Skip to main content

The Umbrellas Of West Third

March 2023
1min read

The picture directly below might have been taken in almost any Northern city on a sodden, bone-chilling day around the turn of the century. In fact, this is downtown Los Angeles whose citizens shelter under rain-burnished umbrellas and wrap themselves in warm woolen coats. If it isn’t the sunny scene beloved by the chamber of commerce, it is nevertheless an alluring photograph, due perhaps to its close look at the purposeful pedestrians and the nearly palpable sense of weather that enfolds them.

The professional photographer whose work this is, Warren C. Dickerson, generally turned out postcard views of the city. When Dickerson focused his camera on the corner of Broadway and West Third, around 1908, he couldn’t have guessed that some seventy years later this intersection would be designated the northern boundary of a historic district. It was in 1979 that the National Register of Historic Places cited the six blocks running from Third to Ninth on both sides of Broadway for the impressive number of theaters and commercial structures dating from the 1890s to the 1930s that still survive.

The National Register’s entry helps refute the notion that Los Angeles has no downtown. Here, standing as a monument to the city’s first great rush of growth (from 1900 to 1910 the population tripled), is a distinct downtown with the same random, shaggy charm that lies at the heart of most cities. At the far left in both pictures is the five-story Bradbury Building, dating from 1893, which has been given a separate commendation by the National Register. Famed for its light-filled interior courtyard, the office building often has been used as a location for television shows and movies.

Although no longer the theatrical center it once was, enough of the early theaters remain for the district to have been cited by the National Register of Historic Places.

Like its New York counterpart, LA.'s Broadway became a theatrical center. Eventually that center moved away, but a surprising number of the early theaters remain. One of them, the Million Dollar Theater, a classical movie palace visible at the right in the recent photo, rose in 1917 on the site of the Muskegon Building, seen in the earlier view.

When laying plans to match a rainy-day scene then in Southern California with one now , patience is called for. The editors first got the idea for the story in July 1987 and then had to wait exactly half a year for the weather to cooperate. Meanwhile, a major earthquake rattled the city. Fortunately, the Bradbury Building, the Million Dollar Theater, and their various illustrious companions withstood the shock. And then, in January of this year, the rains came.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "December 1988"

Authored by: The Editors

The meeting of a Boston woman and the Lone Star State is recorded in a set of watercolors

Authored by: The Editors

A History of American Technology, 1776-1860

Authored by: Anne Hollander

An expert on fashion history looks at portraits of some eminent Americans to see what they say about the native style

Authored by: Ink Mendelsohn

Fashion once expressed America’s class distinctions. But it doesn’t any more.

Authored by: Margaret Hodges

Out of an agonizing American experience, the frail Scots author mined a treasure and carried it away with him

Authored by: Thomas P. Hughes

To bring their nation to the leading edge of technology, Soviet leaders are turning to the United States. Their grandfathers did the same thing.

Authored by: Oliver Jensen

When he’s not taking care of a majestic marshaling of toy trains, Graham Claytor gets to play with the real thing

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.