Via Los Angeles Magazine, Erik Tarloff writes: Even Amid the Red Scare, 1950s L.A. Was a Wonderland Without Fences for Young People. This really reminds me of 1940s North Hollywood and the LA we returned to from Mexico late in 1954. Excerpt:
It was an oddly idyllic time and place in which to grow up. Los Angeles has become a world city in the intervening years, a gigantic, fast-paced, complex megalopolis, but in the 1950s, while undeniably huge in area, it was still largely a sprawling collection of self-contained neighborhoods with lots of undeveloped spaces in between waiting to be filled. There were vacant tracts so vast that, from a position amid the untamed trees and shrubbery occupying the center, you had no sense of the city streets beyond. There were bare hills, and on side streets, old wooden shacks resembling something out of a cowboy movie, many still occupied. No high-rises anywhere; there was so much land, people built out rather than up.
There was a downtown, of course, a busy commercial downtown like the downtowns of other big cities, with office buildings and traffic, and men in suits and ties, and women in hats and gloves. But no one I knew ever went there. The only trip downtown I can remember from my early childhood was taking a streetcar with my grandmother to visit my grandfather, who worked at something called the L.A. Nut House. I’m told I startled a fellow passenger, a sweet older lady who wanted to engage a small boy by asking him where he was headed, when I answered that I was on my way to visit my grandfather at the “nuthouse.” She apparently misunderstood. She didn’t realize it was a retail establishment that sold nuts.
My family moved into half of a dinky duplex in a working-class neighborhood in the Hollywood flatlands at the end of summer 1952, just weeks after my fourth birthday. Prior to that, we’d been reasonably prosperous; my father was a staff writer on a hit TV sitcom, I Married Joan. We’d lived in the San Fernando Valley for a couple of years, and then in a large old house in the Miracle Mile district, not far from where the then-nonexistent LACMA is now located. But with the House Un-American Activities Committee breathing down my father’s neck, the prospect of imminent poverty required some major economies.
We’d spent the summer before the move on the top floor of a rustic cottage near Green Valley Lake; my sister, Julie, and I had been told we were going on an adventurous vacation, but I later learned the real reason for this adventure: My father wanted to forestall for as long as possible receipt of that looming subpoena. He knew the ax was going to fall, and fall soon, and he knew that once it happened, he would be unemployable and his writing career would be over, perhaps forever. The longer he could put off the inevitable, and the more frugally we could live in the meantime, the more savings he could salt away against the impending catastrophe.
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