Remember our two write-ups on early 20th Century programmatic architecture in the Los Angeles area? No? They’re here and here. Check ’em out. Oh, and if you’re really interested, there’s another amazing example here with an entire story behind it. Anyway, here’s a new structure to add to the collection. This is the Mt. Baldy Inn, an iceberg-shaped dance hall built in 1927 that was located in the Pico Rivera area of greater Los Angeles. The inn was popular during the Depression, and was supposedly famous for using freshly squeezed oranges in its signature orange freeze drink. We're guessing the orange freeze was basically a non-corporate Slurpee. This would have been during those sad, alcohol aversive years known as Prohibition, but we bet an extra fiver would've gotten your drink pimped out with a shot of whisky. If the booze didn't get you hopping around, the brain freeze would. This image originally came from the Los Angeles Public Library, but we saw it on the excellent architecture forum skyscraperpage.com, so thanks to those folks for doing the hard work of finding this photo.

Above, a photo of Betty Bersinger, the woman who discovered the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia, seen here at the police station looking unaffected by her grisly encounter. While on a morning walk with her young daughter she saw what she thought was a discarded mannequin that had been broken in two. Instead it was the two halves of Elizabeth Short’s bisected corpse. That happened today in 1947.

Above is a photo of Manhattan, New York City, in the year 1947, looking from Battery Park toward midtown. Here you see everything—the Staten Island Ferry Building at bottom, Wall Street to the right, the 59th Street Bridge crossing Welfare Island at upper right, and in the hazy distance, the Empire State Building—at that time arguably America’s most recognized symbol. In the aftermath of a war that had destroyed Europe’s and Japan’s industrial capacity, the U.S. was the unquestioned power on the planet, with massive economic might, a military that had taken up permanent residence in dozens of countries, and a growing stock of nuclear weapons. Two years later the Soviets would detonate their first nuclear bomb, shaking the American edifice to its core. Meanwhile, all around the world, the seeds of change were taking root. Below is a look at the world as it was in 1947.

Firemen try to extinguish a blaze in Ballantyne’s Department Store in Christchurch, New Zealand.

American singer Lena Horne performs in Paris.

The hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, and the aftermath of the execution of Hisakazu Tanaka, who was the Japanese governor of occupied Hong Kong during World War II.

Sunbathers enjoy Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, and a military procession rumbles along Rua Catumbi.

Assorted Los Angeles Dodgers and manager Leo Durocher (shirtless in the foreground) relax at Havana, Cuba’s Estadio La Tropical, where they were holding spring training that year. Second photo, Cuban players for the Habana Leones celebrate the first home run hit at Havana’s newly built Estadio Latinoamericano.

Thousands of Muslims kneel toward Mecca during prayer time in Karachi, Pakistan.

A snarl of traffic near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

The city hall of Cape Town, South Africa is lit up to celebrate the visit of the British Royal Family. Second photo, during the same South African trip, the royals are welcomed to Grahamstown.

A wrecked fighter plane rusts in front of Berlin’s burned and abandoned parliament building, the Reichstag. Second photo, a shot of ruins in Berlin’s Tiergarten quarter, near Rousseau Island.

A crowd in Tel Aviv celebrates a United Nations vote in favor of partitioning Palestine.

Men and bulls run through the streets of Pamplona, Spain during the yearly Festival of San Fermin.

Fog rolls across the Embarcadero in San Francisco; a worker descends from a tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Detectives study the body of a woman found murdered in Long Beach, California. Two P-51 Mustang fighters fly above Los Angeles.

Danish women from Snoghøj Gymnastics School practice in Odense.

Tens of thousands of protesters in Cairo demonstrate against the United Nations vote in favor of partitioning Palestine.

A beauty queen draped with a sash that reads “Modern 1947” is lifted high above the boardwalk in Coney Island, New York.

A woman in Barbados holds atop her head a basket filled with fibers meant for burning as fuel.

Mahatma Gandhi, his bald head barely visible at upper center, arrives through a large crowd for a prayer meeting on the Calcutta Maidan, India.

Major League Baseball player Jackie Robinson is hounded for autographs in the dugout during a Brooklyn Dodgers game.

Is it pulp? Not strictly, but since when have we been strict? You’re looking at the cover of the September 1933 issue of The Harley-Davidson Enthusiast. Inside you get 20 pages, many of which talk about police departments and their love of Harleys, plus you get a couple of reports from motorcycle meets. Not the most scintillating material, but the photos are nice. As far as the L.A. cop on the cover goes, we have no idea what his problem is. If three babes joined us for a ride we’d be pretty thrilled, but maybe he’s bummed because they’re breaking the helmet law.

Last week we watched Meiko Kaji’s Kaidan nobori ryu, aka Blind Woman’s Curse, and were too busy being cute with our summary of the film to mention that the blind woman was played by Hiroko (Hoki) Tokuda, who is better known to many people as author Henry Miller’s last wife. When they met she was working as a lounge pianist in L.A. and Miller, who had established himself as one of the most important American writers ever, was living in Pacific Palisades. Tokuda told the New York Times in 2011: “Henry started asking every week to meet me. I realized he just wanted a Japanese woman to add to his collection, and I would always ask myself, ‘Why me?’ Soon after we met, he started telling people he was going to marry me.” And marry her he did in September 1967. She was twenty-nine and Miller, who had been born in 1891, was on the verge of turning seventy-six.

By early 1970 Tokuda had left Miller and was back in Japan, where that year she filmed Blind Woman’s Curse. Miller died in 1980, and Tokuda is in Japan today, running a piano bar called Tropic of Cancer, after her ex-husband’s most famous book. She says her marriage with Miller was never consummated, which may or may not be true—Miller isn’t around to contradict her. She also says she only married him for a green card,and has even joked about him being a bad kisser. "Terrible," she describes it. "Wet." It strikes us as a bit cynical for her to pretend the marriage was an inconvenient mistake when she’s borrowing the name of his most famous book in order to brand her bar, but that’s just our opinion. In any case, being a pulp site, we just thought we should offer a little background info, since Tokuda was married to a guy who changed English language literature forever. The above photos both date from September 1967, when their love—if it ever existed—was new.

This poster for the RKO crime drama Bunco Squad drew our attention because of the creepy, white-eyed woman at its center. We assumed she represented a phony psychic, and indeed, after an introductory overview of the various types of con artists that prey on the gullible public, the plot settles around a Los Angeles detective’s efforts to take down a ring of fake spiritualists. These spiritualists plan to entice a rich widow to add their organization, the Rama Society, to her last will and testament, after which they’ll arrange her death. There’s a love story here as well, between the detective and his actress girlfriend, and that thread is woven neatly into the crime plot when the detective gets the idea to have her pose as a spiritualist competing for the trust of the rich widow. All of that leads to a pretty cool scene in which one of the villains drops by to threaten the girlfriend, but instead finds himself in a dark room brawling with the detective and his partner, who are dressed in black head-to-toe sheaths that render them effectively invisible. The villain tries the old windmill-with-outstretched-fists technique, but gets his ass tossed out the door anyway, to the great amusement of the onlooking girlfriend. With car chases, fights, gunplay, humor, an interesting set of villains, a cameo by Dante the Magician, and good looks at a lot of gigantic 1950s-vintage autos, we’ll go ahead and call Bunco Squad a winner. It’s cheesy, moralistic, and over-earnest, but if you like old movies in general, you’ll probably enjoy it. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1950. 

They were known as the Two Tonys—Brancato and Trombino, a pair of wild mobsters out of Kansas City. In May 1951 they robbed the cash room at the mob-controlled Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. They and their three henchmen had been wearing hats, but Tony Brancato lost his mid-robbery, was caught on camera, and from there ended up on the FBI’s most wanted list. Brancato and Trombino were also identified by a mob subordinate who recognized them because he’d been robbed by them in Beverly Hills. The pair were arrested for the Flamingo robbery, but made bail, then promptly headed to Los Angeles. There they shook down a mob bookmaker’s right hand man, which put them on L.A. crime boss Jack Dragna’s most wanted list. But the difference between his list and the FBI’s was that Dragna’s had nothing to do with capture and trial. He ordered the Two Tonys to be killed, and mob shooter Aladena Fratianno, aka Jimmy the Weasel, took on the task. Brancato and Trombino desperately needed money for their legal defense, and Fratianno told them he’d help them take down a high stakes poker game worth $40,000. The Tonys were thrilled and grateful, but the heist was fiction. Instead, in a car on Hollywood Boulevard, Fratianno had two subordinates murder them. The aftermath appears above and below. Today, 1951.

 

Above is a random shot from the USC digital photo archive of a man hanged, either by his hand or others, from a Los Angeles underpass located at West First and North Figueroa. At left in the image you a see a detective using an official LAPD pokin’ stick to turn the corpse for a better look. Except it actually kind of looks like he’s sizing up a piñata purchased from the world’s least festive party supply store, and we can be sure that if he gave it a good whack it wasn’t candy that came out. Meanwhile, the cop below must be thinking that the detective’s exam might not be so hard to pass after all. This happened today in 1951.