Long Beach Chronicles by Tim Grobaty

Author:Tim Grobaty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Even before the advent of the automobile, parking was a problem in Long Beach. People venturing into town, or even just camping on the beach, parked their horses and wagons on the strand in 1884.

CARS HIT THE STREETS

Long Beach wasn’t even old enough in 1902 to apply for a driver’s license when E.R. Brown’s car wheezed down the road, scattering children and making horses bolt in wide-eyed terror.

Brown, a Pine Avenue jeweler and early bandleader, was one of the first car owners in the fourteen-year-old village. It took him and his son two years to build the steam-powered vehicle, and it was the talk of the town as amazed strollers watched the Brown boys speed up and down Pine Avenue—at top speeds of fifteen miles per hour.

By year’s end, the Long Beach automobile fleet would grow to three. Harry Hamilton, a real estate broker, was the next to move into the future with this ultimate toy. He bought a White Steamer in 1902. Another local man, William Varney, who would later go into the car repair business, also bought a car—a Stanhope Steamer—that year.

Naturally, it wasn’t long before everyone had to have one. The early car owners were the big shots in town, and most of them purchased the hugely successful Ford automobiles. Early in 1904, a record of thirty-one car sales was made by the first Ford Agency in Long Beach. Bank owners and civic leaders snatched the cars up: C.J. Walker, P.E. Hatch, Charles Heartwell and C.J. Daugherty.

By 1907, only five years after the first trio of steamers had rattled down the Long Beach boulevards, a count showed that there were between four and five hundred automobiles in Long Beach.

And there were six garages caring for the hundreds of Long Beach automobiles, which, according to one chronicler of the era, “every day or less have something the matter with them.”

With the advent of the auto came laws restricting their speed in town. The first speed limits set twenty miles per hour as the fastest anyone was allowed to travel anywhere. In the so-called congested district, between Maine and Alamitos Avenues and south of Seventh Street, the limit was fifteen milers per hour and ten miles per hour when “passing a school, approaching an intersection and going around a corner or curve.”

As always, laws had to be passed to prevent the actions of dense drivers. Enough people left their cars unattended on railroad tracks that a law had to be passed barring that.

A “visible or audible” signal was required when making a turn. The signal could be made by holding out a hand or by “one blast of the horn.”

It was also unlawful to drive between one hour after sunset and one hour before sunrise without a lamp showing white light toward the front and red toward the rear.

Inevitably, fender benders came to Long Beach. For the most part, the scattered drivers managed to avoid one another, but with increased traffic around Christmastime in 1905, P.E. Hatch, then cashier of the National Bank of Long Beach, was involved in an accident with Jotham Bixby Jr.

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