A brief hiatus...and some interesting historical stuff.
I'll be on hiatus this week, but I'll leave you with a few interesting tidbits in my absence, on L.A. and ocean-themed history.
I began this Substack blog on August 10. Since that time, I’ve put out one article every weekday—on subjects ranging from climate change to modern American politics, World War II, medieval history and lots of points in between. Now comes the first break I’ll be taking since starting, and I’ve had to decide how to handle hiatuses.
I will be gone this week (Sept. 20-24) taking some much-needed R&R. For what it’s worth, here are a few totally random links to some interesting historical material that you might not otherwise come across. As I am going to the coast this week, they are all somehow related to the ocean, beaches, or coastal locations like Los Angeles.
Surf Nazis. Here is an essay that ran in the New York Times about two years ago, exploring the surprising links between the Southern California surfing culture and white supremacy. This topic came up during the course of one of our episodes of my podcast Green Screen, about the 1991 film Point Break. You wouldn’t think of surfing as being anything other than good clean fun, but unfortunately there’s a very dark edge to some parts of the sport.
Oak Island Treasure, Debunked…110 Years Ago. I am somewhat infamous among the fans of an uncommonly terrible History Channel show called The Curse of Oak Island, which posits the theory that some sort of treasure was buried on a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. In 2017 I did some high-profile articles and videos debunking the legend, which angered fans of the show. I hope they have some rage left over for one Henry L. Bowdoin, who wrote this article, published in Collier’s Magazine in 1911, in which he stated how and why we know that there is, in fact, no treasure on Oak Island and never was. Bowdoin was the chief engineer on a 1909 treasure hunt to Oak Island, in which a young Franklin D. Roosevelt participated. If you read the article linked there, you’ll understand not only why this hunt failed to find any treasure, but how they definitely would have found something if there was anything there. No fan of the modern Oak Island show has ever had any substantive response to this 110-year-old article.
An Automobile Club’s 1938 Plan to Ruin Los Angeles. In 1938, an organization called the Automobile Club of Southern California put forth a plan for the “renewal” of Los Angeles, which involved the building of large-scale “elevated motorways”—we call them freeways—all over the city. Their plan was published in a June 1938 issue of the Los Angeles Daily Mirror, archived here. This astonishing plan includes, quite explicitly, the use of building auto-centered highways as a tool of ethnic cleansing, by punching freeways through the heart of “blighted” neighborhoods, which is a euphemism for places where people of color lived. This evidence came to light in my research for recent Green Screen podcast episodes on the films Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Chinatown. As you’ll see, the plan was, unfortunately, followed largely to the letter, resulting in the ghastly nightmare of freeways that Los Angeles is today.
The Rise and Fall of Pacific Ocean Park. Just in case you need a little more SoCal history, here is a fascinating article about the short-lived heyday of a seaside attraction off Venice Beach called Pacific Ocean Park. Built in 1958 by CBS and a consortium of developers, POP, as it was known, was intended to compete with Disneyland, and actually did—for one day, its opening in July 1958. Urban renewal projects in the 1960s choked off freeway access to POP and it closed in 1967, becoming a decaying hulk of a wooden pier that finally burned down in 1975. The video embedded above is a retrospective of some happier times at POP, which, given its timing, was evidently formative among Baby Boomers who lived in the L.A. area. I found these materials also while doing an episode of Green Screen, and it’s too cool not to share.
Don’t Buy Artwork on a Cruise Ship. In the heyday of the transatlantic ocean travel, especially the 1920s and 1930s, there were numerous scammers and hucksters afloat who took unique advantage of oceangoing passengers. They’re gone, but now there’s a new legion of scammers afloat, and some of them sell spurious works of “art” on cruise ships all over the world. This article from Bloomberg gets inside the strange world of cruise ship art auctions and why they’re problematic. This is material I found while doing research for a potential future novel I’m writing, set at sea.
I hope you enjoy the week. Thanks to all who read and share my work.
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