC, like music to my ears, was California. The year after UCLA won their first PCC title (and a split title at that) Cal won their tenth.

USC was the dominant power in the Southern division (the PCC was split into North and South for basketball). The program was established in 1909, and after winning the South in 1928, won the division 10 times in 16 years. In 1935 LA saw the grand opening of this building:

Yes that's what all this buildup has been for, the Pan Pacific Auditorium, which opened up in 1935. The building is an example of the switch from Art Deco to Streamline Moderne, which an architect will have to explain to me. I just think it looks really cool, but it seems that Streamline was he American response to European Art Deco. Interesting. 

Why the name? LA had been hoping to host of Pan-Pacific Exposition like San Francisco had in 1915 and San Diego had in 1916. It's not simply coincidence. The Pan refers not to all like it's used now, but to Panama. The Panama canal had opened in 1914, and the port cities of SF, SD, and LA were holding these expos as an attempt to drum up shipping business.

USC used the Pan Pacific as their home from 1949-1959. UCLA never moved in permanently, but played some home games there during that same time period for games too big for the campus gym. PPA sat 6,000 for basketball, but was said to get very loud. 

Now the reason I started with the basketball programs, is because in 1959 the City of Los Angeles opened their own gym build specifically for sports, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. This shiny new arena sat 16, 161 and attracted an NBA franchise from Minneapolis, the Lakers.  

There was another sports tenant in the Pan Pacific Auditorium, and that was the Los Angeles Monarchs of the Pacific Coast Hockey League. Hockey doesn't have nearly as long of a history in Los Angeles as basketball, but it was the pro sport of choice for folk up north where it snowed. Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver had their own minor league hockey group as early as 1929. When it restarted again in 1944 (now in it's third incarnation) it included teams in LA, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Diego. In 1952, that league merged with a Canadian league to form the Western Hockey League, which like the PCL was considered a threat to the NHL, enough to make the NHL expand westward. 

The LA Monarchs didn't make it past 1950, as the PCHL decided to disband the Southern division. LA wouldn't join the WHL until 1961, with the Los Angeles Blades playing at the Sports Arena. When the NHL decided to expand into Oakland and Los Angeles in 1967, killing the LA Blades, it was the Monarchs they tried to invoke, naming their team the LA Kings. The Monarchs remain the only Los Angeles Hockey franchise to win a championship, winning the President's Cup in 1947. 

So what else happened at the Auditorium, especially before the late 40s? Ice Capades, Harlem Globetrotters, car shows, tennis matches, political rallies, it was LA's premiere indoor venue. In 1957, Elvis would have a perform at the PPA. It wasn't his first stop in LA, but the press treated it as such and as a result it's probably his most memorable LA stop. 

It took more than the Sports Arena to kill the Pan Pacific Auditorium. The Convention Center downtown, opened in 1971, took away the expo business. 

The Pan Pacific Auditorium was destroyed in a fire, but you can still see those iconic stylized towers. Disney's California Adventure currently has them above the turnstiles to get into the park. Welton Beckett was a principal architect of the PPA, and a neighbor of Walt Disney when he moved to California. It was Beckett who suggested to Disney that he use his own artists, and not an architectural firm, when he built Disneyland, which led to the eventual creation of Walt Disney Imagineering. Who knew? 

So Cal college basketball, minor league hockey, Elvis, and Disney, all in one article. Isn't slice of life history grand? 

Baseball in Los Angeles - The LA Angels

Baseball and college football were the "it" outdoor sports during the time of Movie Palaces. Chronicling baseball history in Los Angeles is fun. We get to revisit Washington Park, the baseball ground that was part of the End of the Trolley line amusement park (like Coney Island), and across from the school that would become Loyola Marymount. We get to revisit the Gilmore grounds, where Gilmore Field was built next to Gilmore Stadium. We get to see Catalina Island, and the original Wrigley Field. On a World Series off-day, let's take a look at how baseball was played before the Dodgers moved west.

I feel its a common misconception, that the leagues that are now considered national brands were always considered the top flight without rival. The NFL, NL, and AL faced constant competition from leagues in their own region, and in the South, in Texas, out West, those territories had their own regional leagues. Before the NL Dodgers moved west, and the AL placed an expansion team in the same territory, LA baseball fans were entertained by the Pacific Coast League.

And this wasn't some rinky dink minor league circuit. There was money out here in LA, and like the LA Bulldogs were one of the strongest football brands before they got raided, the PCL LA Angels were one of basball's great franchises.

Wrigley Field was built on 10 acres of land in South Los Angeles between San Pedro St., Avalon Blvd., 41st and 42nd. It was the home of the LA Angels for thirty years. William Wrigley Jr. (owner of the Chicago Cubs) bought them in 1921 for $150,000 (an astronomical sum). The stadium was completed in 1925. 

Before that, we have to explain William Wrigley Jr's association with Los Angeles, and why the LA Angels would have been such a pricey buy. 

Wrigley purchasing the LA Angels happened at the same time he was buying a controlling intrest in the Chicago Cubs. His chewing gum and confectionary business, which you've probably heard of, was based in Chicago. Wrigley had been convinced to invest in Santa Catalina Island, which at the time was controlled by the son of Phineas Banning (you remember him, right?). The idea, continued by Wrigley, was to turn it into a tourist destination, increasing ferry business from the port in San Pedro. 

Wrigley loved it, and bought the island in 1919. He built himself a home there, build a Spring Training facility for the Cubs, and bought the Angels. 

Wrigley's Catalina home

The PCL was organized in 1903, and from then to 1934 the Angels won 9 championships. Not that they were playing against peanuts, like the LA Bulldogs often were. The San Francisco Seals, Oakland Oaks, San Diego Padres, Portland Beavers, and Hollywood Stars, just to name from the top of my head, provided major league level competition every year. Joe Dimaggio and Ted Williams both got their start in the PCL. When Wrigley was looking at the team, they had just won a pennant in 1916, contended for four years, then another in 1921. In 1926, the Angels' first full year at Wrigley, they won the pennant again. 

Wrigley was by no means huge, but comparable to the size ballparks were being built back then. It sat 18,000 (Shibe Park in Philadelphia held 23,000) and the dimensions favored the hitters (340 to left field, 412 to center, 338 to right). The Angels won the pennant again in 1933 and 34, with the 1934 team considered the best minor league team of all time.

The Angels were pennant winners in the first PCL year, 1903, and then again in 1905, 07, and 08. The minor leagues of this time were different than they are now. Teams weren't under control of a major league club. When Wrigley bought the Angels, they were his team, not the Cubs. Player contracts were bought, but it was a negotiation not a demand from the parent club. So those early Los Angeles clubs were simply a collection of the best area talent, not leftovers. 

That's Washington Park, formerly Chutes Park when the Chutes Trolley Park was the main attraction. Chutes Park was on a different part of the lot, but with the Angels successful and the Trolley Park failing, a bigger park was built. Since the Angels went into a pennant drought from 1908-1916, Washington Park saw just two pennant winners while the old Chutes Park saw four. Still, the Angels kept winning, and kept outgrowing their grounds. 

As you can tell in the first photo, Wrigley Field Los Angeles was also the first one to plant Ivy in the outfield. That ivy, and the houses just beyond the outfield wall, would later make national TV as baseball's Home Run Derby program was filmed at Wrigley Field. You can see that Washington Park has just the one grandstand, while Wrigley had two, and the entire stand was roofed. 

Of course, Wrigley would meet a sad end. Walter O'Malley traded his farm team (the Fort Worth Cats) and cash in exchange for the Los Angeles Angels and Wrigley Field. Philip K. Wrigley had taken over the Angels after his dad died in 1932. Many fans in LA assumed O'Malley would move the Dodgers into Wrigley Field, at least temporarily. There were plans drawn up to expand capacity. However, O'Malley chose to use the Coliseum for four years from 1958 - 1961 (winning the World Series in 1959 - LA's first major championship) while his Dodger Stadium was built. 

Wrigley Field would be demolished, and that was that. Owning the rights to the Angels, O'Malley borrowed their interlocking LA cap logo for the Dodgers. The Angel name was sold to the American League for their new expansion team in Los Angeles. So the LA Angels live on, just not the way some Angelinos would have hoped. 

There's still more baseball to go. The Hollywood Stars, Dodgers and Angels are all still to come, so stay tuned!

Pro Football in Los Angeles - A History

Yesterday, I wrote about Cal, Stanford, USC, the Rose Bowl game, and the explosion of college football in the boom decade of the 20s. Unlike the movie palaces we've been talking about, Cal's Memorial Stadium, Stanford Stadium, USC's Memorial Stadium, and the Rose Bowl, have been hosting their respective teams continuously from the early 20s on. They've all had some facelifts, some more than others. Those stadiums stand as a reminder of a time when there was doubt about the future of American football, and the eventual commitment to making that game America's collegiate game. To think, we could have been a nation playing English rugby, or soccer!

The schools way back east refused to get on a bowl game bandwagon, and got left behind when football boomed again in the Jet Age. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Army, no longer football powers. It was the rust belt schools: Michigan, Ohio State, Notre Dame, that partnered with the Pac schools in growing the game. It was out of the rust belt (Canton, Ohio) that the NFL was born.

The idea was simple enough. College athletics were starting to adopt rules regarding scheduling. With conferences forming and setting these rules, that meant schools couldn't play high schools, army infantries, and athletic clubs anymore. So these teams representing athletic clubs, meat packing plants, and food starch companies, got together and formed their own professional leagues, signing these former stars to contracts.

Wanting to get in on the action, plans were made for a Pacific Football League to launch in 1934. While the NFL teams back east mostly played in the already established major league baseball stadiums, oil magnate Arthur F. Gilmore built a football specific stadium in 1934 on Fairfax and Third. It seated just a fraction of what the college stadiums did, just 20,000.

You really do need the aerial view to get a sense of the scope of these stadiums. The track was used to host Midget Car racing, a sport first organized at Loyola High School Stadium in Los Angeles. You can see why an oil man would want to associate himself with a burgeoning auto sport. Football at Gilmore Stadium was just taking advantage of an open field. 

In fact, when the PFL was in the planning stages, they didn't know if they'd use Gilmore Stadium or Wrigley Field in South Central. The idea was to have four clubs in the South, with one home stadium, representing former players from USC, Loyola, UCLA, and Santa Clara. Then there'd be two teams from the North, with players from Cal, Stanford, San Francisco Univeristy, and St. Mary's.

Also part of the planning was that the winner of the league would play the winner of the National league back east, a precursor to the Super Bowl. Ultimately, those plans fell through. The two northern teams withdrew, and then the whole thing folded a year later in 1935. At that point the league was sponsored by the American Legion, and had teams like the the Westwood Cubs and Hollywood Braves. 

Gilmore Stadium was known primarily as a Midget racing venue. Loyola High School would play big football games there, my grandmother remembers going to Gilmore Stadium for games. It was a boom time for minor league football though. The Dixie league formed in the south, and there were others, all trying to take advantage of these college stars with nowhere to play. 

The NFL would occasionally play exhibition games at Gilmore Stadium, as happened in 1936. Just after a Rose Bowl game between Stanford and SMU, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers played at Gilmore Field. The Lions were national champs at the time, and the game drew the biggest crowd on record at the time at Gilmore. 

Interestingly, the reason they had to play the game at Gilmore was because pro football was banned at the Coliseum. The Lions vowed not to return to Los Angeles until they could play at the larger venue. Anyhow, the American Legion founds the Los Angeles Bulldogs, playing as an independent in 1936 and inviting NFL teams out for a weekend in LA. Team owner Harry Meyer (nicknamed moneybags) also took his team barnstorming back east, hoping to earn a bid in the NFL. The NFL decided to accept an AFL II team from Cleveland, the Cleveland Rams, instead. The plot thickens. 

The Bulldogs played in AFL II for a year, going undefeated and effectively bankrupting the entire league. By now we're at 1940, and the Bulldogs help form the Pacific Coast Professional Football League so they'd have some opponents. Their main competition was the Hollywood Bears, named for their coaches alma mater (UCLA), and the league was basically formed so the two teams could compete for something other than the LA Championship. 

Los Angeles was also becoming known as a football hotbed, with the NFL playing two Pro Bowls there in the 1940 calendar year. 

The Bulldogs had gained a reputation as the best team outside the NFL, and the PCPFL quickly gained a reputation as a place for black stars to shine. The NFL didn't allow black players at the time. Neither did Major League Baseball. This is how the Bulldogs were able to get a UCLA multi-sport star to play for them: Jackie Robinson. 

Now in 1943, sports entrepreneur Bill Freelove starts buying out the contracts of LA Bulldogs players to form the appropriately named LA Mustangs. The Mustangs also played at Gilmore Stadium. The Mustangs were granted PCPFL membership for 1943, but with the other owner fearing similar raids, they were kicked out in 1944. He goes and forms AFL III, but it doesn't come to much. 

Who knew that a stadium that couldn't hold more than 20k and was demolished by the fifties held so much history? Well all that attention the Los Angeles Bulldogs and Gilmore Stadium created paid off, but not for them. The NFL, and new competitor AAFC, had their sights set on Los Angeles. Of course, the team to move out for the NFL was those Cleveland Rams the NFL chose over the LA Bulldogs, and they found a way to play their games at the Coliseum which had banned pro football. 

As far as I can tell, it was simply a matter of the Coliseum softening it's position and the NFL having buckets of cash to throw at them. Owner Dan Reeves simply submitted an application to use the Coliseum to the commission that met once a year. The AAFC club, the Los Angeles Dons, also had designs on using the Coliseum. 

"It's going to be the best professional football town in the country," Reeves declared. He was right, and the Rams won out the battle for the Coliseum, with the AAFC folding the Dons when they merged with the NFL. 

The Rams would form a great rivalry with the former AAFC's San Francisco 49ers, and selling out the Coliseum was common. Selling out the Coliseum was a problem though, as traffic was terrible. The 49ers didn't have it much better, playing at Kezar Stadium. 

Cool spot, but like the Coliseum it's a large neighborhood stadium that became obsolete as the NFL and MLB switched to large multipurpose suburban stadiums. The 49ers would move into a converted Candlestick Park in 1970, and the Rams to a converted Anaheim Stadium in 1980. 

Neighborhood stadiums like that are common in the English Premier League (soccer), and of course the coolest college stadiums are on college campuses. The NFL and MLB saw the potential to become regional entities and built accordingly. Can't exactly argue against the results, although it didn't work out so well for baseball which has tried to tap back into that past in smaller neighborhood stadiums. 

The Rams ultimately left the region and the 49ers are desperate to find a new place to play. Gilmore Stadium was demolished in 1952 to build CBS Television city. The stadium that only wanted college football survived the LA Rams, Dons, Chargers, and Raiders and is now returned to just hosting USC. 

USC Football venues - a History

Before moving on to the Little Three, I thought we'd talk a little sports to cleanse the palate. The LA Coliseum and Exposition Park give me a chance to talk about USC Football, UCLA Football, the LA Rams, the LA Chargers, the LA Dodgers, the Olympics...gee what can't I talk about. Also, what exhibitions?

It was a Uni-Watch article that got me thinking on the subject (halfway down). Fifty years ago this weekend, USC played at Cal. Yesterday, USC played at Notre Dame. And both those series' have a lot of history and help explain the USC football phenomenon.

USC in the foreground, with the Coliseum in the background. 

USC has played Cal 97 times. It's a series without a break, but some years they played twice, and both USC and Cal had forfeited a game after the fact. Which makes the math not quite perfect. The series began on October 23rd, 1915.

Cal had been playing football since 1886, USC since 1888. Cal and Stanford both dropped football in 1906, as a response to the "football crisis" debate that was raging in America, and switched to rugby.

Cal and Stanford had actually hoped to get the entire country to come to their senses and stop playing football. They only succeeded in convincing a handful of colleges and high schools in California to do so, including USC from 1911-1913. One result of switching to the "English Game" was gaining rugby contacts in British Columbia and New Zealand. The All Blacks visited twice, plaing Cal, Stanford, and USC.

However, there was great pressure on all three campuses to conform to the notion of college life being lived at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the like. There were some fringe benefits, for instance rugby was being played when USC were nicknamed the Trojans.

Oregon and Washington were playing American football, USC switched back the year before, and Cal was looking to get back in the game; Stanford was resistant. Cal and USC signed a contract to conduct a home and home series in 1915, and so in October, USC students boarded the train to go north and face to California Bruins at California Field on the Berkeley campus.

That is California Field, where Cal and USC played American Football for the first time in the modern era: 1915. You can tell I'm walking a fine line between this being a Berkeley history article and an LA history article. I'm a Cal grad, love love love my alma mater, but I'm trying to keep this to LA history. They just played at Berkeley first : ) 

Anyhow, California Field stood about where Hearst Gym does now (where College st. meets the Cal campus) and sat about 20,000. It was Cal's second stadium, but before Memorial Stadium. And that's where USC's oldest continuous rivalry began (USC first traveled up to NorCal in for a game in 1905 against Stanford, but the teams didn't play American football again until 1918). The Trojans won this game 28-10. 

When Cal traveled down to USC on November 25th, 1915, they played at Washington Park on Washington and Hill St. in Downtown LA.

As you can see, the stadium was built for baseball. The PCL LA Angeles (they'll get an entry soon) played there from 1900-1925. The whole plot of land was built up in 1887 as Chutes Park. It was a Trolley Park, a turn of the century phenomenon where small amusement parks were built at the end of streetcar lines. The amusement park part closed in 1914, the baseball grounds as seen here were put up in 1911 though the Angels played on a smaller field at Washington and Grand from the turn of the century (USC played some big games there too). 

USC had an on campus stadium, but it was really just a practice field. It was often just called "college campus" in the papers, though in 1904 it got temporary bleachers and a name; Bovard Field. Still USC played it's big games off campus, with Washington Park the venue for the Cal game in 1915. USC played three games from 1915-1917 at Washington Park, and lost them all. 

Side note about Washington Park, it was across the street from St. Vincent's College (now Loyola Marymount). 

Things kept changing though, as Cal joined Oregon, Oregon Agricultural College and Washington in the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Conference, which set rules for its members in American football, baseball, track, basketball, and crew. USC must not have liked its trip to Berkeley (or couldn't afford it) as Cal played USC in Los Angeles without a return trip from the Trojans until 1921. Stanford, after reinstating football in 1918, traveled down to USC to finish out their season. 

West coast football was rapidly changing. The Tournament of Roses in Pasadena had been going since 1902 when the organizers invited Stanford and Michigan to play in Tournament Park. At that time, East Coast football was so far ahead of the West than Michigan routed Stanford 49-0. The series was cancelled, and didn't resume until 1916 with Washington State and Brown. The West Coast started winning, and the grounds were built up. USC started playing their big games at Tournament Park in 1918 and one game in 1922 in the newly opened Rose Bowl against Cal with USC lost 12-0.  

The Rose Bowl and Memorial Coliseum were being built at the same time, and with the Rose Bowl finishing first, USC and Cal opened the stadium on October 28, 1922. Not only was this the first game in the Rose Bowl, but USC had been admitted to what now was being called the Pacific Coast Conference, and this was their first conference game. 

USC played in the Rose Bowl again that season. California won the PCC title, and thus the Rose Bowl bid, but declined. As a result, USC was invited to host Penn St. on New Years Day, a game they won 14-3 in front of a crowd of 43, 000. This was also the first ever college football game broadcast on radio in Los Angeles, on radio KHJ which had just launched in 1922. The radio station was owned by the Los Angeles Times. 

The Rose Bowl Game put the California Schools on the map. I mentioned that reinstating American football was a desire to take part in the typical American college life. Well, with increasing crowds, USC, Cal, and the Rose Bowl game all began building stadiums in the model of the Yale Bowl. A large amount of earth is gathered, and then a hole is dug out for the bowl. In the case of USC and the Rose Bowl, when you walk in at street level, there's the dug out bowl, and then there's the upper bowl. Cal is similar, except it was built into a hill such that the East side seats have to walk up a hill to the top of the stadium and then walk down. 

USC played it's first game at Memorial Stadium on Oct 6th. 1923 against Pomona College. Both USC and Cal dedicated their stadiums to those who died during World War 1. You see, while I was blathering about reinstating football, there was a war on!

The area the Coliseum was built on was an agricultural expo until 1910. There used to be a horse racing track where the rose garden is now; when USC started producing influential families they were having none of that gambling nonsense. 

The University of California and it's branches, as a government entity, owns the land it's campus sits on and as a result was able to build a stadium on campus land that the university owns. That's part of the reason why Cal refused to consider alternate sites during the treesitter crisis. USC on the other hand, as a private school sits on annexed Los Angeles land, and it was the city (in conjunction with the county and the state) that built Memorial Stadium. When Los Angeles was awarded the 1932 Olympics, Memorial Stadium was upgraded for that purpose. Stanford was able to annex their campus into their own city. Everyone's different. 

Football was a boom sport in 1920's California. Between 1921-1923, Stanford, Cal, the Rose Bowl Game, and Los Angeles (USC) all opened up large bowl stadiums and would soon attract crowds in the high 70,000s. 

I haven't mentioned UCLA at all. University of California, Southern Branch, didn't play football until 1919. They stuck with small schools like Loyola and Occidental. They played Stanford once in 1925 and lost 82-0. However, they were granted admission to the PCC in 1928, started using Memorial as their home stadium, and started playing USC in 1929. USC had already gotten Notre Dame to come out by train in 1926 to start that annual rivalry. The game was the second highest attended of the year (the NorCal schools still brought a bigger crowd), but the return leg was held at Chicago's Soldier Field and was played in front of 120,000. 

Anyhow, in 1961, USC-Cal (played in Berkeley at Memorial Stadium) looked like this. 

While the series has been lopsided in USC's favor, it's a longstanding pairing that has taken all the California football programs to the heights they're at now (And built all their stadiums in the span of three years).

Of course, by 1961, Memorial Stadium was also hosting the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL (which moved there from Cleveland) and for one year the Los Angeles Chargers of the new AFL. Pro football in  LA is going to have to be another article for another day (since it's minor league history involves another venue : )

Loew's State Theater - Los Angeles

MGM are an important piece of movie history. From Gone With The Wind to The Wizard of Oz up through the James Bond franchise, can't talk film without talking about MGM. Like the other Big 5 I've already written about, they had a massive film studio in Los Angeles by the end of the 20s.

Looking at the map from the Studio Club article which spurred this whole adventure through LA's theater history, Metro Goldwyn Mayer had their studio 10 miles away from the Studio Club in Culver City. The Metro in MGM was Metro Pictures Corporation, a production company founded in 1916 by Richard A. Rowand and Louis B. Mayer. Mayer left to start his own production company in 1918. In 1920, Metro Pictures which had acquired Goldwyn Pictures was purchased by Loew's Inc. which was Marcus Loew's theater exhibition company. With vertical integration complete, Mayer came back and MGM was formed in 1924.

There's the MGM Studios main gate. Not exactly the photo ready gates of Paramount Studios. Not even much to make from the details of the photo. If I hadn't told you it was MGM, you'd probably neve know. Unless you've been there of course. 

MGM studios wasn't so much about presentation as it was functionality. Here's a shot of a bustling back lot. That shot is from 1951, and you get to see actors and extras milling about as a tractor moves some scaffolding, all with the MGM sign and clock in the background. 

Things were a bit more under construction in 1937. That's New York Street being constructed. Every Hollywood Studio has a New York Street. The production companies all moved out to Los Angeles, but they never stopped telling stories in New York. The TV Show Bones, uses LA Landmarks to stand in for Washington DC, then films their street shots on Fox's New York Street. 

I mentioned that Gone With the Wind (1939) was filmed up the street at RKO's old lot. Well while that was filming, The Wizard of Oz (1939) was filming on the MGM lot. Influenced by Disney's Snow White, realizing there was a market for children's book adaptations, MGM bought the rights to the book in 1938. 

The Wizard of Oz had it's premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I've found no evidence that the Loew's theater chain had a theater in Hollywood. However, they did have a theater in the Broadway Theater district. 

The State Theater was build in 1921 by Loew's; at 2,450 seats it was the largest of the Broadway theaters. Before she was in The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland (then Frances Gumm) performed a sister act here. 

The film Happy Landing was a 1938 Fox film as was City Girl. Sonja Henie was quite an it girl in her time, otherwise it's an unremarkable billing. While the theaters were owned by the studios, I think we're learning that didn't mean they showed exclusively films from that company. I'm sure it wasn't freeform though, there must have been agreements signed.

Remember how I talked about the cartoon shorts: RKO distributed Disney, Paramount had Betty Boop and Popeye, WB had the Looney Tunes, MGM made the Tom and Jerry cartoons. I never even realized. 

As I wrap up the Big 5, I should say a last word on what vertical integration meant for the industry. Those studios that controlled their own film-exhibition theaters showing first run films in urban areas (like the ones in downtown LA and Hollywood I tried to chronicle) controlled 50% of the seating capacity in the US for first run movies. So there were other options, but that's pretty impressive. The theaters charged high prices and attracted large crowds. 

You notice how some of the marquees were showing just alright films? Theater owners were required to purchase blind bookings, where they had to show a block of B-movies in order to show the prestigious A-movie they wanted. This process would go on until the 1940s, when US vs. Paramount ordered the studios to divest of their theaters. 

All of my studio history information I've gotten from AMC's film history page.  The website Cinema Treasures has been great in identifying theaters, and most of my photos have come from the lapl photo collection. Those I didn't take myself of course. 

The Little 3 are next, and while they don't have fancy theaters, they do play an important part in the history of Los Angeles.