This collection of impressive photos captures the street scenes and everyday life of Los Angeles in the 1930s. Most of the pictures were taken by Ansel Adams which commissioned to document the city’s industry as the country was shoring up its air power.
Many of his photographs focused on the lunchtime rituals of factory workers along with everyday street scenes he encountered as he ambled about the rapidly developing region.
Adams visited a bowling alley, a forest of oil derricks, and a trailer park, one of many that popped up to meet a fierce demand among the workers for temporary housing. But only a handful of Adams’ images were published by Fortune magazine.
Historian Carey McWilliams wrote that Los Angeles’s growth is “one continuous boom punctuated at intervals by major explosions.”
By 1920 southern California’s population had surpassed that of northern California, and in the next several years Los Angeles experienced “the largest internal migration in the history of the American people.”
Hundreds of thousands of people arrived by automobile. It was a frenzied period of wildcat oil drilling, intense business speculation, religious excitement, extensive suburban development, the birth of the aircraft and film industries, and civic corruption.
The charismatic Pentecostal minister Aimee Semple McPherson captivated audiences with her dramatic preaching. Droves of starry-eyed young people arrived hoping to follow in the footsteps of such movie actors as Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” and her daredevil husband, Douglas Fairbanks.
Los Angeles was very much a white-dominated town in the 1930s. Housing and public facilities were segregated, and job discrimination was widespread.
The Great Depression caused high unemployment in the region and exhausted the resources of private and public assistance.
To slash welfare lists, public officials repatriated thousands of Mexicans—and their U.S.-born children. Amid this dire situation, Los Angeles built facilities for and hosted the 1932 Olympic Summer Games as planned.
The city’s remoteness from Europe and from much of the rest of the world contributed to reduced international participation.
Nevertheless, the Games were a great success and showcased Los Angeles to the world. Meanwhile, the corruption in City Hall led to a recall movement against Mayor Frank L. Shaw and his close associates.
Police misconduct and the mayor’s mishandling of public funds forced Shaw from office and led to the election of reform mayor Fletcher Bowron in 1938.
Economic recovery was relatively swift in the late 1930s owing to the prosperity of the film industry, the tapping of electrical energy from Hoover Dam, and the production of airplanes for Britain and France at the outset of World War II.