Robert Frank on Ocean Boulevard

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The late afternoon light, palm trees, their shadows and a covered car are elements so classic to LA and Southern California that Robert Frank’s “Covered car – Long Beach, California” could have been taken anywhere from San Diego to Santa Barbara.

I’ve been living in Long Beach for a handful of years and the photograph lives in my head rent free, in a good way, considering how much the prints can hammer for. I was out doing errands recently, stuck behind a delivery truck on Ximeno Ave, saw a covered car next to a palm tree for the 100th time and decided to find out where this was. The actual location is not obvious, Long Beach isn’t a small city, without a street sign or house number, you can spend a lot of hours on Google maps.

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In 1955 Frank was awarded a Guggenheim grant to document America through a road trip. He drove 10,000 miles, took 767 rolls off film, made 1,000 work prints from those selections. And edited those down to the 83 photographs of “The Americans,” which became one of most influential photo books of the 20th century. (A signed, first edition can sell for $10-25,000.)

In the final edit of “The Americans,” Frank pairs the covered car in a devastating way with a covered body (“Car accident—U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona”) on the following page. The sequence is a classic example of the art of photography in book form.  

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work print for “Covered car – Long Beach, California” with related contact sheet number in red pencil

A big 2009 exhibit about “The Americans” displayed many of Frank’s work prints, contact sheets, along with prints for every page in “The Americans.” The exhaustively researched catalog included each contact sheet for those 83 final prints. The Frank archive is at the National Gallery of Art and they have over 600 contact sheets from the project online. In the contact sheets, you can see frames Frank shot before and after the frame that ended up in the book. The Long Beach visit occurs in contact sheets 537-540.

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10 Frames from Contact Sheet 537 related to Ocean Blvd, Long Beach

Contact sheet 537 has the sequence with “Covered Car – Long Beach.” It combines two different rolls of film, ten frames are from Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach (made famous by LBC’s 2023 poet laureate, Lana del Rey). The other twenty frames are from a roll of film shot at a recreation center or school auditorium, of a marionette show for children.

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Robert Frank, frame 5 on contact sheet 537, facing south, 13th Place, Long Beach

Seven of the ten frames feature the covered car. Frame 1 is missing, possibly a throwaway while loading film. In the first five frames, Frank shoots the covered car at the end of the street, you can tell he’s interested in the scene. He could have parked his car and got out, or shot these frames from his car window. The photos show a dead end, leading to … white sky. Living here, I immediately had an idea of where this might be. 

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On the west side of Long Beach along the bluff overlooking the beach, there’s a series of half block streets named “place” that jut south from Ocean Boulevard. Each dead-ends at the bluff, allowing beach access and real estate with water views. Some still have the “end” signs you can see in Frank’s frames. So, which one was it? In 68 years the bluff has experienced a lot of development, large towers built, original Craftsman-era homes torn down.

The details help identify the location: low slung garages (frames 2-6), the space carved out in the sidewalk for the palms, the glimpse of a two story building in the frame (frame 7), with a vent in a particular location. When you overexpose the MOMA jpeg, you can see a number: 20. 

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(left) 13th Place, Long Beach 1956, (right) December, 2024

Frank’s covered car was located at 20 13th Place. The garages there still have the number 20, though some have been rebuilt. The two-story building, built 1917, still has the vent in the same location. Interestingly, after taking five shots of the dead end, he only takes one frame of the covered car framed by the palm trees.

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The next frames were taken further down Ocean Boulevard, about a half mile. A man, woman and child walk towards Frank, while on the right side of the frame the beach is visible. A woman is on a bench facing the beach.

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Robert Frank contact sheet 537: Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach, (left) facing east, (right) facing north

He stops and takes a portrait of her. She’s near the corner of Ocean and Lindero - a house and bus stop are visible in the background, that (infrequently arriving) bus stop is still in that location. The angle of the shadows from the palms indicates very late afternoon.

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(left): Woman seated on bench–Los Angeles [sic], 1956, (right) Ocean & Lindero, 2024

In between “Covered Car” and “Woman seated on a Bench” is the Municipal Art Center (now called Long Beach Museum of Art). If Frank had stopped there, the 1955 Long Beach Juried Art Show was up, a show of mostly local painters. The museum was housed in a distinctive historic mansion on the bluff that would have been impossible for Frank to miss on foot or even if he had driven the half mile.

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Robert Frank contact sheet 537: the marionette show

The remaining question about contact sheet 537 is: where is the location of the marionette show? There’s a park one block north of Ocean Boulevard that had a recreation center with a stage. It’s possible Frank skipped the art museum for the rec center.

Besides identifying the location of the covered car, the other question I had: What was Robert Frank doing in Long Beach? He didn’t just drive down to look for cars and palm trees. The other contact sheets (538-540) and work prints answer this. In a follow-up post we’ll look at the rest of Frank’s day in Long Beach and give it an exact date.

Related to the topic of locating places and people in “The Americans”:

• “Robert Frank Goes to Bunker Hill” - a 2021 investigation to find the location of Frank’s photo of a building on Bunker Hill, downtown Los Angeles. Deliciously deep dive that involves building permits for the neon sign in the photo and a tour of Bunker Hill via the contact sheet.
• In Search of the Places in Robert Frank’s “The Americans” - Nicholas Dawidoff, 2022, locates a handful of photos
• “Elevators, Americans, Missed Connections” at the SFMOMA version of the 2009 exhibit, a woman (the elevator operator) recognized herself in one of the photos!
• Alamo Square, San Francisco - my 2008 photo of the spot Frank’s portrait of the couple was taken (he said this was his favorite photo in the book). He was probably using a wider 28 or 35mm lens to take the portrait.