$15.00 CAD
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Photo postcard with early aerial view of Santa Anita Park Racetrack. View over stables, parking lot and oval racetrack. Taken by famed California aerial photographer Robert Spence.
Printed on photo negative ‘SANTA ANITA PARK’. In LR corner, photographer ‘Spence H-1307’
The photographic paper used AZO dates it to 1924-1949.
Unused.
Pencil mark on back.
(Red text is an electronic watermark that is not physically part of the photo for sale)
During the roaring twenties, Los Angeles bigshots hired Robert Earl Spence to take aerial photographs of their homes, paying $10 a picture. Spence himself did not fly; he hired a pilot and airplane. He would lean out from the open cockpit, focusing his 46-pound camera on his target at an angle instead of shooting straight down. Rather than simply showing roof and treetops, his oblique shots captured the ornamental details of a home and its surroundings all the way to the horizon.
For five decades, Spence leaned out over California and the west, taking pictures that would chronicle the growth of suburbs and freeways, along with harbors, dams, aircraft plants, and skyscrapers. He captured the filming of Cecil B. DeMille’s Ben Hur, a 1928 football game at the Rose Bowl, the construction of Dodger Stadium, Disneyland as an island in a sea of orange groves in the mid-1950s, and countless marinas sprouting along the coast.
“An inveterate aerial historian” is how John Franklin, former curator of the photographs at the University of California at Los Angeles, once described Spence. “When he flew out to take a picture for a client, he would shoot on the way out and back."
www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/oldies-and-odditieshe-shot-california-58820211/#iXu3gxLhgPDbDeCS.99
Santa Anita Park is a Thoroughbred racetrack in Arcadia, California, United States. It offers some of the prominent horse racing events in the United States during the winter and in spring. With its backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains, it is considered by many the world's most beautiful race track.
In 1933, California legalized parimutuel wagering and several investor groups worked to open racetracks. In the San Francisco area, a group headed by Dr. Charles H "Doc" Strub was having trouble locating a site. In the Los Angeles area, a group headed by movie producer Hal Roach was in need of further funds. These two groups combined and the newly formed Los Angeles Turf Club opened the present day track on Christmas Day in 1934, making it the first formally-established racetrack in California.
WIKIPEDIA
