L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Other cities were based on geographical virtues—a splendid port (San Francisco, say, or New York), an important river (St. Louis), a magnificent lake (Chicago). But nothing about the arid basin of Los Angeles (other than its mild weather) suggested the site of a great metropolis. So the men who built Los Angeles decided to advertise a different kind of virtue: moral and racial purity. Los Angeles, a settlement founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, was reenvisioned as “the white spot of America,” a place where native-born, white Protestants could enjoy “the magic of outdoors inviting always… trees in blossom throughout the year, flowers in bloom all the time” as well as “mystery, romance, charm, splendor,” all safe among others of their kind. It was an image relentlessly promoted by men like Harry Chandler, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times and one of Southern California’s most important real estate developers, and it worked. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco to become the largest city in the west. There was just one problem with this picture of Anglo-Saxon virtue. It wasn’t true. Far from being a paragon of virtue, by the early 1920s, Los Angeles had become a Shangri-la of vice.

The historic center of the city’s underworld was Chinatown, “narrow, dirty, vile-smelling, [and] thoroughly picturesque,” an area just east of the historic plaza that had been the center of town back in Los Angeles’s pueblo days. Its opium dens introduced Angelenos to the seductions of the poppy flower; its fan tan and mah-jongg parlors catered to the area’s still-sizable Chinese population; its fourteen-odd lotteries attracted gamblers of every color and nationality from across the city. Just north of Chinatown was the predominantly Mexican part of the city known as Sonoratown. There women in negligees lolled casually in the open windows of “disorderly houses,” advertising their availability. According to the Los Angeles Record, a hundred known disorderly houses operated in the general vicinity of downtown. The citywide brothel count was 355—and growing fast. (By the mid-1920s, reformers would count 615 brothels.) That was just the high-end prostitution. Streetwalkers offered themselves on Main Street, a thriving but seedy neighborhood of taxi dance halls (so named because a dancing partner could be hired like a taxi for a short period of time), burlesque shows, and “blind pigs” (where a shot of whiskey went for ten cents a gulp). Farther south, down on Central Avenue in the thirty-block area between Fourth Street and Slauson Avenue, an even more tempting scene was taking shape, one offering narcotics, craps, color-blind sex for sale, and a strange new syncopated sound called jazz.

The city also boasted a steamy sex circuit. Upscale “ninety-six clubs”—some just blocks away from City Hall—offered “queers,” “fairies,” or otherwise straight men a place for a discreet “flutter” or “twentieth century” (read: oral) sex in a luxurious setting. The less well-to-do worked a circuit of downtown speakeasies, bars, public baths, and parks along Main and Hill Streets—Maxwell’s, Harold’s, the Crown Jewel, the Waldorf. For those who could not afford “to spend a quarter or fifty cents for a dime’s worth of beer,” there were the parks. The poet Hart Crane, visiting Los Angeles in 1927, would marvel at what he saw in the lush groves of bamboo and banana trees in downtown’s Pershing Square. “The number of faggots cruising around here is legion,” he wrote friends back East. “Here are little fairies who can quote Rimbaud before they are eighteen.” The city itself was horrid, Crane wrote, but the sex was divine.

Then there was gambling. Amid the banks and stock brokerages of Spring Street, bootlegger Milton “Farmer” Page presided over a string of gambling clubs, the most imposing of which, the El Dorado, occupied the entire top floor of a downtown office building. There on a typical evening five to six hundred people would gather to play craps, poker, blackjack, roulette, and other games of skill and chance. At the corner of Spring and W. Third Streets, bookies waited to take the public’s wagers on the Mexican racing tracks or on Pacific Coast League baseball games. Nearby saloons provided upstairs rooms for poker and faro, sometimes even roulette, while younger and less prosperous customers stayed in the alleys to try their luck with the dice in one of the ubiquitous games of craps. Bingo games sucked away the earnings of bored housewives; card rooms distracted their husbands. “Bunco” men (as con men were then known) preyed on the unwitting, selling naive newcomers nonexistent stocks, gold mines, oil fields, and real estate. “Boulevard sheiks” prowled for and preyed on the growing number of working girls making their homes in Los Angeles. Among this teeming underworld’s victims was a seventeen-year-old emigrant from Deadwood, South Dakota, William H. Parker III.