Anaheim Landing from Above

I’ve spent the past week organizing and labeling the image files of Seal Beach aerial photographs that I’ve accumulated over the past 25 years. This chore requires my reviewing every aerial photo scan I made or used in the early 2000s for the newsletter of the now shamefully defunct Seal Beach Historical & Cultural Society, various historical slide shows that I’ve given over the past two decades, and the thirteen years I’ve been doing this blog.

In the process of formatting and reformatting these images for these various projects, I’ve amassed a monstrous number of duplicate image files in different sizes and file formats. All of these have to be pruned from the collection and care must be taken not to dump any unique images, so this has been a slow and methodical process.

The ultimate long-term goal is to have an organized, dated, and annotated archive of the highest quality version of all the Seal Beach historical image in my collection (not just the aerial shots) preserved and available for future generations and researchers in Photoshop, TIFF, PNG, and JPEG formats.

The short term goal is to have all these Seal Beach aerial photographs prepared and consistently labeled for use for the new blog posts I’ll started writing next month to stockpile for the relaunch of fresh daily This Date in Seal Beach History posts on January 1st, 2025. I’ve been researching different dates the past six months, and it’s now time to add a writing schedule to the research so that I’m not rushing to write a new post every single day in 2025.

This is the point where, once again, I must switch into pledge drive mode. My bare minimum costs for the rest of 2023 for research subscriptions and photo editing software comes to $200 — more if I can afford to add a genealogy subscription for research and/or a Zoom subscription for monthly online Seal Beach history slide shows.

If you’ve enjoy the work I’ve done here in the past, attended one of the slideshow I’ve given for Founders Day celebrations or the Woman’s Club, connected with me on social media with questions about Seal Beach history, and you want to see more, please consider making a donation of five dollar or more to help defray the cost of my doing more Seal Beach history research and posts. Your name will be featured on a list of 2023 sponsors here on the blog (unless you request it be kept private.)

Donations can be made securely with most major credit cards directly through PayPal. Just click on paypal.me/MichaelDobkins to go to PayPal. Thank you.

(To make up for my crass solicitation for funds for this project, here’s an examination of one the aerial photos I worked on this past week.)

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The photo below is an early aerial photographs of Seal Beach taken from an airplane banking over the Crawford Airport that once stood at the State Highway (now Pacific Coast Highway) and Bay Boulevard (now Seal Beach Boulevard.) Along the top of the photograph, you can see a bit of a pre-Navy Anaheim Bay with scores of cottages and homes along the shore. In the top right you can see the Pacific Electric bridge that the P.E. red cars used to cross Anaheim Bay from Electric Avenue on their way down the coast to Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, and Balboa. Just past that, you can barely see a second separate bridge that made the same crossing for auto traffic.

One might assume that this is one of the earliest aerial photographs of Seal Beach. The original photo which was in the historical society’s archive had a simple unsourced notation on the back of “1920s” on the back in pencil. Personally, I’ve never found any Seal Beach aerial photos that can be definitively dated to the teens of the Twentieth Century, so this being one of the earliest aerial shots of the city is an easy assumption to make.

Ah, but if you look closer, you can spot the original location of the Glide ‘er Inn at the corner of Bay Boulevard and Coast Highway.

(It may be my imagination, but I see the faint shape of an airplane atop at derrick-like structure on the corner. Could this be the original spot where the icon Glide ‘er Inn airplane was set up before being moved to the top of the restaurant building?)

Now, as anyone with a scan of a late 1970s/early 1980s Glide ‘er Inn menu on their hard drive can tell you, the restaurant was launched in 1930. So this photo couldn’t have been taken in the twenties.

This means the photo was most likely taken in the thirties, and definitely before the Navy took over Anaheim Landing in 1944. So we can date this photo in a range from 1930 to 1944.

Other details in the photo stand out and are worth a closer look.

It’s hard to make out details in such a dark and murky resolution, but the airport appears to be busy. There are three airplanes on the ground outside the hangar, plus the one in the air used to take this photograph. I count five cars parked along a railing that runs parallel to Bay Boulevard and then turns to meet hangar. It’s hard to tell what the dark patch that the hangar stands upon — it could be asphalt or some sort of grass. In the upper left you can see curved grooves made by wheels where airplane turned on the dirt runway before take-offs and after landings.

The hangar in this photo is not the same on seen in later photos of the airport. The Seal Beach Airport shut down in 1933, and this hangar was removed and reinstalled in Long Beach. When the airport reopened (possibly as late as 1937!), a new hangar was built closer to Bay Boulevard, and the dirt runway was paved as seen in this earlier post from 2010.

Based on the presence of the Glide ‘er Inn and the first airport hangar, we can now narrow the date range for this photo from 1930 to 1933. I don’t think it’ll be possible to pinpoint the year or date any more accurately than that.

On the right edge of the photo, you can see a teeny speck of a car driving down Bay Boulevard where, in less than forty years, second-stage Apollo Saturn rockets will be trucked to Anaheim Bay for sea transport to Mississippi for testing and then onward to Cape Kennedy to launch Apollo missions to the moon. It’s possible that the pilots at the airport and the driver of the car in this vintage photograph lived to see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in 1969 on color televisions.

Finally, let’s pause to look a little closer at two building along the bay and next to the Pacific Electric bridge.

You might recognize these two buildings from a different angle in famous Seal Beach panorama shot from 1917.

Or you might not. A WordPress blog is probably not the best way to present details in a panorama photo. Let’s take a closer look at the righthand side of the photo.

Note the Anaheim Landing Bowling Alleys building behind the bathing beauties. This is the same building on the right highlighted in the oval from 1930s photo blow-up three images up. Just past it, you can see the top of the roof of the second building.

And here’s a pre-1913 photo featuring the front of the two buildings facing Anaheim Bay from before Bay City was rebranded as Seal Beach.

We’re looking at the Anaheim Landing Bowling Alleys and the Anaheim Landing Pavilion where the locals and tourists went to have a good time before the roller coaster and the Joy Zone amusement attractions were built in 1916 along the beachfront.

The Bay City name was a reference to the convenient access to Anaheim Bay on the east and Alamitos Bay on the west. Part of the competitive advantage the Bayside Land Company was pushing to visitors and potential real estate buyers was that Bay City offered not one, but two bays to fulfill their aquatic recreational needs! (Take that, all you crummy single bay towns!)

As charming as that notion was, the name was too generic to make much of a promotional impression and only lasted from 1904 until 1913 when the area was rebranded as the more romantic “Seal Beach.” The Seal Beach name became official when the city incorporated in 1915.

I think this demonstrates how invaluable these aerial photos are, not just for capturing a single moment in time, but also for how they connect with other vintage images to create a wide historical landscape of Seal Beach’s past.

Or… that all could just be a fancy and pretentious way of saying, “Mikey like looking at old photos.” I’ll let you decide.

— Michael Dobkins