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Originally Posted by Tourmaline
This brings me to the following Shorpy photo, said to be from August '63. I thought I had seen it on NLA, but today my memory and search skills are blunted. Notice the overhead street light. Notice the five horizontal red "dots"? Are they reflectors or lights? Do they serve a specific function, other than being decorative and to splash more color on the canvas?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...f0f317100f.jpg
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Speaking of which, I just found out there's a city-owned Streetlight Museum which has one of the star-studded "bathtub" heads (did anyone else know of this place?):
"5. Streetlight Museum, Downtown L.A.
L.A. has kind of a love affair with streetlights. Maybe it started relatively recently, like when LACMA installed its "Urban Light" art installation, which was supposed to be temporary but became so popular that it still stands out front today, facing Wilshire Boulevard. But based on our streetlight designs that date back to the early days of electricity, it appears that our fascination with design in light started long before that. And now, there’s a museum for us streetlight people — on the second floor of the Public Works building, courtesy of the Bureau of Street Lighting. Surrounded by Bureau of Sanitation workers, there's a tiny room that chronicles the history of how L.A. has lit its streets since the early 1900s. This breathtakingly beautiful collection is only open to the public once a month, only by appointment, for only 30 minutes. If you hadn’t noticed already, on your visit you’ll learn that L.A. has had an amazingly wide variety of streetlight styles — and actually still does, among its 200,000 lights standing today. Each of the 400 styles have come to define certain areas — and, in some cases, certain streets — like the "5 Globe Llewellyn" of Downtown L.A., circa 1900. Most of them aren't just utilitarian "lights," but bona fide lanterns, lighting the way for wayward L.A. souls, beckoning them across certain bridges, into certain neighborhoods and onto certain streets. These fixtures don't just illuminate the streets below them. They draw the eyes upwards, past their concrete electroliers, to gaze directly at their textured glass globes and occasionally intricate metalwork."
It doesn't sound (or look) as though they have entire electroliers displayed (it is after all just a room), but it's something:
kcet
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Thank you for demystifying the Wills home
Flyingwedge. I never knew intact Ft Moore Hill IRL obviously, but have always been fascinated by by its windswept heights, the platform for so many of our early photos. I'm not quite sure if the ca 1882 photo below shows the Wills residence future site, as I'm a little confused about its placement in relationship to the Banning place from this angle:
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Originally Posted by tovangar2
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This is the same house? I was kind of stupidly thrilled to see ice plant in their dirt yard:
lapl