Title supplied by cataloger.; Herman J. Schultheis was born in Aachen, Germany in 1900, and immigrated to the United States in the mid-1920s after obtaining a Ph.D. in mechanical and electrical engineering. He married Ethel Wisloh in 1936, and the pair moved to Los Angeles the following year. He worked in the film industry from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, most notably on the animated features Fantasia and Pinocchio. His detailed notebook, documenting the special effects for Fantasia, is the subject of a 14-minute short-subject included on the film's DVD. In 1949, he started employment with Librascope as a patent engineer. Schultheis was an avid amateur photographer who traveled the world with his cameras. It was on one of these photographic exhibitions in 1955 that he disappeared in the jungles of Guatemala. His remains were discovered 18 months later. The digitized portion of this collection represents the images Schultheis took of Los Angeles and its surrounding communities after he relocated to the area in 1937. Originally an alluvial river that ran freely across a flood plain, the Los Angeles River's 51-mile path was unstable and unpredictable with the mouth of the river moving frequently from one place to the other. In March of 1938 there was a great storm that flooded one third of the city of Los Angeles killing 115 people. Later that year, due to public outcry, the Army Corps of Engineers began the 20 year project to create the permanent concrete channel which still contains most of the of riverbed today.; Dayton Avenue (later N. Figueroa Street) has had three different bridges. The Riverside Drive-Dayton Avenue Bridge first built in 1903 was replaced with a concrete one completed in 1928. In 1939, after the Elysian Park landslide and heavy floods in 1938, the Army Corps of Engineers built a replacement bridge with steel trussing, known as the Riverside Drive Bridge (Riverside-Figueroa Bridge) that was demolished in 2011. Southern Pacific's Dayton Avenue railroad bridge across the Los Angeles River is being reconstructed. Something like to scaffolding is rising below the level of the missing Riverside Drive-Dayton Avenue Bridge in the background, possibly the beginning of the reconstruction effort.
Type
Image
Format
1 photographic print :b&w ;11 x 15 cm. Photographic prints
Flood damage--California--Los Angeles Bridge failures--California--Los Angeles Railroad bridges--California--Los Angeles Bridges--California--Los Angeles--Design and construction Bridges--California--Los Angeles--Maintenance and repair Construction equipment--California--Los Angeles Rivers--California, Southern Riverside Drive-Dayton Avenue Bridge (Los Angeles, Calif.) Los Angeles River (Calif.) Schultheis Collection photographs
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