Visiting Santa Barbara in 1897

It's been a long time since I lived in Santa Barbara, but I have fond memories of it. The last time I was there, a few years ago, I was surprised at how much came back to me, and how easy it was to find my way around. And since I'm a history adventurer nowadays at my computer, I decided to visit Santa Barbara on the Library of Congress site, looking at old newspapers. I found an article from the Los Angeles Herald in 1897. Let's time-travel.

The drawing is from the newspaper, and I tried my best to match it up using Google Earth. The angle isn't exactly right, but you can see the ocean to the left, and the mesa at upper right. The artist who drew this wasn't flying, he was simply standing on a ridge that nowadays has a road called Alameda Padre Sierra, which locals just call APS. The modern view is much higher, but it was best I could do.

I don't see many buildings in the drawing, but of course they were there. Most of them fell down during the 1925 earthquake, and that's why Santa Barbara looks the way it does, it was pretty much all rebuilt after the quake.


I haven't read the whole article yet, but it seems like the phrase "equable climate" says it all. It was a good place to get away to in the summer and winter, and of course spring and fall are beautiful there, too. It's always beautiful in Santa Barbara. I'm not kidding, the most amazing climate in the world. I would consider living there again, if I had the money, and if weren't for the earthquakes (I hate earthquakes, although I never felt any when I lived there).

Hang on, I'll do some math here. Looks like California had only been part of the United States for 48 years when this article was written. Before that, of course, it had belonged to Mexico, and before that, to Spain. So you do see a lot of Spanish influence. I learned a little Spanish in high school, and it helped me make some sense of the street names, although the locals pronounce them in an anglicized way, such as "GOO-terrace" for Gutierrez. I was laughed at quite a lot until I learned the correct way to mispronounce the names of the streets. My guess is that no one would have laughed at me in 1897.

And that's Santa Barbara. Other than a freeway being built through it, it really hasn't changed much, and hopefully it never will. Words cannot express how beautiful it is, and neither can photos or drawings. Go there.

Here's a link to the article if you want to read more
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/curiv_nicasio_ver01/data/sn85042461/00280769745/1897080801/0468.pdf

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more