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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Photographs

677

Photographs

Contents of this path:

Eames House (1958)
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Shulman, Academy Theater (1940)
Shulman, Duffield Lincoln-Mercury Showroom
Shulman, Kaufmann House (1947)
Shulman, Lovell House (1950)
Shulman, Malin (Chemosphere) House 1961
Shulman, Spencer House (1955)
Shulman, View of Pasadena Freeway, 1949
Stahl House, Case Study #22, Daylight Exterior. Julius Shulman (1960)
Walter Gordon Collection # 06 Photo, Walter Gordon Collction, USC Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "A festive time at the Jockey Club on Central Avenue finds a group sampling the work of chef/owner Ralph Gibbs. From left to right, actress Dorothy Dandridge; pianist Hattie Hopgood; Earl “Red” Griffith; entertainer/reporter Maggie Hathaway; an unidentified woman; Gibbs; and newspaper reporter Paul McGee."
Walter Gordon Collection # 07 Photo, Walter Gordon Collction, USC Department of Special Collections. Caption by Walter Gordon: "Some “power ladies” in the local African-American community gather for a meeting in the 1940s. Seated at left is Betty Hill, a social activist and founder of the Women’s Political Study club. Next to her is Dr. Vada Sommerville, the first Black female graduate of USC’s School of Dentistry and a founding member of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP. Standing in the back, third from left, is the social and labor activist Jessie Lee Terry. Next to her is Martha Jefferson, the first Black female attorney to practice law here."
Eastside Real Estate Office, 1923
Walter Gordon Collection # 10 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Ivan Johnson, the first Black member of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, stands in support of Goodwin Knight (seated at center), governor of California from 1953–1959. To the left of Knight is accountant B. B. Bratton. At far right is Vincent Monroe Townsend, an attorney and veteran actor who played the judge on Amos and Andy."
Walter Gordon Collection # 11
Walter Gordon Collection # 14 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Charlotta Bass, the owner and editor of the pioneering Black community newspaper The California Eagle, receives a congratulatory proclamation on August 27, 1949, from her former paperboy, attorney Walter Lear Gordon, Jr. Upon Gordon’s graduation from law school, Bass invited him to set up his practice in the front portion of the Eagle’s building on Central Avenue, where this photograph was taken."
Walter Gordon Collection # 18 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Teachers gather at a backyard party held by Bessie Bruington Burke in the early 1950s. Burke was the first Black teacher and principal in Los Angeles. Her mother secured support for her daughter’s professional aspirations from the Forum, an African-American civic organization headquartered at the corner of Eighth and Wall Streets. Burke broke through the prevailing color barrier thanks to a combination of the Forum’s considerable influence and her own impeccable academic qualifications."
Walter Gordon Collection # 22 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Billie Holiday stands with LAPD Detective Gosline in front of a courtroom while awaiting trial in the early 1950s. Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit” (a song about the lynching of African-Americans) in a West Hollywood club, when a member of the audience proceeded to heckle her. She left the stage midway through the song, allegedly slashed the heckler with a knife, and resumed singing. She was charged with assault and battery but the case was dismissed when the victim, under cross-examination by Walter Gordon, refused to give his name and address."
Walter Gordon Collection # 24
Walter Gordon Collection # 26 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Valaida Snow, on the left in the front row, sits with friends at Wrigley Field, a baseball stadium formerly located at Avalon Boulevard and 42nd Street in Los Angeles. A remarkable trumpet player, Snow was captured by the Nazis in 1941 while entertaining in Copenhagen. Although threatened with execution during her eighteen months in incarceration, her life may have been spared due to her musical talent. This photograph is probably from the late 1940s, some time after her release. Behind her sits Honey Murphy, owner of the Last Chance Restaurant and Club situated at 108th Street and Central Avenue."
Walter Gordon Collection # 30
Walter Gordon Collection # 33 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Reverend Clayton Donovan Russell addresses an audience at the Peoples’ Independent Church of Christ at 18th and Paloma Streets in the early 1940s. Russell, who grew up in Boyle Heights and graduated from USC, embodied the church’s influence in the Los Angeles Black community. He began preaching at the age of seven, soon catching the attention of Reverend N. P. Greggs of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. Greggs left First AME in 1915 to found the Peoples’ Church and took Russell with him. When Russell succeeded Greggs as pastor in 1935 he revitalized the church’s influence by introducing radio broadcasts of his sermons, joining the Sentinel’s Leon Washington in the “Don’t shop where you can’t work” movement, creating innovative community work programs during the Depression, and organizing the Los Angeles Negro Victory Committee to aid the cause in World War II. Russell’s progressive views earned him a loyal following until his death in 1981."
Walter Gordon Collection # 34 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "An audience takes in a show at the Club Alabam at the height of its popularity in the 1940s. Some of the notable attendees include, from left to right: Tillie Euliss (wearing a mink coat), who was a popular waitress at the Dunbar Hotel; Clarence Moore, owner of the Mimo Club at 29th Street and Western Avenue; actress Lillian Randolph; Elihue “Black Dot” McGee, a well-known Central Avenue figure; Club Alabam singer Juliett Ball; and with his hand on his chin, Prince Spencer—one of the fill-ins for the Nicholas Brothers and later, a keno operator at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas."
Walter Gordon Collection # 38 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Dr. John Sommerville and his wife, Vada Watson, the first African-Americans to graduate from the USC School of Dentistry, opened the Dunbar Hotel in 1928. Located at 4225 S. Central Avenue, the establishment and its adjacent nightclub quickly became the focus of the area’s music scene. The manager of the hotel’s cocktail lounge may be seen in this photomontage from the 1940s."
Walter Gordon Collection # 39 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Entertainment celebrities pose at a home party in the early to mid-1940s. Standing from left to right are: Jennie S. Bruington, mother of Bessie Bruington Burke; actor Ben Carter, who played Ben Shadrack in Green Pastures; Jack Chase, a popular local prize fighter married to the woman standing next to him, actress Lillian Randolph; actress Hattie McDaniel, winner of an Academy Award for Gone With The Wind; C. W. Hill; tenor George Garner, who led the Southernaires; his wife; and finally, Lillian Cumber, the first Black entertainment agent in Southern California. Seated, from left to right are: Herman Spurlock, who was a colorful sportsman; actress Lillian Beavers; and society figure Naomi Green, pictured next to her husband Eddie Green, star of the long-running play Duffy’s Tavern."
Walter Gordon Collection # 41
Walter Gordon Collection # 42 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "A group of journalists gather to discuss their work. Pictured from left to right are Joe Harris, author of the “Smoke Rings” column in the Los Angeles Sentinel; Walter Winchell, a nationally syndicated radio personality; Joe Adams, the first Black radio announcer in Los Angeles and manager of singer Ray Charles; and Leon Washington, founder of the Sentinel, which grew under his stewardship from a throwaway sheet to one of the leading African-American newspapers in the country. Washington began a desegregation effort on Central Avenue in the early 1930s, called “Don’t shop where you can’t work.”"
Walter Gordon Collection # 43 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Maceo Sheffield, seen here in the late 1930s, was one of the most colorful personalities in the African-American community that encompassed Central Avenue in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a veritable renaissance man whose resume included actor, producer, pilot, police officer, and photographer (with a few of his snapshots making their way into Walter Gordon’s collection)."
Walter Gordon Collection # 47
Walter Gordon Collection # 50
Walter Gordon Collection # 51
Walter Gordon Collection # 52 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "The Saints, LAPD Newton Division’s baseball team, pose for a team photograph around 1945. Kneeling on the left are Sgts. Bob Green and Kinney Harris. Standing in back, third from left, is the former three-term mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley. Third from right is Thomas “Red” Davis. Although they could be teammates in baseball, Black and White officers were not allowed to patrol together until 1961."
Walter Gordon Collection # 53 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "A group of prominent politicians and community leaders meet at the Southern Pacific train station at 5th Street and Central Avenue in the late 1930s. Seen here, from left to right: Assemblyman Augustus Hawkins; Titus Alexander, a leading member of the Forum; Congressman Arthur Mitchell of Chicago and his wife; USC Law School graduate Bert McDonald, who was a member of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office and the half-brother of Dunbar Hotel founder Vada Sommerville; and longtime local attorney Hugh Macbeth, who provided legal counsel for the Forum in the early twentieth century and promoted Black resorts like Val Verde and “Little Liberia”—a retreat in Baja California that operated from the 1920s through the 1940s."
Walter Gordon Collection # 54 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Louis Armstrong (center) celebrates with friends at Lovejoy’s, an after-hours club located at 42nd and Central Avenue, across the street from the Club Alabam where he had performed earlier in the evening. The proprietor of the establishment, Alex Lovejoy, is seated second from the left."
Walter Gordon Collection # 55 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Four distinguished men of the community pose for a photograph sometime in the late 1930s–early 1940s. From left to right are Norman Houston of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company; boxing champion Joe Louis; attorney Charles Matthews, who worked for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office; and Fred Roberts, who in 1918, became the first African-American elected to the State Assembly."
Walter Gordon Collection # 57
Walter Gordon Collection # 59
Walter Gordon Collection # 60 Photo, Walter Gordon Collection, USC Libraries, Department of Special Collections. CAPTION by WALTER GORDON: "Veteran attorney Curtis Caville Taylor (center, facing viewer) celebrates a birthday party in the mid-1950s with friends and colleagues. Taylor, who came to Los Angeles around 1915, was admired in the Black community for his affable nature as well as his deep roots in the city. The event was held in the Benedict Canyon home of retired Superior Court Judge Earl Broady, who employed clever subterfuge to buy a place in an area where Black people were not yet welcome. To see the inside of the house, Broady’s wife Maude posed as the maid of Jack Tenner, a white attorney. Tenner purchased the property and promptly transferred title to the Broadys. In the foreground with her back to the camera is current Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, with Walter Gordon standing to her right."

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Reader's Guide Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 is a large work about a very large and very old region. It is composed of hundreds of elemental units: in multiple genres, textual and visual. These basic units are organized using the Scalar digital publishing platform, in Scalar's elemental unit, the "page." Each page in Ghost Metropolis belongs also to a "path," and each also has "tag" relationships to other pages. The reader is invited to travel through the historical Los Angeles metropolis along multiple paths and networks of textual, visual, and spatial narratives. Ghost Metropolis has a spatial-temporal-textual structure that is modeled on the metropolis itself. Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible, so it literally visualizes the past, as a three-dimensional form of mapping. Those three dimensions are 1) the linear chronological narrative, recounting actions by actors; 2) our visual encounter with the past in photographs, graphic arts, and motion pictures; and 3) the cartographic, which is a special, spatial medium that visualizes the topography of human action. Each of these dimensions is historical and chronological, but there is no single, privileged timeline or narrative.

Readers may follow many different paths through this work. It can be read chronologically from 13,000 years ago until the present; it can be read by narrative pathways that follow the course of a general area of social and political life; it can be read between subject areas, along a relatively consistent time-depth: in more familiar terms, in the same chronological period. It can also be read via intersections and networks through and between the textual and visual narratives.

The forty textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into five thematic narrative paths:
1) Manna From Hell Should we tell political, social, economic, cultural, private or public cultural stories with any greater priority or order? I have chosen to tell my stories without regard for conventional priorities. My parallel "paths" travel through the spacetime of global Los Angeles chronologically, but not always from the same beginning or destination. Because all human action takes and makes place, the the past is the set of all places made by everyone who lived in or passed through the Los Angeles Basin. The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. Readers may follow my maps along both textual and visual paths. Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives. As a historian, cartographer, and photographer, I have attempted, for more than a decade, to compose an account of Los Angeles that makes its great trajectories visible to a very wide audience. I have researched the region's history and its social and political geography deeply and broadly, and have composed my accounts of of the metropolis in forty-two narrative essays, some of them previously published mostly not. I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together. Following Cervantes, Mercatur, and Melville, I've constructed a large-scale work of many different components, and many different genres. Most of the components of Ghost Metropolis are, like the short stories Cervantes folded into Don Quijote, free-standing. Ghost Metropolis is composed of forty-two (42) narrative essays and many visual narratives. Visual media numbering several hundred belong to the genres: photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos.
Genres
Ghost Metropolis is built from many genres, textual and visual:

Textual Genres      Narrative Essays            Prose essays that narrate, analyze, and interpret the past.      Narrative Paths Sequential collections of narrative essays that tell larger stories.
Social Science Essays
Findings from systematic research using falsifiable methods to generalize about social conditions and processes. Visual Genres      Photographs   Still images recorded to photosensitive films and digital devices. Panoramas           Sweeping views of multiple directions from a single camera position.      Diptychs            Paired images, the combination of which constitutes a visual statement.      Montages           Assemblages of photographs, often with graphic arts and cartography.      Maps            Pictorial cartography, including historic, archival maps, and maps by the author.
Cartography
Ghost Maps
Thematic Maps
Motion Cartography  (eg)
Animated Maps (eg)
Transections
      Video             All motion pictures.       Audio             All recorded sound apart from moving images.
Theory and Methods
Visual | Interpretive |  Institutional |  Spatial |  Quantitative | Narrative | Digital | Bib

I have labored for years to sharpen tools that are versatile, powerful, and also, when needed, delicate and fine-tuned enough, to help us both know (saber) and to understand (conocer) so giant and diverse of an entity as the global metropolis of Los Angeles.
While I deliberately wrote the narrative essays with a vocabulary of common English speech, the whole of this work is based on theoretical work I have conducted for more more than two decades, and most of that work is written in very technical language, specific to several disciplines. Ghost Metropolis is a historical work built with the tools of many disciplines, from the social sciences to the humanities, and so its theoretical framing is necessarily diverse: the theories underpinning the social sciences and the humanities, natural sciences and the latest emergent field of neuroscience, descend from very different intellectual genealogies. The discussion in the next two paragraphs summarizes very quickly the intellectual pathways I have taken and the basic premises of the work as a whole. I also offer far more detailed introductions to my theory and methods on pages specific to the several discourses involved, and each of these points to my publications that delve more deeply into the various questions involved: In the philosophies of knowledge, understanding, and cognition, I owe my greatest debts to the phenomenological, pragmatic, and existential traditions, beginning with Dilthey and James, through Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, Ricoeur, and Casey. But in philosophy, I also identify with the aporetic tradition, beginning with Aristotle, through Nietzsche, Simmel, and Wittgenstein. These philosophers did not seek to build "systems," like Hegel, but rather, chose to examine the world one puzzle (aporia)at a time. I am also very influenced by work in the cognitive neurosciences, from Schneewind to Lakoff, and have joined that with the emergent field of visual studies, and the much older field of art history. There my debts are to Erwin Panofsky and the acid criticism of Art Forum in the 1970s. I have participated, in real time, in the "spatial turn" sparked by Lefebvre and Foucault, Bachelard, Soja. In political science, I have long identified with the historical institutionalists, especially the work of Theda Skocpol.   underlying my whole endeavour has been a desire to emulate Fernand Braudel's great masterpiece of interdiscinplinary history and regional geography, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949).    Putting these various disciplines together has been my ongoing theoretical and methodological project during the fourteen or so years that I have labored to produce Ghost Metropolis. Indeed, I have been driven to invent theoretical tools and methods to apply those tools, or else goals of the research program would not have been reachable. The intersection of all these philosophical and theoretical an ddisciplinary paths can be summed up in a paean to the embodied individual, whose understanding of the world and intentions for action are inseparably "grounded" in that persons' position and place. The intersection of my theoretical and methodological "groundwork" is also the region: All human action takes and makes place. The past is the set of all places made by human action. History is a map of those places. The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. This brings me from the realm of underlying theories to the outward presentation of the work, its expression in the multi-genre (multimedia) form that you, the reader, are engaging now.
Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives. As a historian, cartographer, and photographer, I have attempted, for more than a decade, to compose an account of Los Angeles that makes its great trajectories visible to a very wide audience. I have researched the region's history and its social and political geography deeply and broadly, and have composed my accounts of of the metropolis in forty-two narrative essays, some of them previously published, and some were conducted with collaborators, who are copiously acknowledged in each portion of Ghost Metropolis that resulted from collaborative work with others. I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together.    Following Cervantes, Mercatur, and Melville, I've constructed a large-scale work of many different components, and many different genres. Most of the components of Ghost Metropolis are, like the short stories Cervantes folded into Don Quijote, free-standing. Ghost Metropolis is composed of forty-two (42) narrative essays and many visual narratives. Visual media numbering several hundred belong to the genres: photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos.