Archiving Googie
A lecture by Jane
Newell, Historical Archivist/Librarian, City of Anaheim
Presented
at the Orange County Historical Society's annual conference, 1999,
California State University, Fullerton
In building a collection of googie
images and records, I've drawn upon these two young men (Daniel Paul and
Chris Jepsen) plus another person (John English) who are now known
commonly at the library as "The Googie Guys."
We identified sites that are still existing in Anaheim and we've gone out and photographed them.
I started with black and white shots for archival purposes. I didn't really understand Googie when we first began this project. They showed me that color was a very important part of googie architecture. So we went back out and took color slides. Then we wanted to capture the look of the neon lights at night, so we did that as well.
We also went to the police department for the photos used in sequencing of streetlights. Some of the buildings show up in the background and sometimes provide us with our only record of a site. We wanted to preserve these images.
The project really started with an attempt to preserve some of the [roadside] signs, but that did not happen. So, we're trying to document them. Because of the archival collection at the library, I've also been able to go back and find images in some of our Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau publications. In this way, I've documented sites which are long gone. For instance, there was a Walker's Coffee Shop, an excellent example of the style, which doesn't exist anymore.
We've also found photographic advertisements showing buildings and signs. So, we have at least some documentation that these sites existed and we know where they were located. We may never get an actual photograph of some sites, but we're still looking and asking.
As a result of an article about this project, published in May 1999 and picked up by the wire services, some former Anaheim residents called me from Pittsburgh, PA with information. They sent me some photographs, which were taken for a school project back in 1986. A lot of those sites had long since disappeared. As a result, our collection grew to include sites we had previously found no documentation for. So, in a way, we are documenting Googie retroactively.
If you know of anyone who has photographs of something that might be googie, please have them get in touch with me. (We're defining "googie" fairly broadly for the purposes of this project.) They don't have to give up their photos -- I'd be more than happy to copy them and return the originals. We just want to have a record of these sites.
As we do research, we never know what we're going to find. We have some photos from the 1960s taken from the Anaheim Bulletin.
I created some forms to help us document the history of each site. Daniel Paul and John English from the L.A. Conservancy are actually doing the part regarding what's significant about each building and what makes it googie. They're the experts on architecture and I'm trying to fill in the historical information.
Right now, our focus is on Anaheim because that's the project that was dropped in my lap. Initially, I said that if someone else wanted to document Googie, I would make the materials available at the library. The next thing I knew, I was documenting. No funding and no staffing, which is why I rely so heavily on my volunteers.
Like Chris' website, we would like to include Googie from all of Orange County and maybe even Los Angeles County at some point in time. But we need somebody out there taking the photos or slides and collecting the information from the city records. If you're interested, please let me know. As Chris and Daniel said, Googie is disappearing quickly and we need to document it now.
(Editor's note: Time constraints forced Jane to ad-lib an abbreviated version of her planned lecture. This transcript is a testament to her excellent extemporaneous speaking abilities. This transcript was made from an audio tape of poor quality. Any errors in content are my fault, not hers.)
Photo from O.C. Register