Julian Eltinge

I had never heard of Julian Eltinge until I came across some material for sale on EBay. I dug out his photo file and over the weekend found his former home in Silver Lake.

 

Los Angeles Times file photo

 

Here's Eltinge in his prime in an undated picture. He performed frequently in Los Angeles and appeared at the Mason Opera House in a play titled "The Fascinating Widow," which received rave reviews. In fact, the critic compared it favorably to the annual New Year's show at the Jonathan Club.

 

Los Angeles Times file photo
Julian Eltinge in "The Fascinating Widow," 1913.

 

He was also a boxing fan.

 

And he built this house in Silver Lake.

Photograph by Larry Harnisch / Los Angeles Times
Here's the former home of Julian Eltinge, 2328 Baxter St. Warning! Baxter is one of those extremely steep streets around Silver Lake.  Because of the mature trees,  it is quite difficult  to see the home from the street. But it is still there. Note: In his later years, he lived in North Hollywood. He died in New York in 1941, somewhere in his mid-50s. The Times noted that he was a "lifelong bachelor," a vintage code phrase for "gay."   

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Ps. The Times clips are full of interesting accounts about Eltinge. I'll try to post a few as I get time. So many stories, only one Larry Harnisch.

110 revisited

 

I realized I got more than I bargained for as soon as I found this map among The Times pictures of the Pasadena Freeway. As this 1912 map shows, the Arroyo Seco Parkway was originally intended to link Elysian Park to the area north of Devils Gate Reservoir in what is now La Canada Flintridge. But what's this off to the left? A parkway linking Elysian Park to Silver Lake? And what is this Silver Lake Parkway connecting Wilshire Boulevard to Griffith Park? Also, please note the reference to a "proposed boulevard from the mountains to the sea."

You might ask why the city was taking its first steps toward freeways as early as 1912, when autos and auto travel were primitive to say the least.  My goodness, the question of transportation in Southern California gets complicated quickly, doesn't it?

Stay tuned.

Mystery photo

 

Los Angeles Times file photo

Here's a vintage photo of our mystery guest. Some artist at The Times cut it down years ago, but left part of the autograph intact. And yes, I cropped out the signature. No point in making this too easy.

• Mary Pickford? (Interesting guess. But no).

• Julian Eltinge? (Carol Gwenn). Absolutely right! Bravo

This is Julian Eltinge, the leading female impersonator of his day.

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Dec. 31, 1957

 

Company town III

Robert Birchard writes:

    Saw your blog on Francis Boggs and early filmmaking in Los Angeles.

 

    Perhaps one of the reasons you've never found the laundry except in the earlier fire reference is that it is nearly always misidentified as the "Sing Loo" laundry, when in fact it was the "Sing Kee" laundry and it shows up in city directories of the time. 

 

    The laundry, of course, was not part of the 1907 expedition, but was a temporary Selig studio active in April and May of 1909.  Boggs left Los Angeles for location work in Yosemite, the Hood River Valley and Oakland before returning to set up a permanent studio in Los Angeles in Edendale in October 1909.

 

    The "rooftop" studio is somewhat problematic.  "Monte Cristo" has recently been found and restored.  All of the film, except for the emergence of Dantes from the sea, is shot on interior sets.  There is no Selig "Carmen," or anything that might resemble it for that matter, in the release records of the Selig Polyscope Company, and it is highly unlikely that Lillian Haywrd would have worked with Boggs ca. 1906-1907 (although she certainly worked for Selig after Boggs's death) because they were just recently divorced and Boggs was remarried to May Hosmer.  Hayward was also a new mother, having given birth to an illegitimate daughter in Dec. 1906 and only returning to work on stage in San Francisco later in 1907 after "a lengthy illness."

 

    The fellow who gave the photo of the rooftop studio to Hobart Bosworth claimed it had been taken in 1906 when he was appearing in a show in Los Angeles.  I need to do additional research on this to confirm the show (if possible) and its play dates, but I suspect that the rooftop studio does indeed date from 1906, but that Francis Boggs wasn't involved at that time.  It is my suspicion that Thomas Persons blurred the rooftop studio and the Monte Cristo shoot in his memory many years later. 

 

    The first account I've found of the Monte Cristo shoot is in a 1916 article by Charles E. Van Loan that quotes Persons, but which may have been slightly embellished for effect. 

 

Best,

 

Bob Birchard

The 110 revisited

 

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1939

He looks out from the bridge as if he is gazing toward the future. Not that this is what the photographer intended. Like The Times "Scout Car," a new 1939 Oldsmobile, the unidentified fellow in the suit and two-toned shoes was added as visual interest to an otherwise static shot of Southern California's first six-lane "superhighway" being built from Los Angeles to Pasadena.

But what did our friend see when he looked away from the camera and faced Orange Grove Avenue? The future of transportation? The ultimate solution to the region's intractable problems with congested streets? Did he, or anyone, ever envision long lines of cars backed up on the Orange Grove off-ramp at the evening rush hour? How about freeway signs, shrouded in an attempt to protect them from graffiti?

 

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times

The year after that picture was taken, 1940 Rose Queen Sally Stanton, aided by Gov. Culbert L. Olson, cut a ribbon just east of Fair Oaks in South Pasadena, opening six "glass-smooth miles" of the Arroyo Seco Parkway from the Figueroa tunnels to Glenarm Avenue. The era of the Southern California freeway had begun.

 

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times

Cheryl Walker at the 1938 groundbreaking for the Arroyo Seco Parkway.

But our story doesn't begin with our friend on the bridge, nor with the Dec. 30, 1940, ribbon-cutting. Nor does it open two years earlier, when 1938 Rose Queen Cheryl Walker started a tractor at Sterling Place and Arroyo Boulevard in South Pasadena to move the first mound of dirt for the "speedway between Pasadena and Los Angeles."

As The Times noted in March 1938, the groundbreaking was the culmination of a 20-year effort. Indeed, even a little research reveals plans for a landscaped route along the Arroyo Seco as early as 1907.

With the 70th anniversary of the groundbreaking a few months away, and a large folder of Times archival photos on my desk, I've decided to use the Pasadena Freeway as an instrument to examine the larger question of traffic and transportation in the Los Angeles region. Is traffic a new problem that can be easily fixed with a few more buses or a couple of toll roads? Or, like the line from "Alice in Wonderland," has it taken all the running we can manage to stay in the same place over the last century?

Like most Southern Californians, I have a personal relationship with this subject. The Pasadena Freeway is literally my backyard and my house was moved from Sterling Place to make way for the project. (And yes, although I personally oppose the 710 extension, I'll make every attempt to write about it impartially).

More than that, with the exception of a few years when I lived in the San Fernando Valley, I've used the Pasadena Freeway nearly every day since 1988. As I tell my fellow commuters, driving a freeway is like running a river; you learn where the rapids are and where you are likely to get caught in an eddy. After seeing dozens of three-car pileups in the same sharp curve, I have learned to slow down and say a little prayer for people who speed on by.

Today, despite years of tinkering, the freeway is as outdated as our friend's two-toned shoes and his 1939 Oldsmobile, which had a 230-cubic-inch, six-cylinder engine, a 120-inch wheelbase and weighed a bit more than 3,000 pounds. The builders could have never imagined a dressed-out Hummer H2 with a 133-inch wheelbase and a 393-horsepower V-8 that weighs as much as pair of 1939 Oldsmobiles. And yet the highway continues to serve its intended function: moving cars between Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles.

One might say that the freeway was conceived the first time someone mounted a horse and rode to town. I don't plan to go back quite that far. Nor do I intend this to be a linear history of the Pasadena Freeway. For that, I'll post Patt Morrison's marvelous 1990 nondupe on the freeway's 50th anniversary. Instead, over the next few months I'll be revisiting some of the locations in the old photos to see what lessons we have learned--and perhaps what lessons have eluded us. (Note the absence of a center guardrail in the 1939 photo. A bloody lesson to be sure).

 

 

Photograph by Larry Harnisch / Los Angeles Times

And like the Pasadena Freeway, this will be built in chunks and strung together, then modified as I see what works and what doesn't.

Hope you enjoy the ride.

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