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The annual summer Antique and Vintage Car Show at Heritage Square was one of the last events I attended as a staff member – I’ve moved on to another Museum downtown after 15 months working in the Shaw House – and the event was personally both poignant and satisfying for me. It was the end of my tenure at the Square as a staff member, but also the first time I got to park my own problem child, er, I mean, vintage car, at a show.
My car is a mildly customized 1966 Plymouth Barracuda with a 340 engine, one of the early muscle cars, but compared to the other newfangled contraptions at the show, it was just a youngster who snuck in with a fake ID and a friend working the door. But youngsters was who it was made for...just listen to this!Yeah baby! One of the most far-out radio ads what ever tried to bridge the generation gap, man!
One of the event’s regular sponsors, Highland Park auto shop owner Gus Lizarde, of Lizarde Auto Service, (serving the community since 1961!) who has cursed (while loving it) at the extent of my car’s needs, was responsible for it being there and I thank him. He may not have been able to get me to the Spring Fling, the big Chrysler (Mopar) show in Van Nuys (the biggest west of the Mississip. Jay Leno is always there, this year too)—the clutch dropped out actually right at the Van Nuys offramp—but he got me to Heritage Square, and then later (see the next issue), to the 25 year-old Highland Park Car Show, and I encourage you to put any problem car into his hands. He is also currently trying to sell a really nice black 1971 VW Beetle, if you're interested.
Watch a TV commercial for my car from 1966:
But enough about me and my ride. There are a lot of simple reasons that the Square is a natural place for a car show.
The love affair between the auto and Highland Park, to say nothing of L.A., has a long history. We know that right next to Heritage Square is California’s first true freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (or Pasadena Freeway). Rubbernecking rightwards off the northbound lane on U.S. Route 110 and asking themselves, what are those Victorian buildings? is the way probably 70% of the Museum’s visitors discover Heritage Square.
The route was initially planned as a wooden cycleway by Horace Dobbins, who incorporated the California Cycleway Company and bought a six-mile (10 km) right-of-way from downtown Pasadena to Avenue 54. Construction began in 1899, but only a mile and some change were actually built. The bicycle craze of the 1890s had ended, and with it, Dobbins’s ambitions and financing. The built section now is Edmonson Alley in Pasadena, which goes as far as today’s Glenarm, just to the west of the entry to the 110. It was in fact the bicycle craze and the new "safety" bicycle (replacing the old "Penny Farthing") that drove the first efforts to pave major roads.
Some say that the same route was used in 1781 by the 44 pobladores charged by Governor de Neve to set out from the Mission San Gabriel and found a town near a river that was dubbed El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles sobre El Rio Porciuncula. Around present-day Olvera Street. But you cannot always believe what you read. For example, it is not true that the settlers stopped on the way to 33° 56' N 118° 24' W to see the Dodgers play the Yankees. Construction on the stadium had not yet begun and the Padres were still kicking out the Native Americans they called the Gabrileños and the Fernadenos (i.e., the Tongva and the Tatviam).
Some say that the same route was used in 1781 by the 44 pobladores charged by Governor de Neve to set out from the Mission San Gabriel and found a town near a river that was dubbed El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles sobre El Rio Porciuncula. Around present-day Olvera Street. But you cannot always believe what you read. For example, it is not true that the settlers stopped on the way to 33° 56' N 118° 24' W to see the Dodgers play the Yankees. Construction on the stadium had not yet begun and the Padres were still kicking out the Native Americans they called the Gabrileños and the Fernadenos (i.e., the Tongva and the Tatviam).
In any case, Dobbins's right of way more or less sketched out the route of the future freeway. At the time, and for quite a while afterwards, trains and streetcars were the main way you traveled. People were skeptical about the real use of cars when they first began to be manufactured and the infrastructure was not there. The Southern Pacific streetcar lines, and a bit later, Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway, were the main sources of transit across the lion’s share of residential Los Angeles.
Then came what is known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal. A cartel of oil companies and automobile manufacturers bought up commuter rail systems in many cities and scrapped them. National City Lines, a consortium formed and owned by General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone, bought up private streetcar lines across the country and systematically dismantled them, replacing electric trolley service, at least partially, with buses, and the infrastructure quickly followed. The age of the auto was born. And HSM’s Palms Depot, the Victorian railroad depot that is now the Museum’s store, was eventually stripped of its rails as well. All it could do then was provide a movie set, and then, a clubhouse for the local Boys Club.
During the 1940s through the 1960s, Los Angeles County had become the second largest auto manufacturing region in the nation, following closely Detroit. Studebaker, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors all manufactured cars here. Parts manufacturers, tire makers, refiners and mechanics all jumped on the bandwagon. Some of the parts tycoons built elaborate and fanciful factories, like tire manufacturer Adolph Schleicher, who built a 7th Century B.C. Assyrian palace (built 1929) in Commerce to house the operations of his Samson Tire and Rubber Company. The building, which still stands today (it is now a Citadel factory outlet store) boasted a 1,350-foot-long (later expanded to 1,750 feet) crenelated concrete wall decorated with heraldic lamassus, shedus and bas-reliefs of Babylonian princes carved into the stone between impressive pillars and towers. Morgan, Walls and Clements, the original architects, designed the wall in the style of King Sargon II's palace. Sargon, who today is also a computer chess program and a band from Barcelona, was an Akkadian king born in Babylonia (friends with the Fonz, BTW) with a 23-acre palace and Schleicher's plant, coincidentally or by design, covered the same amount of land. It's an Art Deco hoot.
Then came what is known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal. A cartel of oil companies and automobile manufacturers bought up commuter rail systems in many cities and scrapped them. National City Lines, a consortium formed and owned by General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone, bought up private streetcar lines across the country and systematically dismantled them, replacing electric trolley service, at least partially, with buses, and the infrastructure quickly followed. The age of the auto was born. And HSM’s Palms Depot, the Victorian railroad depot that is now the Museum’s store, was eventually stripped of its rails as well. All it could do then was provide a movie set, and then, a clubhouse for the local Boys Club.
During the 1940s through the 1960s, Los Angeles County had become the second largest auto manufacturing region in the nation, following closely Detroit. Studebaker, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors all manufactured cars here. Parts manufacturers, tire makers, refiners and mechanics all jumped on the bandwagon. Some of the parts tycoons built elaborate and fanciful factories, like tire manufacturer Adolph Schleicher, who built a 7th Century B.C. Assyrian palace (built 1929) in Commerce to house the operations of his Samson Tire and Rubber Company. The building, which still stands today (it is now a Citadel factory outlet store) boasted a 1,350-foot-long (later expanded to 1,750 feet) crenelated concrete wall decorated with heraldic lamassus, shedus and bas-reliefs of Babylonian princes carved into the stone between impressive pillars and towers. Morgan, Walls and Clements, the original architects, designed the wall in the style of King Sargon II's palace. Sargon, who today is also a computer chess program and a band from Barcelona, was an Akkadian king born in Babylonia (friends with the Fonz, BTW) with a 23-acre palace and Schleicher's plant, coincidentally or by design, covered the same amount of land. It's an Art Deco hoot.
The former Samson Tire and Rubber Company in Commerce, courtesy of Google Maps Street View. Drag the picture to 'walk' around the building or visit the neighborhood.
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Jobs, jobs, jobs! And almost no unions! Henry Ford was virulently anti-union, like most local L.A. businessmen--they were bad for the workers, he wrote--and had the city on his side. (He was also an outspoken anti-semite, and Ford and Hitler mutually admired one another.) It must be said for Ford, however, that generally speaking, he treated his workers well, and felt that if a company had good managers that realized what giving generous incentives to workers could do for a company, the workers would be happier than union workers. Unfortunately, as Henry Ford himself observed, there was a dire shortage of good managers. In the latter years of his life, when the UAW had become powerful, he threatened to break up the company rather than unionize. His wife Clara, who was determined to see her sons at the helm of Ford, threatened to leave him if he did so, and so it was that the old anti-unionist offered UAW workers the most attractive contract in Detroit.
Ford's revolutionary cars have been around for a century. 2008 is the 100th anniversary of the world's first consumer car, the Model T, otherwise known as the "Tin Lizzie". NPR has a great article on it here.
The Long Beach plant prospered through the 1960s. At its peak, more than 15,000 auto workers assembled half a million cars per year. By 1965, the L.A. Times even suggested that Los Angeles had replaced Detroit as the nation’s auto capital. It was also at the time the smog capital of the world (now I think it's Mexico D.F., but see a future post here on L.A.'s smog heritage), one of the reasons why today California vechicle emissions standards are the toughest in the world. You think smog in L.A. is bad in the 21st century? Check out some pictures from the 1940s or 1950s. The worst smog episode in terms of mortality occurred in 1963, when 40 deaths were attributed to smog in a single day. Regulations in many other states and other counties regularly use "California Standards" as a benchmark to reach. California was also the first U.S. state to try to enact CO2 emission standards, an attempt shot down by the W. Bush EPA. Our state is sueing in Federal Court to be allowed to make it law, gods bless it. $6 gasoline is going to do more for Global Warming than California and Al Gore, though. And shoot, I get 9 mpg. But then again, the car is generally in the shop, anyway.
The Long Beach Ford Plant, early days. Note the tall-masted ships in the background.
When the 1970s and the oil shocks arrived, imports began consuming a significant portion of the auto market in Los Angeles. My father turned in his Ford Country Squire station wagon for one of the early Honda Civics. Perhaps many people today are going to be doing that with their SUVs soon. The Chrysler plant in the city of Commerce became the first major auto plant to shut down. Other plant shutdowns followed until the region’s last remaining auto plant, the General Motors facility in Van Nuys, closed in 1992.
But back in the day, L.A. was the second Detroit. The HSM car show traditionally features many beautifully restored Ford Model A’s and Model T’s, thanks to the Screenland Model A’s Club and the Model T Ford Club of San Fernando Valley, and perhaps one of the reasons is that in 1930, even though the 1929 stock market crash was bringing America into the Great Depression, Henry Ford decided to build a massive Ford plant in Long Beach.A public tour of the Long Beach Ford plant in 1931
Ford built the modern, two-story, high-ceiling plant in spite of the miserable prevailing economic conditions. The main reasons were that the plant had already been under construction, and no one really knew at that point just how bad and long the Depression was going to be. And, unlike today, L.A. was an oil town, and gasoline was dirt cheap, cheaper than maintaining a horse. And why maintain a horse when you can have 40 horses cheaper in a horseless carraige? The plant opened in April 1930, as the 35th of Ford’s strategically-placed plants around the country. It replaced the old multi-story plant where Ford had been making cars for booming L.A. since 1915. The proximity to the Port of Los Angeles, via the Cerritos channel, and ample rail access had been a decider for Ford, who always seemed to make the right moves. Ford, the father of mass production and inventor of the assembly line, made sure that from the start the plant could produce upwards of 500 cars a day. It was actually one of Ford's plant managers, William C. Klann who in 1913, built the world's first automotive assembly line. He got the idea from visiting a slaughterhouse in Chicago. Go figure.Race a 1929 Ford Model A!
A few years later, when the depths of the Depression were becoming more obvious, Ford shut down many plants across the country. But not Long Beach. And then came another one of the strokes of good luck that were Henry Ford’s forte:
A rich oil field had been discovered under his Long Beach plant property, and 31 gushing wells were merrily producing great heaps of cash. The bad news was that with all the pumping from under the reclaimed landfill, over time the plant began sinking below sea level, and for years the encroaching tide had to he held in check by high walls of steel shoring.
The old Ford plant closed in the early 1960s, but the building still served as a film location (for movies including Lethal Weapon and Robo Cop) right up until 1990, when it was finally torn down.
The site of the former Long Beach Ford Plant, on the Cerritos Channel, courtesy of Google Maps (you can click on the buttons to zoom in, out or drag to travel.)
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Next Post: Smog, a part of L.A. heritage. Then, Henry Kaiser, L.A. Steel and Kaiser Cars! There was a rare Kaiser at the HSM show, and I had never seen one before. In fact, I never knew Kaiser Cars existed. And then, old Country Folk Songs about hot-rodded Model A's and Lincolns and, the Highland Park Car Show and mucho macho LOWRIDERS!
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