LOS ANGELES: OLDEST KNOWN PHOTOGRAPHS, A True Old World Compilation

Introduction
Howdy, y’all! Welcome back to the channel. Thank you so much for being here. Many months ago, when my channel was just fledgling and the videos—while entertaining—lacked a narrative, I made a video that was less than 15 minutes long about Old World California. While that video was well-received, I knew I had to do a little more digging.

California, as vast and beautiful as one can imagine, is full of history and thus historical architecture, which we must examine to have a full grasp of the area at that time we would consider to be the Old World. One of the most popular and thus interesting locations in all of California is Los Angeles, the City of Angels.

In my previous video about Cali, we lacked the direction I wanted to have. But in today’s video, we are going to focus on a selection of nearly 200 Old World images of Los Angeles, California, from before World War II. These images are going to be hand-selected by me as some of the most interesting, rare, and downright unexplainable photographs of L.A., with a focus on the pre-1900 era.

We will begin with a brief recap of the current narrative of the history of California, accompanied by some of the very earliest pictures of specifically the Los Angeles area. We will follow that with the narrative into more modern times and wrap up the video focusing on the unique architecture and antiquitech around Los Angeles in the late 18th and early 1900s.

[Music]

The History of Los Angeles
Los Angeles was originally inhabited by the Tongva and Chumash tribes, respectively. These indigenous groups occupied the California coast for at least 11,000 years, from at least 7000 BC. Sites like Milling Stone Horizon show evidence that these native groups had intricate systems of survival and trade, including the use of many different seeds. They used these for survival, for food, but also to create variously colored art and dyes. The name “Chumash” itself actually means “bead maker.”

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. The native peoples of California—the Tongva and the Chumash—had a great period of growth from roughly 950 AD until 1300, which was called the Medieval Warm Period. This brought greater resources to California with an increase in temperature, so basically, there were better weather conditions for crop growth.

Interestingly, before this Medieval Warm Period, many historians believe the Chumash were visited by the Polynesians sometime around 600 to 800 AD. This Polynesian excursion to the New World would pre-date Christopher Columbus’s arrival by nearly 800 years. Vast similarities between the native groups of California and the Polynesians exist, not only in language but also in more concrete items, including the sewn plank canoe—a design that, upon European settlers’ arrival to America, was only found in one area: California. However, this sewn plank canoe design was used specifically by the Polynesians before this time and had not been seen anywhere the Polynesians had not visited, which leads historians to make the assumption that ancient California tribes and ancient Polynesian tribes had a connection to one another.

At this point, the narrative is alluding to California—and more specifically, the area of Los Angeles—being claimed by the Spanish Empire in 1542 by a man named Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo while he was on an excursion north from previous New Spanish forts. However, at the same time in the narrative, we reach an interesting hole: while Spain lays claim to California and Los Angeles in 1542, it takes over 220 years for Spanish missionaries to officially reach the land of Los Angeles and begin to set up shop, so to speak.

In August of 1769, the narrative says Gaspar de Portolá and Juan Crespi reached Los Angeles for the first time. In September of 1781, the narrative goes on to say a group of 44 settlers, known as Los Pobladores, founded the pueblo, which they called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles—aka, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels.

By 1820, the town was still relatively small, with only 650 residents. Two-thirds of these residents were of mixed ethnicity, with large portions being part Indigenous, Spanish, and African. While this narrative really only talks about Los Angeles being this area, we do have New Spain achieving its independence from Spain in 1821, thus creating the free land of Mexico, which includes Los Angeles and California.

Los Angeles at this time was part of the Alta California region of Mexico, and thus, Los Angeles became California’s capital while under Mexican rule. According to the narrative, Los Angeles continued to grow and flourish at this time while still maintaining its agricultural background.

Now, the narrative then skips ahead one more time, and we jump to the end of the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847. This is when the United States officially took control of California and the Los Angeles area.

Roughly 30 years later, the first major railroad arrived in Los Angeles from New Orleans—this was the South Pacific Line. More railroads quickly followed suit, and in 1892, petroleum was discovered in large quantities beneath the city of Los Angeles. From here, a population and industrial boom occurred, and by the year 1900, the population of Los Angeles was over 102,000 people—up over 100,000 people in less than 80 years.

The massive-scale building projects that followed ensured Los Angeles would stay at the forefront of American culture. These projects include some of the most intricate dams, aqueducts, and man-made water projects ever undertaken up until that time. These building projects also included leveling off the land, which seems to once have consisted of many ancient mounds or, at the very least, undisturbed hills. One of these hills would later become the Hollywood Hills, known first as Hollywood Land.

In 1910, Hollywood would officially merge into the city of Los Angeles, bringing with it 10 major motion picture studios. The Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles in 1932. Following the end of World War II, Los Angeles became one of the most rapidly growing cities in the United States—and for that matter, the entire world—quickly incorporating the San Fernando Valley into its larger city limits.

The 1960s brought the Interstate Highway System through L.A., which subsequently brought an end to the intricate electrified railway system of Los Angeles, which was once the largest in the entire world. In 1969, the University of California became the birthplace of the internet, as the first ARPANET web transmission was sent from UCLA to Stanford University.

The list of accomplishments of Los Angeles goes on and on, but for the remainder of this video, I would like to put some photographs to this narrative that I’ve just presented. We’re going to go through and take a look at some of the very oldest images of these architectural and antiquitech accomplishments of Los Angeles. I’d like to do this so we can put a better image to the current narrative that has been given.

What we come to find are some amazing, if not miraculous, structures that seem to fully integrate and elaborate how luxurious we were building in Los Angeles at the time. It’s Old World construction at its finest.

Of note here are the many buildings that, even in their earliest appearance, seem to be unleveled or somewhat buried on what appear to be earth mounds or raised sections of land. We are told they were simply built this way or the land was filled in afterward, so we’re going to take a look at some photographs and see if we can question that just a little bit.

We’re also going to take a look at a few massive underground and water-related building projects that really seem to dwarf anything else I’ve seen around the United States during this time period—turn of the century, late 1800s, early 1900s. How quickly California was built is just miraculous.

So, we’re going to take a few looks at some of the more interesting images related to the aqueducts and the massive dam of Los Angeles as well. Overall, this will just be a pretty stout collection of amazing, mostly museum-quality photographs of Los Angeles, California, that I believe many people have not had the opportunity to see before.

Throughout this video, we will focus on all aspects of Los Angeles that caught my eye, and I will try to hold nothing back from the imagination when I dive into these photographs. With that being said, sit back, strap on your California sunglasses, grab some California raisins, and enjoy the Old World photographs of Los Angeles, California.

I will chime back in on different photographs just to point out things that I found really interesting, but really, as in many of these Old World photograph series that I make, these images speak for themselves. So, feel free to mute the video, play your own music, and just take in all of these images because, in every single photograph, there’s so many things that stand out. I’d love to hear what stands out to you in the comments down below.

Observations on Old World Los Angeles
Right off the bat, one of the first things that struck me are these amazing tunnels that we’re told were built in the 1800s and the 1900s in California—and in Los Angeles more specifically. They’re really interesting to me because they became points of interest even to the public at this time. While they could have just been there to see it being built, for some reason, people were drawn to these areas as if they needed to see it—as if it was something miraculous being done.

Now, I’m not saying it was impossible, but this certainly took a lot of craftsmanship. You can see that these areas were turned into, like I said, points of interest to the point that different rides were incorporated—much like what we see in state fairs and things like that. So, it’s interesting that these tunnels became points of interest like that.

Also, with these tunnels and with these hills and these mounds in California, we have a lot of buildings that are built right into them. For example, on one side of this little hill, you’ll see this large home—three stories. From one side, it looks very big but nothing spectacular. Yet, from the other side of this tunnel and the other side of this hill, you can see that the house is actually built into the hill. And from the other side of this mound, the house actually is five or six stories, and many of their stories go right into the ground. They seem to go right into the construction of the tunnel.

So, it’s just a really intricate design, especially thinking about the 1800s and what we were building with. Now, we also have a lot of representations of the Spanish community and the Mexican community in California, which I found really interesting just because you can see so much culture in the area at the time.

Something that stood out to me, no matter what part of the city of Los Angeles that we’re looking at, is how Old World everything looks. And when I say Old World, and we think of Old World cities, we always see these buildings that are really brick and masonry, which seem to stand out because you would think they would be building with wood.

We’re told these settlers arrived, and they cut down all the trees to make this area basically inhabitable, so now we don’t really have these wood buildings. Instead, we have stone and brick buildings. And yet, we have streets that are not paved, and we have streets that are made out of mud, and we have streets that are really dirty and don’t seem to match the rest of the city around it.

So, we see the same thing here in California. Even though this is one of the later-built (according to the narrative) cities that we look at in this Old World series of videos, we still see the same thing here. I found that really interesting.

[Music]

Theaters and Entertainment in Old Los Angeles
Now, something that I’ve noticed in a lot of these Old World series, when we talk about the different buildings that were founded in these areas, we always see these larger buildings being founded as factories and things like that. And while we do have a lot of these factory buildings being founded in Los Angeles, one thing that stood out to me is even more of these very large and intricate buildings that have these designs that sort of are reminiscent of the Old World.

Many of these Old World buildings are being designated as theaters, so I found that to be really interesting—especially when we look at the history of Los Angeles and Hollywood and that whole idea in general. We sort of have this push beginning even in the 1800s with the massive amount of theaters that seem to have existed in Los Angeles at that time.

And these theaters included outdoor and indoor theaters. Some of the indoor theaters are rather large—they have these really awesome domes on top or other antiquitech designs that are really neat to look at and really reminiscent of the Old World.

But even when we look at the outdoor theaters that existed in Los Angeles, one of them—I believe it was called the Fishbowl—appears to be one of the most unique designs and definitely has something atmospheric about it. It certainly looks like the acoustics of the area were perfectly designed, and it seems like something out of the Old World.

But I digress on that. I just wanted to share these images with you and point out the fascinating fact—at least to me—that when we talk about Hollywood (“Holly Weird”) and we talk about Los Angeles and the area we think of for film and movies and celebrities, it’s interesting that many of the oldest buildings and largest Old World buildings we see in the 1800s and the early 1900s are being labeled as theaters.

Because theater is a little different than the common factory and other things that we see being thrown on these different founded buildings. So, just another fun fact for you when we’re looking at these images.

The Los Angeles Coliseum
Now, we’re going to get into what I consider to be the real meat and potatoes of this video. And that is, first, we’re going to look at the L.A. Coliseum. Now, in my impression, when I look at this building, it instantly screams the Old World to me.

Now, initially, I had thought this was being built for the Olympic Games of 1932, but this actually predates that pretty significantly. They say that this was completed in 1921 and was opened on December 21st of that year.

Now, we’ve looked into the Old World stadiums before in different videos and the whole idea that to build these stadiums, the first thing they did is make a massive earth mound or a massive earth circle. And interestingly, then they would apply this Romanesque architecture—basically cut into this mound—and on the inside or the inner angle of the mound is where they would lay all of these seats and all of this interesting design.

It really seems to stem from the Old World, but even further back than the Old World, looking into the Native American culture, it seems to be where we get these designs from. And I just wonder if the whole stadium idea really predates what we are told.

Now, this stadium—being one of the largest to ever exist in the United States—had a capacity of 101,574 people, and it was designed by John and Don Parkinson.

Now, another interesting fact is, besides the amazing photographs here which speak for themselves, this Coliseum in L.A. is known as the “Grand Old Lady.” And that’s another interesting fact when we talk about the Old World.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about mountain ranges that are old and have significance or castles and other buildings that are old and have significance—we refer to them as the “Old Man,” the “Old This,” the “Old Lady.” And it’s just really interesting because, right off the bat, to a person who didn’t know anything about the English language, and you just introduced them to it, and you told them this is known as the “Grand Old Lady,” and you gave them a definition of those words, it would imply that this building is significantly older than what we are told.

Why would you refer to a building that’s only 5 or 10 years old as the “Grand Old Lady”? Yet, that’s what we’re being told was going on.

The Los Angeles Dam and Aqueduct
Now, looking at the rest of the meat along with these potatoes, we also have the massive Los Angeles Dam that was created and then eventually filled in with land.

What I mean by that is, initially, we are told that a giant masonry-built dam was constructed in Los Angeles. And again, the photographs speak for themselves, but this is intricate—it screams from the Old World.

Although we do have photographs that show the quote-unquote “technology” that was being used to build this dam, we can see that especially in this image here how large these concrete or brick—these stone blocks—are. These building blocks, as I’ll refer to them simply, are that—built this dam. They are massive, and they are humongous as far as tonnage goes, as far as weight.

So, the idea that a small group of men—this wasn’t the entire community because, at this point, Los Angeles is already very developed, we have a lot of different jobs here—so everybody could not just drop what they were doing to construct this dam. Yet, we’re told this dam, built with masonry, was constructed in a rather short amount of time when we look at how large it is and how many people were working on it.

And it’s just really interesting because, before this dam is built, the narrative says that certain people had to secure the water flow into Los Angeles, and they don’t really explain what that means. But it seems to imply from the wording that there was some sort of argument or another event that predated access to this water.

Now, the other major water project that I want to look at is the Los Angeles Aqueduct. And what I found very interesting is, with the aqueduct, we’re literally shown photographs of maybe 20 to 30 horses and 5 to 10 different men, and these are said to be photographs of the work site as this aqueduct is being created.

And once you see the completed aqueduct and you compare it to the photographs we are given of the construction, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I know there are others in the Old World research community that have made arguments that these photographs were only photographic opportunities—basically, they were commissioned, and that they were only taken at opportune times. So, basically, when everyone had already gone home for the day is when they would send in the photographer and take these images.

And if you want to believe that, that’s well and dandy. But we’re talking about Los Angeles, and these projects are happening in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. So, at this point, photography is advanced enough, and there are enough people out there with enough different jobs that, whether it’s a news reporter or simply a man with a camera who wants to take a photograph—maybe it’s another worker who’s there—we do have on-site photographs of this aqueduct being built.

And the manpower that seems to be used while this aqueduct is being created doesn’t seem to fit the large—almost massive—implausible scale that this project was. So, I’m going to present these images with you just to show you how intricate this job was.

And if you can find images that show me a hundred men on the job working to make this happen, I would love to see those. But realistically, all we are presented with are horses and wagons and a handful of men with simple hand tools, and we’re told they are the ones who completed this aqueduct.

Now, we do have a few interesting images like this of a man actually riding his car on top of the exposed aqueduct. But realistically, there’s just a lot of different parts here and not a lot of tools being shown or a lot of manpower being shown to complete the job.

So, we’re just going to look at a couple more photographs being said to be construction of this aqueduct. And then, I want to focus on the images here at the end of this sort of collage because, while I made mention multiple times of the lack of manpower, what you will find is that the completed aqueduct was a celebration of really large proportions.

What I came to find is that the opening day and the opening ceremony really attracted the entire city of Los Angeles. So, that’s another interesting dichotomy—not saying that it sort of points in one direction or another with this narrative—but to show us photographs of a basically nearly completed aqueduct and then show us five or six workers and a bunch of horses, and then at the same time you say, “But when it was finished,” and then you show us 20,000 people gathered around the aqueduct just to see them, it sort of creates this dichotomy that I at least thought was worth mentioning.

So, take a look at some of these photographs. You can see what sort of celebration it was when this aqueduct was finally completed, and just compare that to the photographs of the men at work, and it sort of seems like they’re from two completely different times.

Los Angeles City Hall
Another building that caught my eye was the Los Angeles City Hall. While this is a more modern building and not exactly from the Old World or pre-1900—as they say it was completed in 1928—it was really interesting to me and reminiscent of a lot of the buildings that we consider to be Old World.

And another thing I found interesting about it is, while there are a few Old World images—or images from before World War II—of this building, one of the most interesting that I found was one of the top of this building, this L.A. City Hall, apparently fully illuminated. And while the photograph itself looks to be altered a little bit, it did really remind me sort of Batman and the sort of Bat-Signal idea.

Just really interesting images to me—a really awesome building no matter what era it’s from—and I just wanted to share it with you.

Santa Monica and Beachfront Culture
So, one of the most interesting things to me is that, with all the rich and luxurious lifestyles that were being lived by the residents of Los Angeles, one thing that they desired was beachfront. So, that’s where we get to the beaches of Santa Monica and how Santa Monica basically became part of the greater Los Angeles area.

Santa Monica is the coastline that is closest to Los Angeles, and it became a desirable area of retreat for those rich inhabitants of L.A. Now, Santa Monica, according to this narrative, was incorporated as a town in 1886. But interestingly, you would think that it would be a very small or undeveloped area at the time, but much to the contrary, we can actually find a lot of very advanced things seeming to be happening on the beach of Santa Monica in the 1880s.

Including the Arcadia Bath House—and this is a massive hotel that, at one point in the 1880s, actually had a roller coaster-type of ride that would connect it to the surrounding area. And you would think, “Oh, roller coaster—maybe something like a trolley or an electric tramway or something like that.” But this is actually much like a precursor to a real roller coaster, equipped with dips and swerves and things of that nature.

So, I had really never seen anything like this, especially in the 1880s—especially being to connect from one area to another. This wasn’t so much a ride as it was a way of transportation, and yet it had an element of fun that was incorporated into it.

And you can also find that on the Santa Monica Pier, which is another area that I found very interesting because we can see some of the earliest renditions of this culture that we’ve looked at previously—the whole idea of these rides, these advanced mechanisms being unveiled at these different piers and these different state fairs and things along those lines.

Well, that same story holds true when we look at Los Angeles and the Santa Monica boardwalk because we can see that they had their own pier, and this pier had its own intricately designed rides or inventions that included roller coasters and Ferris wheels and things of that nature.

So, I just found this whole area to be really interesting because we’re told it was only incorporated in the 1880s, but at the same time—or at the time of its incorporation—it was already so well developed to have some of the earliest renditions of roller coasters as well as other antiquitech rides. So, just another fun fact about L.A. that I thought was meaningful to share with you.

Mass Gatherings and Population Growth
Here’s another image that I found that was really unexplainable to me. And this is 50,000 people said to be gathered in one location in Los Angeles on Easter Sunday in the 1920s. And I can’t really explain what they are gathered for or what they came to see, but to imagine all of these people not being with their families or bringing their families to one specific area of L.A. on Easter Sunday—it’s just really interesting.

And I say that because, like I mentioned earlier in the video, at the turn of the century in the year 1900, the population of L.A. (Los Angeles) was a little over 100,000 people. Now, at the same time, we’re being told by the 1920s they could have Easter Sunday gatherings in the middle of open land—basically in the middle of nowhere—that had 50,000 people.

And at the same time, another example is the L.A. Coliseum—we were able to put over 100,000 people in the Coliseum at a given time in the 1920s when, in the year 1900, there was only a hundred thousand people in the whole entire city of Los Angeles.

So, that just shows how exponential the growth of this city really was. And I’m just gonna leave it there—whether you believe these are Old World-founded buildings and things that were maybe of a different narrative than the one I’ve presented or the current narrative, or if you think that this is all proof of the rapid growth and the rapid construction and the magnificent architecture and the magnificent minds that went into developing and arranging and constructing these things.

Either way, I think it is easy to say that these images are remarkable. And to me, at least, many of them were breathtaking and left me sort of in awe when I viewed them. So, I’m just really happy to be able to present them with you.

And for the remainder of the video, we’re just going to take a look at a handful more unique buildings and images—photographs of Old World Los Angeles.

So, anything in this video that stuck out to you, let me know down below. And if you’re from L.A., I would love to hear from you, so please let me know down in the comments below. And if there’s anything in this video that you felt like I’ve missed, I definitely want to hear about that too.

Closing Thoughts
I’ve never been to L.A., and it’s a dream of mine. I hope to one day be able to have enough money to freely travel to California because Los Angeles would be one of the first places I would go, and I would see all of these sites while they are still around.

You know, the L.A. Coliseum, for example, is somewhere that I would definitely go right when I arrived because, to me and my own personal belief, these have much more history than what I’ve presented to you in this video. And I do not know the exact true nature and all the full details of the construction of many of these buildings, but I would love to go see them in person.

Because you sort of have a feeling with these buildings and with this architecture, and when you see something that’s from the Old World, you can identify it. So, I would love to have that feeling in person and see these buildings in person.

So, I hope that I was able to present L.A. in a positive light—to show you all of these awesome images I was able to find. I dived in real deep—as deep as I could go. I went into some museums, went into some other places to find all of these unique images, and hopefully, I presented a good video to you.

So, if you enjoyed it, hit the thumbs up, let me know your thoughts and your comments down below. Let’s keep it positive, let’s keep the light with us, let’s share our ideas with one another, and let’s try and enlighten one another to new things we might not have noticed before.

So, in conclusion, thank you so much for being here. Los Angeles is simply amazing—the City of Angels. I can’t wait to see it one day, and I thank you so much for viewing my video. I will talk to you very soon on the next one. Jared Boosters out.

And the last thing that I wanted to mention—and this is a thank you to everyone that leaves overwhelmingly positive feedback and new ideas on these videos—I have been receiving a few comments that have been asking for ways to donate to the channel or to help the channel to grow monetarily.

Realistically, I never want to ask for anything out of my viewers. I do not expect anything out of you, and to ask sort of makes me really uncomfortable. So, while a lot of other channels have all these different links for “Hey, give me money this way,” and they ask for money in different ways, that’s something I didn’t want to ever do. I’m not doing that now.

So, actually, what I want to say is the best way for me to be able to keep growing and to make more content and to inspire me to want to do more for you and for us and to help us learn more is to share this work the most that you can.

Whether it is to like, to subscribe, or to share to anyone that you think would even have a little bit of interest—whether it’s just one or two images—send them the video and send them a timestamp and say, “Hey, check out these images. Let me know what you think.”

Because that’s the best way to help me is to get this information out to as many people as possible because I want people to wake up. I want to be able to go down the street and have a conversation with someone and be inspired again when I speak with them and to be able to talk about things from our history that can lead us to a better future.

So, that’s all I wanted to say with the end of this video—just a big thank you to everyone who wants to help me grow. I will possibly consider maybe taking donations at some point from those of you who would ever consider that to be a thing. But overall, I’m just appreciative of everybody that’s here, and I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Me, Jared Boosters, appreciates you—my viewers—every single one of you.

Los Angeles is simply beautiful. This land is breathtaking. It’s so interesting to me to look at this vast difference from when Los Angeles was mainly farmland and agricultural area to when it grew into the massive city that we know today.

This all happened in a very short amount of time—in 80 years, the population increased over a hundred thousand people, and we have all of these Old World buildings that we can, according to the narrative, thank this 80,000 for.

So, I just want to share these images with you and see what you have to say and hear your comments down below—maybe find out some new information I hadn’t presented in this video. And we will talk more on the very next video. I will see you very soon.