Today we visited the Cabrillo Beach and Cabrillo Marine Museum. We last visited the marine museum some years ago. We remembered it as a small hole-in-the-wall museum. Wow, has it changed. The original marine museum is still there but they have added a touch tank.
But in addition, they've added a discovery center, a state-of-the-art marine research library, and a research area. We were completely blown away. My first impression was that it was nicer than the Boston Aquarium. Then I remembered the seals, the penguins, and Boston Aquarium's own touch tank. For children under the age of eight years, I would recommend the Cabrillo Marine Museum. It's smaller, a bit more educational for that age group, more intimate, less easy to get loss, but one really can't go wrong with either.
Oh, by the way, the Cabrillo Marine Museum is free. Yes, free. Suggested donation but my hunch is that most of the locals who visit frequently donate only occasionally.
But I digress. I assume most folks coming to a blog on the North Dakota oil industry are not interested in reading about a marine museum in southern California. There is another reason for writing about the museum.
As noted, the research library is a state-of-the art complex run by a very engaging librarian. She pointed out one of the library's new books, a history of the Los Angeles Port. Interestingly, every page in the book, it seems, refers to the port as the San Pedro Port, but that's another story.
There is a chapter in the book on the oil industry in southern California. There's an interesting story of a young woman who came from Boston to San Pedro, California, to teach piano lessons. She got caught up in the oil frenzy at the turn of the century, and actually invested in a well that happened to be located next to where she was living.
With the money she made from that first half interest in the well next to her, she bought her own rig, hired a crew, and started drilling.
To make a long story short, she ended up controlling ALL the oil from the Los Angeles oil field, one of the largest fields in the United States.
She continued to teach piano lessons.Summers expanded her holdings into real estate as World War I demand for petroleum increased her profits. She bought some of the first motion picture theaters in Los Angeles as well as apartment houses, several San Fernando Valley ranches, and a Wilshire Boulevard mansion.
As the Los Angeles oil boom waned, Summers moved into her elegant hotel appropriately named the Queen. Years later she recalled, “Oh, how scared I was sometimes! I would start in on a big deal and then get scared and wonder where I’d land. But I usually came out all right.”
Her name was Emma Summers. Her story can be read here. She became known as the Oil Queen of California.
I live in the Longfellow neighborhood in Minneapolis. 90% of it was built between 1919 and 1921 (basically a WWI "suburb" that used to be very small dairy and egg farms, "truck farms" from before there were trucks. I am less than four miles from the center of downtown Minneapolis.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Longfellow was built with alleys so it was idea for automobiles. They added one new streetcar line in Longfellow. It had relatively low usage except during the WWII tire and gasoline rationing.
Minneapolis especially and the Twin Cities had one of the best streetcar systems in the world. It may have made money before WWI, especially after 1890 when it was electrified.
After WWI Minneapolis "The Mill City" was booming due to high grain prices. The post WWI automobiles were far more reliable and a lot cheaper so people bought many of them here.
At this point the streetcars were probably not making much if any money. Added to this there were "jitney" buses scooping up streetcar riders on the most popular routes.
Our streetcars probably made their money on land speculation and electricity. Basically, a streetcar company would have front buyers buy up clustered areas of land and then run a streetcar line out to it. They would sell land for factories adjacent to the new streetcar line.
Especially for city dwellers the streetcar was an an easy and practical way to commute to the new factory. Eventually there would be demand for the land around the factory.
The Great Depression ended land speculation/development. The other cash source was electricity. Streetcars use a lot of electricity with the highest demand during the morning and afternoon commutes. These new factories could use streetcar electricity during the work day. I knew that President Roosevelt banned this but I didn't know when.
As for GM and buses, yes GM was promoting them but the streetcar system was pretty much a "white elephant" by then.