In this beautifully crisp photo, we’re looking southeast across downtown Los Angeles past St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which is the one with the pointy tower. Past it, that expanse of trees is what we now know as Pershing Square. This photo is from 1913, so it was then still known Central Park. But the detail that catches my eye is that pale building down in front – the “Young Women’s Boarding Home” which I had never heard of before. It stood at 514 S. Grand Ave, and was run by the Salvation Army, and was torn down to make way for L.A.’s Biltmore Hotel, which opened in 1923. It looks to be quite a large place and has me wondering if it housed any young and independent women who eventually made it into the flickers.
Here is another photo, probably taken at the same time by the same photographer looking to the left where we can see the Fifth St end of Central Park/Pershing Square.
These photos were taken from the State Normal School which itself was torn down to become the site of the Central Library. The Normal School was a teachers college. It moved to Vermont Avenue and later to Westwood where it became UCLA.
Thanks, Gordon. I was wondering where they were taken from.
Even though it is by this time surrounded by taller buildings, the Alexandria Hotel stands out. Los Angeles was once known as the Queen of the Cow Counties, but the opening of this venue a few years into the new century put the city in a bigger perspective. It was now ready to begin competing with all the other places that had overshadowed it for so long. In no time at all, it could boast having the burgeoning film industry, new aviation companies, automotive assembly plants, and all kinds of production while still keeping a strong place in the tourism/vacation field. And the hotel was only a couple of blocks away from PE Stations which could get you to any place you needed to go back then. Note that the smokestack in the distance by the gasometer marks the location of the LARy shops complex around 7th. Also that large structure on the hills in the left side of image #2 is the giant Santa Fe Railway hospital complex. This ain’t pioneer grandpappy’s frontier town no more. It will still take almost half a century to gut most of the remaining Victorian era structures.
Actually the Orphan Asylum (Boyle Hghts), not the S.Fe hospital.
You’re right, Martin. These are exceptionally crisp and sharp images. Maybe a photography student from the “Normal School” took them?
Quite possibly!
I was wondering if the Womens boarding home was used and not demolished. On a blog called Big Orange Landmarks someone commented, the Young Women’s Boarding home was not displaced by the original hotel, but by addition. Anyone know?
The original Biltmore was built on the Pershing Square half of the block between Grand and Olive. An annex was built 5 years later extending the hotel over to Grand Avenue which took out the Young Women’s Boarding Home along with other buildings.
Thanks for the info Gordon!