Larchmont Chronicle
DECEMber 2016
SECTION TWO
21
When California left the Union during the Great Depression
Sip champagne, sample refreshments and hear holiday jazz tunes while touring the Robinson Gardens in the firstever holiday open house, 1008 Elden Way, Beverly Hills, Sat., Dec. 10 from 1 to 4 p.m. There will be a cookie bar, pictures with Santa and the chance to do some holiday shopping, as well as docentled tours, during the event. This is the only time during the year, other than the Garden Tour, that the house is open for viewing to the public
HOLIDAY open house will show off the Robinson home.
and you can see it dressed up in its vintage grandeur. Tickets are $30 per person. RSVP at 310-550-2068, or info@robinsongardens.org.
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Squads” in the LAPD, “to control radical activities, strikes, and riots.” It was a time of brutal harassment, and worse. “The more police beat them up and wreck their headquarters, the better,” Davis said publicly. “Communists have no Constitutional rights and I won’t listen to anyone who defends them.” He also said that his men “would hold court on gunmen in the Los Angeles streets, I want them brought in dead, not alive.” James E. Davis was forced out of office in 1939 after the election of reform Mayor Fletcher Bowron in 1938. He died a decade later, on a Montana ranch.
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(Continued from page 13) is the super casual, rather funky, but surprisingly tasty Filipino fusion Belly & Snout. It’s barely a restaurant. One orders at a counter and the cafeteria-style dining room is down the hall, where there’s a wall-mounted TV perpetually turned to sports and a small opening into the kitchen where orders are claimed. Food here is not for the health-conscious — this stuff is high-calorie, high-fat, messy, filling and fun. Have you always wanted to have a hot dog loaded with simmered pig part stew and a fried egg? Then order the amazingly flavorful sisig dog. Pork adobo grilled cheese is delicious — cheesy, meaty, the white bread perfectly toasted. Tater tots are the retro junk food favorite on menus all over town and here is no exception. We enjoyed ours with oxtail sauce. This food screams for beer, but they do not have a liquor license. Nonetheless, we wolfed down our meals, promising each other we’d live on kale salads for the rest of the month. Most menu items are under $10. Belly & Snout. 974 S. Western Ave., 323-643-4170.
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be locally deputized in other counties, a veneer of legality. (The sheriff of Del Norte County was a holdout.) Chief Davis’s blockade of California was over in two and a half months. He didn’t have the budget for it — and outrage came from all quarters, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Sheriffs Association. But the Foreign Legion of Los Angeles, according to Starr, “did provide California and the nation with a chilling spectacle of unprecedented police power: in its own way a coup d’état on the part of the LAPD of all other forms of local and state police authority.” Davis also formed “Red
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Vintage grandeur at open house
Angeles would soon attempt to seize control of the state.” Starr describes Los Angeles Police Chief James Davis as a “spit and polish officer” in his “shiny black riding boots;” entangled in layers of corruption, “Two-gun Davis” was in his second term as LAPD chief. On Feb. 3, 1936, Chief Davis sent 126 LAPD officers to “16 crucial highway and railroad entry points with orders to turn back any and all indigent transients who could not prove California residence,” Starr writes. Davis wanted his “Foreign Legion of Los Angeles,” as the posse was soon named, to
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terrible time here. No stock’s or bond’s. But as long as we have some eats and a roof over our heads we will be all right.” This is the picture many of us had when we heard our parents or grandparents Home say they “lived through the Ground Depression.” by But the poli- Paula Panich tics of our city were far darker and more complex. The City of Los Angeles brought into being, in early 1935, a Committee on Indigent Alien Transients. Who was such a person? The committee’s definition: “A transient entering the state of California without visible means of support and whose legal residence is foreign to the State of California.” As Kevin Starr, in “Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California,” (Oxford University Press, 1996), has written: “Thus the Committee, for all practical purposes, took California out of the union. The City of Los
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In 1933, when Anita Baldwin and others published “The Palatists,” a celebrity cookbook to benefit the work of the Assistance League in Hollywood, not many people were instructing cooks to whip up olive canapés. The already-fabled town was not immune to the Great Depression. RKO Radio Pictures, just up the street, on the corner of Melrose and Gower, was in danger of bankruptcy, but that year “King Kong” was a smash hit. The suburban-urban fabric of our Larchmont-area neighborhoods was built between 1929 and the early 1930s. You can still take walks along our streets and see more or less what our now-ghostly neighbors saw then. What were they thinking? How was their vision of themselves and the neighborhood and Los Angeles and California different from our own? A few years ago I bought a personal letter, dated Hollywood, January 23, 1932, found in an antiques store in South Pasadena. A woman wrote to her friend: “We are having a
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