Author: Nathan Marsak

No, these men aren’t burying children, they’re building a railroad-for now. Don’t they know what railroads do? Don’t they know that all trains are capable of is buckling and derailment? Wait til they read the papers on March 4 to see what happened to Helen Gil. Here, an earthen roof will be put over this cut to make a tiny tunnel, where a tiny Taggart Transcontinental can-you know the rest.

How many budding Cherryl Brookses will leap from this bridge?

We here at 1947project know only danger and distress whilst bringing you danger and distress, so I took it upon myself to risk riding the Griffith Park “Choo”-“choo” and after making certain we weren’t carrying chlorine gas (though I wasn’t sure some of those kids didn’t have Sarin on them), I boarded, uncertain that there was to be no repeat of Nowy Dwor, 1949; there was not. I was still nervous, though. That whole Auschwitz thing has given me an aversion to mass transit.

Here we are in the Floyd & Sam’s tunnel. Thinking Salerno, 1944.

And crossing the bridge:

I thought of the train that plunged off just such a bridge into the Baghmati River, killing 500. The driver had braked to avoid hitting a cow. So here I was. Praying our driver wasn’t Hindu. (Actually, he and I stood around after and shot the bull about the B-24s that took off from Atwater, and the nearby Rancho stables, and his hopping on the Glendale Red Car to go see movies downtown as a child-you’d go to Broadway, I asked, heck no, he replied, you go to Main Street, and see movies at places where you sat on old crates.)

So that’s the tale of the Griffith Park Train. One last note. I don’t know why, but rolling past these things made me think of some lonely children’s cemetery.

Perhaps an image of a house in Compton doesn’t make you think of the March of Dimes, but who cares. Look at that curved entry canopy!

On a numismatic note, just last year the dimers had moved from using these-

to these:

Funny, there was a creamery here yesterday.

I don’t know about you, no, really, I don’t know about you, but I get hot for chemical journals what discuss that unpredictably violent and violently unpredictable perchloric acid. You’d think Bob O’Connor, as manager/secretary of O’Connor Electro-Plating Corp., would be similarly obsesssed. You’d think wrong. Bob was a sales and business tool. When some other cat named Bob–they stick together, you know, those Bobs–when Bob Magee told him about the magic to be had from exciting your perchloric stew with electrolytes writ large, Bob O’Connor bit and bit hard. To the detriment of a few city blocks.

Let’s say it was an isolated incident. And let’s say we were wrong again.

Toss a stone in this town. Hit, say, Pasadena. Let’s see what that stone wrought.

A simple plating factory (the Crown City plating factory, at 28 West Union):
very nearly took out all of what’s now “Old Town” on 22 February, 1925. The Los Angeles Times reported that but then the next near mishap, well, that got bumped up a bit:

In quiet little Pasadena, Calif, one day last week a blast almost materialized that would have shaken the sober townfolk out of their skins. Two blocks from Pasadena’s busiest corner, Crown City Plating Co. electroplates chromium, gold, brass, silver, copper. A swart little man named Wallace Foreman was mixing sulphuric acid and glycerin to make an electrolyte for plating. Already in the tank were 75 gal. of acid and 2 gal. of glycerin. Thinking to add more acid, Wallace Foreman picked up a 3-gal. container, dumped in the contents. Unluckily the container held not sulphuric but nitric acid….

Time Magazine, 27 August 1934

I mean, you can mix sulphuric acid with glycerin all you want. Nitric acid, well, that makes nitro-glycerin. The rest writes itself. A smoldering hole three blocks wide.

Here’s where everyone and their brother nearly died:

But we’re not here to talk about happy people eating the iced creams, unaware of the giant smoldering hole from where they couldabeen eating ’em: we’re here to discuss the Continent of Death that encircled the 900 block of Pico that February day in 1947.

And now, from our “nie wieder” files, compare and contrast:

Yes, they’ve renamed Ground Zero “Lucky.”

My people call this “hubris,” though I know not how the Chinese would term such, should they care to. Which they won’t.

It had been reported that there was a particularly beautiful, and occupied, house just behind on 14th — the house was blown apart like so many tragically electroplated child’s limbs —-

This was mentioned as a particularly sticky rescue area, given this area had at the time held a giant and absurdly intricate Queen Anne mansion. The developerclass blesses every day which includes Victorian spindlework thrown sixty some-odd blocks as if touched by the Finger of God.

Nigh-on sixty years in, we still talk about this kind of “keep acid under refrigeration” dictate.

Anyone who’s been following the ConocoPhillips buyout of Unocal knows that Texans live to oneup Californians…

Smoke poured from here. The Stone Man calcified.

Here’s exactly how and where he was driving-tooling west, not a care in the world-

Note the large chunk of concrete beneath the Santa Fe overpass. It tolls for thee.

Wait. What kind of Indian? Nowadays I’d wonder if they’re Kayastha Jats or perhaps of the Sudra Varna. But this is 1947, and one can only assume God-fearing White folk were disinclined to share a sewer system with the heathen Gabrielino. Or terrifying Chumash from the North!

Here’s the house. I mean, it’s fine, yeah, it’s West Hollywood, so you’re there for the schools or the nightlife or something equally repellant. In defense of the neighborhood, this house is markedly less attractive than any of its neighbors.

This instance, some Chinese and Korean lawsuits, and the Sugar Hill Gang, no wait, the Sugar Hill Case, all led to racial covenants being deemed unconstitutional in 1948, but it is this squaw’s tenacious fortitude (as had by, you know, those people) shall forever be remembered as how and when Los Angeles became the beautiful rainbow it is.

Statistics regarding a post-Supreme Court rise in scalpings and/or purushamedha have not been evaluated. (Ok, so if you want the real story, go to the comments section.)