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. The part of the city called "Sonora Town" was an old adobe village north of the Plaza and Church of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. It was Los Angeles' first Mexican quarters, or barrio. The area was named for the numerous miners and families who came from Sonora, Mexico, and may have still been around in the 1930s. Now it is Los Angeles' Chinatown District. Steam rises from a washtub on a ceramic fire pit stuffed with wood in the foreground, while one woman fills a washbasin of soapy water with a hose, and a second woman pulls something out of the water to wash. More washtubs and barrels surround them. Two boys watch in the background, one carrying a stack of newspapers. This apartment was located across the street from the adobe known as the second Casa Santa Cruz (or the Santa Cruz Chapman Adobe) in the 600 block of north Broadway.
Type
image
Format
1 photographic print :b&w ;11 x 15 cm. Photographic prints
Families--California--Los Angeles Children--California--Los Angeles Wash tubs--California--Los Angeles Cleaning Courtyards--California--Los Angeles Dwellings--California--Los Angeles Apartments--California--Los Angeles Lost architecture--California--Los Angeles Sonora Town (Los Angeles, Calif.) Schultheis Collection photographs
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