‘Baseball in Long Beach’ full of wonderfully hazy memories

There’s a scrapbookishness to Baseball in Long Beach, the recently released retrospective of this city’s contributions to America’s grandest old game. Author Tom Meigs has assembled a lot of mostly old photographs of once-young ballplayers—faces both familiar and forgotten—who either claimed their fame in Long Beach or [...]

1917
Cleopatra, starring the silent era’s original sex siren, Theda Bara, is filmed in Dominguez Slough. The film is a sensation but, by the 1930s, is banned because of its overt sexuality. It will eventually spawn other films that challenge sexual mores, groundbreaking films such as Porky’s, Porky’s 2 and Porky’s 16: Mystery on Gonorrhea Ridge.
1950ish [...]

The Historical Society of Long Beach’s new Bixby Knolls  home helps legitimize the area’s Midcentury Modern roots

JULIE BARTOLOTTO by RUSS ROCA
By the time you arrive at the new home of the Historical Society of Long Beach you’ve probably already experienced the most important message of its inaugural exhibit: The trip up to Bixby Knolls—which is [...]

Our plans for a better, richer, beachier, artyer, hover monkier city

While we realize that this week’s bankruptcy-court auction of the Queen Mary lease begins a whole new chapter in the life of the once-proud luxury liner turned whored-out bag ’o bolts, we beg to remind everybody that not all of Long Beach’s tourism problems have [...]

Everything Long Beach desires to be, it once was
So did you get our little joke? Our proposals in this issue for a “new” Long Beach—of public space, amusement areas, cultural centers, and public transit—were all based on Long Beach’s past. It was during our discussions about our story on the possible death of Acres of [...]

A tremendously brief pictoral history of surfing in Long Beach
On the same sand where couples now take long, romantic walks holding their noses, a thriving beach community once pitched a sea of umbrellas for a day of fun in the sun. Long Beach in the early 1900s was a haven for what you now have [...]

A determined group of dreamers envisions a day when waves will return to Long Beach. It could happen sooner than you think

PHOTO courtesy HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF LONG BEACH
Members of the Long Beach chapter of the Surfrider Foundation understand how weird that name sounds. They like to joke that Long Beach is one of just two [...]