1930 (1929) (1931) (1920-1930) (1930-1940) Table of Contents
Casino Gardens Dance Pavilion, 1930
Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1930 See Text
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965, with photographs by Robbert Flick, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 1930 See Text
Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
Santa Monica Municipal Bus, Pier Avenue turntable in Ocean Park, ca. 1930 See Image and Text
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1930 See Text
Betty Lou Young and Randy Young Santa Monica Canyon: A Walk Through History Casa Vieja Press: Pacific Palisades, CA, 1997, 182pp., 1930, See Text
550 A Walk Among the Palm Trees, California Post Card, Western Publishing and Novelty Co., Los Angeles, Calif., KR 1930 See Image and Text
Notes
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1935
Chapter XVIII The East A-Calling
" . . . By 1930 . . .
"The essential reason for the growth of deep sea shipping at San Pedro was, of course, the growth of the oil industry in Southern California.
" . . .
"[p. 228] Oil is the chief product going out of the harbor. In 1929 (from which year all these figures have been taken), tankers carrying 5,650,751 barrels of oil sailed for various countries with a value of $58,870,837. As has been shown this was not a peak year.
" . . .
Documents
Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1930
" . . . and the daily supervised playground program [at Washington School] began in 1930 [49. Mary E. Baker, Washington School Annual Report (unpublished report to the superintendent of schools, June, 1930, p. 1.],
" . . .
. . . And the rapid growth of the student body within the first two years of the Junior College's existence clearly indicated the need for additional classrooms. [66. Martin, op. cit., p. 18.] Fortunately, the old Garfield Elementary School, conveniently located just north of the high school between Sixth and Seventh Streets on the east and west and Olympic Boulevard and Michigan Avenue north and south, became available in 1930. The building was remodeled for junior college use, and equipped with the necessary science laboratories and demonstration rooms. [67. Pearl, op. cit., p. 115.]
Ralph H. Bush, who had founded the nation's first junior college in Joliet, Illinois, was secured by the Board of Education to organize the new junior college in Santa Monica. Long an advocate of the junior college program, Bush enthusiastically set about establishing a curriculum and activities that would meet the needs of the post-high-school students in Santa Monica.
" . . .
Santa Monica Junior College offered two types of curricula: one to prepare students for entrance into a university upon their graduation from junior college; the other, of a semi-professional nature, to satisfy the needs of students wishing to complete a year or two of schooling beyond the high school level before seeking employment. [69. Ralph H. Bush Santa Monica Junior College Annual Report, 1930; in files of the Santa Monica Board of Education, p. 2.]
When the rebuilding and remodeling of the Garfield plant was completed, the new junior college campus contained sixteen sturdy bungalows housing laboratories, art and music departments, administrative and faculty offices, a field house, men's and women's lounge rooms, an auditorium, and a total of twenty-four classrooms. As the college continued to grow, additional bungalows were added to provide needed classrooms.
The Dance Magazine, March 1930
Ted Shawn and Ruth St, Denis, The Dance Magazine, March, 1930
Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Tamris, Dance Repertoire Theatre, The Dance Magazine, March, 1930
Except maybe for Tamris, former members of the Denishawn Troupe, 1930
The Dance Magazine, March, 1930
The Dancer's Bookshelf
W. Adolphe Roberts Every Soul is a Circus, Vachel Lindsay, The MacMillan Company, New York, $2.75, The Dancer's Bookshelf The Dance Magazine, March, 1930
The poet who created such ringing original rhythms in The Congo and General William Booth Enters Heaven has turned his attention to the dance. His new book, he state in an interesting preface, was written "for precious children of all ages," but especially for those around eleven or twelve years old. The poems are intended primarily to be danced, and Linday states emphatically that there must be no musical accompaniment or singing. He wishes solo performers and classes to interpret them as they are read aloud from the side lines. Each movement of the body is to be improvised about half a second after the words which have suggested it. "Dance one syllable at a time," he instructs, "thinking only of the music of the poem and not the meaning."
Having never seen anything of the kind done, the reviewer hesitates to express an opinion as to whether it would be effective. Lindsay declares that he trained a group of schoolchildren in Spokane, Wash., along these lines, with excellent results.
The verse included in this volume does not impress me, considered simply as poetry. It is jazz in words, than which I ask no better when the the trick is effectively turned. However, the present examples are staccato and loud, without having any of the gorgeous thunder that was characteristic of Vachel Linsay's earlier work.
About the best piece I find to quote is the following, written, Lindsay merrily avers, "for Ruth St. Denis to dance on the top of a watch-crystal:"
The idea of dancing to verse is well worth a trial, and this book undoubtedly shows how it can be done. Teachers and poetically minded children should look into Every Soul is a Circus. Used as Lindsay intends them to be used, the poems may be far, far better than I think.
-[p. 52]-
Mary Watkins Dance Events Reviewed [pp. 27 and 60]
Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Assisted by Messrs. Sol Cohn and Hugo Bergamasco and the Misses Mary Campbell and Muriel Watson. Two weeks' engagement. The Forest Theatre, New York.
Program:
These two outstanding artists and their work are so well-known and so widely beloved that comment and criticism upon their performance is almost gratuitous. The engagement however is so unique and so indicative of the important place which the dance is assuming in this city that a detailed account of it belongs to our readers. It is the first time that a theatrical manager has booked a dance attraction for a prolonged run on Broadway, without any "alleviating" assistant [p. 61] performers, and thus, true to their own traditions, the Denishawns are once more pioneers. As such, they must suffer the trials as well as reap the glories and we regret to report that every audience was not of the capacity variety which their work so richly deserves, although enthusiam was unbounded upon every occasion we attended.
The initial program might almost be subtitled "resume of past triumphs," for it included almost all those dances which have won these two artists international renown during a decade of effort. Beginning with Miss St. Denis' White Jade, ending with the popular duet, Josephine and Hippolyte, and presenting in between such classics as Mr. Shawn's Japanese Spear Dance, his Flamenco Dances, the justly famous Cosmic Dance of Siva, and Miss St. Denis' Waltzs by Brahms and Liszt, her Bakawali Nautch, her Javanese Court Dance. Among the less familiar numbers were two outstanding hits of the evening, Miss St. Denis' sprightly and bewitching re-creation of a little Khmers ballerina, dead and vanished a thousand years ago, and Mr. Shawn's virile and poetic Ramadan Dance, or Algerian Earth and Moon Ritual. The new, or newly adapted duet suite, was the least admirable of all the offerings, having in the course of three numbers Tillers of the Soil, Idyll and Nocture, many moments of lyric beauty and imagination, but proving on the whole somewhat cloyingly sentimental, and vastly inferior to the less abstract and more dynamic creations in the familiar repertoire.
The musical accompaniement was unusually good, but the musical substance was not always chosen with the same brilliant sense of fitness and qualtity which marks the choice and working out of the actual dance themes.
The second program was at least in the case of Miss St. Denis, amost entirely a glorification of the Orient. Hence it represented the best of the great dancer's achievements in her happiest vein, beginning with the Japanese Goddess of Mercy, and including the classic Japanese Flower Arrangements, the Black and Gold Sari, an engaging and querulous dance of Burma, and a new compostion, or rather one not seen by us before-the Tagore Poem to music by Carpenter, which concluded with the heartbroken and poignant speaking of lines from the poem. This was an extremely beautiful dance, full of the much abused thing called "atmosphere," and remarkable for its skilled manipulation of the exaggerated lengths of a rose-colored dekkan sari and its resolving plastic pose.
Mr. Shawn's numbers were also from his best, the Spear Dance, the American Indian's stirring Incantation to the Thunder Bird, and the almost overwhelmingly tragedy and despair of his Prometheus Bound. His slight but perfect Gnossienne of Satie, his Siva, and above all, from a popular standpoint, his Spanish dances, won him salvos of applause. Miss Ernestine Day, who was to have assisted Mr. Shawn in the Cuban La Rumba, was prevented by illness, and so the dancer substituted one of his original tangos, and was compelled to add not one but three encores in similar vein.
The evening again concluded with Hippolyte and Josephine.
Second Program
-[p. 61]-
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965, with photographs by Robbert Flick. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 1930
" . . . in 1930 . . . Many of the natural attractions-like the beaches and mountains-were free to all comers. As a result, outdoor recreation came to represent a sort of social leveler in Los Angeles, a place where people of different classes might mix. Although the upper classed tried to change this by establishing elite beach clubs, designed to keep away the "riffraff," most L.A. beaches remained open to a wide cross section of classes. The line, however, was drawn when it came to race. Nearly all Southern California beaches were off-limits to blacks, more by de facto practice than written law. Although no beaches explicitly prohibited blacks, public officials and public pressure encouraged blacks to use certain beaches set aside for them, such as a part of Santa Monica known as 'the Inkwell' and a section of Manhattan Beach." p. 90
Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
"The Third Street Neighborhood Historic District is the City's first Historic District. It consists of 38 contributing buildings constructed between 1875 and 1930. This small Ocean Park neighborhood illustrates many of the historical and architectural patterns that characterized the larger community. Historically, the neighborhood has ties to some of Santa Monica's most prominent early residents. Architecturally, the buildings chronicle the evolution of design from the Victorian era through the revival styles of the 1920s and 1930s, with an emphasis on hipped roof, turn-of-the-century cottages and Craftsman bungalows."
Santa
Monica Municipal Bus, Pier Avenue turntable in Ocean Park, ca. 1930 -
Adelbert Bartlett (Carolyn Bartlett Farnham Collection) Note the
Afro-Amercans at the back of the bus; Jack Posner, Jeweler, the Ocean
Park Hotel and Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines No. 16
http://www.smpl.org/archive/0932/IMG0026.JPG
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1930
Pp. 38, 39 [Photo captions: "This view from the air was made circa 1930. Taken from a point on the south side of Venice, it shows a small, long-gone pier in the foreground, then the big Venice amusement pier, only the breakwater seaward of which now remains, and the Ocean Park pier, the Crystal pier and the Santa Monica piers" [an aerial photo from the south side of Venice]"]
Betty Lou Young and Randy Young Santa Monica Canyon: A Walk Through History Casa Vieja Press: Pacific Palisades, CA, 1997, 182pp., 1930
[1930 photo on page ii of Rosemary and Vincent Romero and their cousin, Perfecto Marquez posing with a float, built by Ysidro Reyes II, based on a carreta from 1830, for the Ocean Park Kiddie Parade. The entry won first place. Rosemary Romero Miano]
"A modern lifeguard station was built at the mouth of the canyon in 1930 . . . and was manned by county lifeguards from 1930 to 1949. In 1933 the city of Santa Monica established its first lifeguard team, including three Palisadians . . . and sited its own tower next to the Santa Monica Swimming Club."
550 A Walk Among the Palm Trees, California Post Card, Western Publishing and Novelty Co., Los Angeles, Calif., KR 1930
550 A Walk Among the Palm Trees, California Post Card, Western Publishing and Novelty Co., Los Angeles, Calif., KR 1930 Franked with a green 1c Franklin and cancelled 29 May 1930, 1 pm, Los Angeles [ . . . Sta.], Addressed to Ms. A.J. Myers in Newville, PA, "Dear Friend, Having a delightful trip through the west. Will return to my office on or about July 20th. Dr. R.W. Pratt Opt. Eye-sight specialist. 26 W. 3rd St., Harrisburg, Pa.
