nathan marsak – Page 14

A Strange Funeral Indeed

September 16, 1907

Los Angeles

We’ve all been to funerals. Some of us more than others, but funerals, they’re all pretty much the same. Lots of black ostrich plumes. Black clothing with jet-black buttons. Stopped clocks and covered mirrors. A fancy coffin and a viewing of the body, a solemn cortege whereby you follow the hearse to the cemetery, and then you watch as your loved one, at the hands of the undertaker and gravedigger, is lowered into the cold earth. Then it’s back to the house for snacks.

Today, however, Mr. and Mrs. L. M. Vance conducted a novel funeral ceremony for their fifteen year-old son Daniel, who contracted fatal cerebral meningitis after a recent dip in one of the local plunges. Mrs. Vance (famed for organizing the “Helpful Home for Boys,” at Trinity and 16th) wished to triumph over the sting of death and the horror of the grave, and according to the Times, “the mother succeeded, and as a result the friends of the family attended the strangest funeral service ever held in this city.”

Before you get too excited, dear reader, remember, this is 1907, so you might do well to consider that when comparing the “strange funeral” of 1907 with the funerary customs of 99 years hence.

The first order of operations was taking Dan’s body to Rosedale Cemetery, where he was placed in the crematory and reduced to ash. When friends gathered at the Vance home at 972 West 34th Street, instead of being met with his body in a casket, the house had been filled with flowers, arranged around Dan in his urn. Floral pieces were massed in profusion all around the parlor, where words of inspiration and hope were spoken by all, including Rev. B. Fay Mills of the Church of Brotherhood, who officiated. The ashes will remain in the home; said Mr. Vance, “I shudder to think of returning from the funeral and leaving the body of my boy under the ground.”

And so went the strangest funeral ever held in this city.

(The Vance home has since been covered over by USC’s Parking Lot P, which services the Humanities and Social Science Annex. The subsequent disposition of Dan’s ashes is unknown.)

Downtown Demolitions

September 8, 1907
Los Angeles

Much has been made of Bunker Hill, its rooming houses torn asunder, and of the wholesale postwar demolition of many a downtown landmark. Downtown hotels have fared the worst, though they limped along longest—the Lee, the Lankershim, the Gates, the Armondale, all held forth before being felled in recent memory. As much as we must blush at this collective ignominy, let us turn an eye back to some of our fallen comrades that predate, or were otherwise too shabby to be considered amongst, the brick and metal structures of our Gilded Age.

On this day in 1907 Fire Chief Lips, Health Officer Powers, Building Inspector Backus, with Mayor Harper at the helm, visited four downtown lodging houses and found the living conditions in them so deplorable that orders were issued for their immediate demolition. This action was largely at the behest of those tireless proponents of the “City Beautiful” movement, the Municipal Art Commission.

Like sleuths on the trail of flimsy firetraps unfit for human habitation (or, more likely, menaces to the business district), the Mayor and his posse struck first at the Saratoga, at 218-230 East Third Street. The Mayor, having never seen the common bedbug once in his life, was horrified at the sight of the Cimex lectularius. Harper had Building Inspector Backus draw up a letter to the building’s owner, one J. J. Pattison of Hollywood: “…I have reached the conclusion that it is my duty under Sec. 7 of the Los Angeles Building Ordinance to condemn…on account of its exceedingly flimsy character—the construction being mainly boards and the ceiling consisting of cloth and paper. The class of construction is, in my opinion, a very serious menace to the thickly built-up section surrounding the property. You will therefore demolish the building at once and remove all the old material from the premises. The section referred to requires that you begin this work within forty-eight hours of the receipt of this notice.”

Similar notices were sent to the owners of the Mechanics Lodging house at 232 East Second, the New England lodging house at 245 East Second, and the Nagaska Hotel on 2321/2 East Second. The Saratoga, Mechanics Lodging and New England were immediately vacated, their roomers dispersed who knows where; however, regarding the Nagaska, "the Japs have disregarded their notice and are still packed in there like sardines in a can. If they have not cleared out by Monday they may be transferred to the Police Station.”

While he was at it, Inspector Backus condemned the aged Pioneer Warehouse at 421 Bernardo, whose foundations have settled and whose brick walls are warped and cracked. Fire Chief Lips also pronounced an unnamed hotel on Spring, south of the Alexandria, to be an unsanitary firetrap.

It is said twenty other buildings within the business district have failed to meet the approval of the fire chief and building inspector. Their fate is of yet unknown.

This take-and-demolish method may be bad, but at least it’s more honorable than our modern methods practiced by that deceitful cabal of disingenuous philistines known as the LAUSD.

There is a Balm in Gilead

August 31, 1907
Los Angeles

William Bradley, the “Singing Negro,” was arrested three times yesterday before performing an act of singular bravery today. bradley

Everyone likes the religious fanatic, and because there is no law prohibiting a man from singing religious songs on the street, he’s been busting out camp-meetin’ aubades downtown in a voice “that would make the steam whistle on a New Orleans cotton-boat turn green with envy.”

When some motorman on the Temple-street car finally had had enough, and after his strenuous objection to authorities, a warrant was sworn out on Bradley for Disturbing the Peace. Friends quickly put up bail and Bradley burst into spirituals on the steps of the station. Arrested again as he marched down Spring, he was released and promptly arrested again as he belted out canticles on South Broadway. He finally agreed to hold in his gospel long enough to reach home, though said he guessed he’d “might near burst open.”

Today, Bradley was walking along Temple, singing at top strength, when a runaway horse charged down the hill, bearing straight for two women and a little girl. Men did not care to step off the sidewalk, but Bradley never stopped singing, his voice in fact rising higher in song, as he dashed into the street to throw himself upon and pinion the mad animal.

Without waiting for thanks, he lifted his voice and trudged away.

Vice in Venice

August 30, 1907 invadelair
Venice

Get talked up by a booster…wend your way through the hall…step on the special stair which emits a loud buzz, warning those you approach. You’re one your way into the Venice Club, Windward Avenue, Venice, California.

The windows are covered in black oilcloth to keep out light and sound and prying eyes. Inside there’s a roulette wheel, stacked high with gold and silver, emitting its seductive clicky whir, counterposed by the atonal, plangent clack of chips. Verdant young society men huddle around the faro layout. You may or may not notice—they’re all losing. Certainly your luck can’t be as bad!

Your luck would be bad indeed this night, as Deputy District Attorney John North kicks in the door and announces that everyone is under arrest. This would not phase the roulette dealer: “He looked coldly at the officers and his slender gambler fingers toyed idly with the stack of chips at the edge of the table; his little, ratty, sharp face was a slight sneer, half of amusement.”

The Venice Club, run by an aggregation of Arizona sure-thing men, is as crooked as they come. It is said that the reason the faro dealer has one eye is due to time spent having to look crooked at the bent ends of marked cards.

As the room was pinched, a sudden epidemic of sick wives befell Los Angeles. But the cops would have none of it, and everyone was hauled in. The gamblers were allowed to kitty their boodle—some $1486 ($30,498 2006 USD).

The club kept a register of all the tenderfoot gilded youth they’d fished, and, amusingly, the paper printed it in full:
listofbadmen
Ah, would that the story should end there. The bust of the Venice Club opened wide a scandal that shed no new good light on the already suspect “beach towns.”

crooksgive

The Venice police were as fixed as the card games, and got fat from the brace games that lined the seashore. (During Fiesta week, the same underworld figures who ran the Venice Club ran a crooked [and police protected] gambling hall downtown on Broadway between First and Second.) Venice men “higher up” had cemented relationships with blind pigs, dens of ruination for young girls, and that special element adept in fixing elections. Abbot Kinney and (Ocean Park magnate) G. M. Jones battled it out and the cops pledged their various allegiances in the war.

The corruption scandal lingered long and luscious…September 11, 1907:
knifehilt

The Night Signal

coltonmad

August 29, 1907
Colton

An augur came to Mrs. John George last night as she meandered through the traumwelt, delivering the most terrible of presage: murder! The prognostication was that of her husband, Mr. George, standing over the bed. Choking her.

But Mr. George, long locked up in the secure confines of the State Hospital for the Insane at Patton, was certainly no threat. Or was he? On the strength of this omen, she fled her home.

Mr. George had in fact escaped. Not finding her at their San Bernadino home, he went late in the night to the home of her parents, and then to Colton, where one of his little boys was staying with an aunt. Before he could gain ingress, the bulls caught up to the fugitive, and threw him in prison.

This morning, Mr. George, having torn off his clothes and soaked them in water, and having ripped apart the mattress and bed quilts, fought violently the attempts of the attendants whose job it was to pack him up and ship him back to Patton.

That Mrs. George will sleep soundly tonight is of course a matter of conjecture, but we hope she does, lest she miss another harbinger from the other side.

Of Boxing and Booze

August 14, 1907

Los Angeles

Colonel and Cracker alike are swarming our borders!

Dateline—The Peach State—Sherman’s march to the coast was less an indignity than that done by the last state election: all liquor establishments are to be outlawed on January 1. Now the march is of capital out of Georgia—an estimated $3,000,000 in taxes and licenses in 08. As the steady, self-righteous hand of the WCTU has not as yet clamped itself upon the great metropolis of Los Angeles, wholesalers and barmen alike are arriving en masse.

Those in the LA liquor trade welcome our Reb brethren, at least so that they may assure their bit by securing locations and concessions for the newcomers. The local liquor lobby has hit up City Hall for an extension of the Liquor Zone, and has petitioned to increase the number of saloons in LA to 250.

Despite a collective Angeleno fondness for drink, it is the civic duty of 1947project to provide a temperance lesson:

Some years ago, Harry Stuart was a pugilist of renown, his nose broken repeatedly in the ply of his noble trade. Then, as a barkeep on West Third, he was LA’s authority on the pugilistic arts, and oft served as referee for Tom McCarey’s Fight Club, which held forth in the old Hazard’s Pavilion (in 1907 the site of the great Auditorium facing Central Park). Stuart was famous for the way he yelled “b-r-e-a-k!” that amused spectators; his downfall was an unpopular decision in the ring which awarded a trophy to colored boxer Billy Woods, over Al Neil.

Bad luck turned worse after Stuart built a fight club at the westerly end of the Third Street tunnel, which prompted uproar from the tony neighbors. The City Council passed an ordinance confining such clubs to a certain district in the Eighth Ward. To make matters all the more discouraging, Stuart was stung by a spider on his left eye, destroying the sight thereof.

He found menial employment soliciting monies for a weekly publication, and after collecting nearly $100 ($2,052 USD 2006), decided to go on the drinking spree to end all drinking sprees. It lasted three weeks.

After the money was gone and the booze was consumed, he wrote notes to his wife in San Francisco, the Los Angeles Coroner, and his employer. In them he stated that drink had put him “down and out” and that he had nothing to live for. From his note to the Coroner: “Booze has been the cause of my downfall, and I am daffy…my wife will meet the expense of having my worthless body burned.”

Stuart, after losing his last fight, this one to a bottle, swallowed a solution of bromide in his Bunker Hill room at 244 North Grand.
stuart

Photos from the August 6 Pasadena Confidential Tour

Yesterday’s Pasadena Confidential Crime Bus Tour was a hoot, as we glided around the Crown City in our air conditioned murder bus with a happy coterie of grisly lookyloos. Here are a few photos snapped along the way…

Below, Crimebo honors the lucky Miss Cathy with a pre-birthday litany of all the horrors that happened on the day she was born.

Here, Crimebo and hosts Kim and Nathan take a mid-tour breather at Connal’s on Washington Boulevard, conveniently loated between the sites of a hammer murder and a bathtub suicide. Plus their malts is yummy!

And another view of that scary clown Crimebo… don’t you want him at your birthday party?!

Scourge of Sonoratown

sonoradrug

August 3, 1907
Sonoratown

Beware the Plaza. Patrolmen do their best to beat down and drag away human fiends, filled as they are with a new drug menace and the awful blood-lust it produces.

In the labyrinths and dens of Sonoratown, violent outbreaks have become commonplace, as Mexicans of the lower caste have been frequenting drug stores to purchase a substance said to be more harmful in its effects than cocaine, morphine, or even opium. Victims of the powerful narcotic—its scientific name, Cannabis Indica—are helpless to control their need for it, or the frenzy it produces. An effort will now be made to regulate the sale of this poison.

The initial effects of Cannabis pellets, called “Hashish,” consist of mad exhilaration (especially, it is noted, involving one’s mistaken ability to lift heavy objects) and a distortion of the optic nerve, wherein men of ordinary size appear to be giants.

After its use for any length of time, a homicidal mania manifests itself, as under its influence, the desire to shed blood is uppermost in the mind. According to Police Surgeon J. Sumner Quint, much of the crime in the Mexican community is due to its use.

This writer urges all readers to steer clear from this terrible peril and its attendant misery!

Pasadena Weekly Puts Crimebo and Pals on its Cover

All the world loves a clown… especially a Crime clown! And when the editor of Pasadena Weekly heard about Crimebo, he upgraded Carl Kozlowski’s planned feature on the Pasadena Confidential tour from the arts section to the cover! Sneak a peek, online or in person, and don’t miss Matt Craig’s evocative photos.

Our Harbors: Built on the Body of Graecus

August 2, 1907
San Pedro

longwharf The great wharfs and piers of Los Angeles are by and large but a thing of memory. Who cannot tilt a head in wonder as one motors up PCH past the State Historic Landmark signage for the Port of Los Angeles Long Wharf, designating it “site of” the longest wooden pier in the world?
pedrowharf
It was dismantled after San Pedro became our official harbor in 1897.

Ten years later, on this day, while the wharf was under construction, stout men were busy pulling bodies from the briny Pedro deep.

Seems that trainmen ran heavily-loaded cars onto the trackless uncompleted portion, causing 365 feet of trestle work to collapse, crushing Bakko Kovavich and drowning three others—Melia Bolich and Miko Kovavich. Where Native Americans famously built our skyscrapers, it would appear that Greeks built our piers.

Remember these men when next you enjoy the fruits of our port system.