ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

LARGER THAN LIFE
Myth: A group of little people, flush with cash from their roles in the 1939 movie classic The Wizard of Oz, built great big little houses on La Linda Drive. Their neighborhood? Midget Town.

Reality: Just not true, though this is the city’s most enduring of at least three separate midget myths.
The real question is, what does that say of a city once flush with sideshows like the late Illustrated Man (the Reverend Leroy Minugh) that it still needs to believe that somewhere among us, little people live? Are we missing something? Do we love too much?

It’s not as though Long Beach was—or is—any more welcoming to the disabled or the unusual than any other city.

Toledo Walk—the one-block, pedestrian-only street where Minugh finished his days on Earth—pales in comparison to any street in Gibsonton, Florida, a sideshow wintering town which was zoned to allow circus performers to keep elephants in their front yards.

Long Beach? We once zoned our streets to permit apartment buildings on narrow, 50-foot-wide lots, sandwiched between original California bungalows. We tore down the Pike Amusement Park. Frances Belle O’Connor—whose sole movie role was playing “Armless Girl” in Tod Browning’s 1932 cult classic Freaks—died here in 1982, in obscurity.

Midget Town? No. We just don’t have it in us.

The legend speaks alluringly of tiny houses on a circular street, secluded behind giant gates—but the Press-Telegram’s Tim Grobaty debunked that a while back. Turns out, the street was originally a carriage path that ran around the George Bixby mansion. (Bixby’s dad, Jotham Bixby, ran Rancho Los Cerritos, one of the city’s two historic ranchos.)

George’s widow Amelia sold off the property when he died in 1920, and it was subdivided into small lots. And there you go: houses on small lots along a narrow street. Of course it looks undersized.

The closest Long Beach really gets to The Wizard of Oz is 19th Street and Cherry Avenue in Signal Hill—former site of The Foothill Club, a honky-tonk where Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson once played.

The story there is that the owner, Bonnie Price, ran a restaurant in Hollywood during the late 1930s—and basically did craft services on The Wizard of Oz. Later, of course, Price moved down here and ran a slew of places including The Foothill, The Hillside, and a bar called the Algiers. They’re all gone now. // TD

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Tags: bill hunter, charlie's angels, igor's alley, jfk curse, midget town, nu pike mummy, son of sam, the black dahlia, the traffic circle