I’m doing a little series for Patch’s Beverly Hills-centric site on historic sites in the Beverly Hills area! First up is the Beverly Hills Women’s Club, and within the next few months I’ll be visiting Greystone Mansion and Park, the Virginia Robinson Gardens, and the Saban Theatre, as well as telling tales of treasures lost to decay and development.
Read, comment, enjoy! Also, I’m always available to write/blog/Tweet about history, preservation, and your grandma’s lineage!
On this day (October 8, just to clarify) in 1860*, the first telegraph line connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles was officially open for business.
*Edited to include the year! I was so excited about the picture/the baseball game (the San Francisco Giants are about to send a telegram announcing their loss) that I just plum forgot!
“Nestled beside where Lincoln’s killers were executed, the placement of the stadium may have unwittingly exposed the Nationals to the conspirators’ vengeful ghosts. That the apparitions of Booth and his gang would aim their ghoulish enmity on modern baseball may seem strange, but it makes sense…
Fans of Chicago/World’s Expositions/the Flatiron Building! KCET (Los Angeles’ PBS affiliate) is airing Make No Little Plans, a documentary about the life and work of Daniel Burnham, chief architect of the 1893 World’s Fair, New York’s Flatiron, and Washington, D.C.’s Union Station (and so on and so forth), in approximately 5 minutes! Check local listings, and consider this the first of your weekly History on TV info posts!
As advertising becomes art and art becomes advertising, it’s only fitting that our little Peggy runs into a downtown artiste eager to tell her all about Andy Warhol and real art.
He painted soup cans and celebrity and ruled over the In Crowd with an iron fist, but in the mid-60s the Pittsburgh born Warhol was creator, owner, and social director of the Factory, a raw performance, art, and film space at fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street. Warhol used the Factory as a base for creating art, much of it for outrageous profit—silkscreened prints designed by Warhol and executed by assistants for upwards of $20,000 each.
House band The Velvet Underground regularly entertained slumming celebrities and bohemian hangers-on, and Warhol girls like Edie Sedgwick were always around to appear in films like Haircut no. 1, Screen Tests, and Blow Job (it plays out pretty much like you think it does) that were made and screened at the Factory.
Would that Peggy’s haughty new nude-photographer acquaintance remember that Warhol, the artist he so wishes to emulate, worked in advertising in the 1950s!
YouTube! An advertising graveyard littered with cigarette commercials—all that hard work, and soon Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is going to have to look elsewhere for it’s billings.
The Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 implemented advertising restrictions, and yes, the likes of Lee Garner Jr.’s attorneys did draft the restrictions themselves, but it officially rendered the days of doctors and athletes hawing nicotine (for pay, at least) over. It also brought about the warning label we’ve all come to know and love—you know, the one that reminds us that no one who smokes will have Betty Draper’s complexion for long?
Within two years, cigarette ads would be banned from television entirely, and Mr. Garner’s Christmases would never be the same.
