Post-War Postcard

Time for another episode of vintage Covina photo sleuthing! Got ahold of another uncommon postcard of Citrus Avenue recently for which I hoped to pinpoint a date.

Post-war view north on Citrus Avenue from its intersection with Center Street.
Click on image for a larger view.

It's unused, so there's no postmark to give us a ballpark estimate. Just eyeballing the cars, though, I could tell it was from the Forties, but when, exactly?

Unfortunately, the image is a little overexposed, so the scene isn't as clear as I'd like. We're also a little too far away from the businesses north of Badillo to see much detail in the signage.

So what's left in terms of clues?

The most visible one is that Sawyer's Furniture (left, below) is in their new location just north of the Covina Woman's Club, so that means the date for the photo can be no earlier than February, 1946.¹

Second thing I notice is the parking meters. I knew they were first installed after WWII, but not precisely when, so I went to the newspaper archive to find out. Turns out the meters were put in in May, 1947,² so again we have another "no earlier than" date to go on.

One thing that's always been useful dating shots of Citrus is what was playing at the Covina Theatre at the time, but glancing at the photo, I couldn't quite make out the marquee, which struck me as odd. So I did a 1200dpi scan of the card, and was surprised to see that there was, indeed, no marquee there, only what appeared to be a framework for one. Was this photo maybe taken when a new marquee was being built?

Turns out, yes, that's exactly what was going on: the whole theater was undergoing a remodel from late November, 1947–early February, 1948.

Covina Argus-Citizen, November 14, 1947.

Another detail I noticed in the high-res scan was what looks like a bunch of wires strung across the main business section of Citrus.

Those I guessed were the supports for Covina's annual Christmas street decorations, which are either in the process of being put up or taken down. In my time, I remember those decorations appeared immediately after Thanksgiving Day, and were taken down a week after New Years.

So now we have two possible time frames. The newspaper article says the remodel was to begin November 16.³ Thanksgiving, 1947, was on the 27th. So our first time frame for when the photo was taken would be November 16-26th. The other would be the first full work week after New Years, which in 1948 would have been January 5-9.

No way to know for certain, of course, but my hunch is that the marquee was not one of the very first things they did in the remodel, so I'm reasonably confident the first time frame can be excluded and the photo was actually taken sometime during the week of January 5-9, 1948. Best guess, anyway!

The theater remodel was finished in the second week of February, 1948.⁴ (The new marquee can be seen much better and in color here.)

References:

¹ Covina Argus-Citizen, February 22, 1946, p.1.
² Covina Argus-Citizen, May 30, 1947, p.13.
³ Covina Argus-Citizen, November 14, 1947, p.1.
⁴ Covina Argus-Citizen, February 13, 1948, p.1.