1 post tagged “dorothea lange”
I stumbled across this photo while looking at the Calisphere site today at work. Take a look. It's a famous photo by Dorothea Lange, but found it interesting that it was taken about 7 blocks away from where I work (a little over 65 years ago in 1941, and you can see a Google map of the location if you wish). This seems to be a slightly different cropping of the same thing.
It expresses the feeling pretty well. The person who put this sign up was probably incredulous about Japan bombing the country and about being told he had to leave everything behind. (According to the text he was of Japanese descent and went to the University of California for college). Something like this would never happen in the US, right? People have rights and things. . .
What if someone bombed your country but they happened to be the same race as you? And then pretty soon you had to leave all your possessions behind (probably without compensation) and were shipped off to some internment camp for 3.5 or 4 years because you happened to be of the wrong descent? It happened during WWII to people of Japanese decent in the US. Though WWII was a war that seemed to be for a good reason (and not just to ensure future profitability and prosperity like many modern wars) there were still moments of ugliness and stupidity. I don't know how that works into "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for these people. Of course slavery and other institutions didn't help out much in this regard for other races in American history. (Though other countries have had race/ethnicity problems and still have them to some degree, also.)
Anyway, I was curious about the building and my BART train was late and wasn't coming for a while so I went a station in the wrong direction and went and looked at the corner. There are buildings on 3 sides of that intersection and a parking garage on the other corner. One of the three buildings was the Oakland Tribune Tower which has been around since 1920 or earlier and I doubt it would've had a supermarket on the ground floor like is shown in the photo. None of them had the cool-looking columns with the art-deco-ish lines and nothing really looked exactly like the photo. So I'm assuming that building was replaced by the parking garage or another building. Or maybe the structure was overhauled and new facade was put on. Too bad, too, since the building in that photo looks cooler than anything that currently exists on the ground floor at that corner.
I suppose it was my own little 7-block pilgrimage brought on by picturing this situation, wondering what this was like and curiosity to know if that building still existed.
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Here are some photos from the Google Streeview of the corner. I can't tell which corner this store used to be on. The notation said 13th and Franklin, so this is the right corner. Was it where a parking garage is now? Where the blocky building with the big windows is? Was the store in the bottom of the Oakland Tribune Tower and they've just changed the facade? Or is the Golden Lotus now in the same spot?
