As Seen by The New York Times

As Seen by The New York Times

Photos by Bob Martin for The New York Times; Animation by Grant Gold/The New York Times.

This portfolio is the first publication from Past Tense , an archival storytelling project of The New York Times. As we digitize some six million photo prints in our files, dating back more than 100 years, we are using those images to bring the events and characters of the past to life in the present. To enhance these photographs’ value as artifacts and research tools, we are presenting these images with some of the “metadata” from the reverse side of each print.

In California, there were deserts and mountains, vast farmlands and a thousand miles of publicly owned beach. There were people from everywhere and opportunity that only a country like America could offer the working man or woman, and their children, too. From San Francisco to San Diego, from Hollywood to the world, California offered succor, health and, oddly, anonymity. If you didn’t like the view, you moved. If the boss gave you grief, you dropped him.

The sun shone mercilessly, but no one asked for mercy.

Everybody was rich because anything was possible.

Men outside the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown in 1970. Nikki Arai for The New York Times

Architect Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, in Palm Springs, Calif., in 1947. Julius Shulman/J. Paul Getty Trust

John F. Kennedy surrounded by fans on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., in 1962. Bill Beebe/Los Angeles Times

When World War II was over, people asked my father’s African-American relatives where they could go after seeing Paris. “Where?” they replied. “I’m goin’ to California where it’s mild enough that you can sleep on the ground outside, wake up in the morning and eat fruit right off the tree.”

Jim Crow had seen his day. It was time to move on and move up; to immigrate within your own country. Southern California was growing by leaps and bounds, and any able-bodied woman or man was welcome to work a job, or two or three. You could buy property, send your kids to school and go out for a drive to nowhere at all, do anything — as long as you stayed within certain parameters, like Watts or the Barrio.

Seasonal farmworkers, part of the “bracero” program, taking a break to eat in 1963. United Press International

Traffic streaming across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on opening day, in 1936. The New York Times

Children attending Japanese school in Los Angeles in 1935. The New York Times

“Elkie,” my Jewish cousin Lily said to my mother, Ella Slatkin, on the telephone in 1945, “in California, it’s never cold and the beaches go on forever. Come out to visit me and I bet you never go back to the Bronx.”

My mother came bleary-eyed and tired to the breakfast table that first morning. Lily asked if it was the time change from New York that made her so tired.

“No, Lily,” my mother moaned. “It’s all that racket.”

Join us for a reception and conversation between celebrated author Walter Moseley and Hrishikesh Hirway, co-host and co-founder of the West Wing Weekly podcast. They will be discussing The New York Times’s new section Past Tense, and its first issue, California: A State of Change. Go behind the scenes with Times journalists, grab a drink and mingle with our guests and fellow subscribers. Buy tickets here. Date: Wednesday, December 5 Time: Reception: 7–8 p.m. Pacific (Local time); Program: 8 p.m. Pacific (Local time) Location: Japanese American National Museum Address: Tateuchi Democracy Forum, 100 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles

“What racket? There’s no traffic or parties or sirens in the night like New York.”

“But those birds in the tree outside my window. They made so much noise that I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

My mother stayed. Her relatives populated the Westside while my father’s people colonized the southeast.

In Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles, every house, it seemed, had a swimming pool. In Watts, we had a park with a pool and that was enough; maybe even better because at the public pool you also had all your friends.

A group of teenagers hanging out in a Modesto, Calif., parking lot in 1974. Teresa Zabala/The New York Times

A Bay Area housing development near the San Andreas Fault, in 1972. Gary Settle/The New York Times

Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower cooking at Chez Panisse in 1975. Sandy Solmon for The New York Times

On some Saturdays my father would say, “Come on, Walter, let’s catch us some crawdaddies.” And he’d drive a little ways into the hills where we’d set up our nets at a stream or pond and catch a few dozen crayfish that we’d eat over white rice that night.

Later, in the ’60s, my friends and I would drive out to Joshua Tree National Park, well before the great migration to the desert out there. At night, back then, there were more stars in the sky than any abacus could count. Stars so bright they exuded mute colors breathing life into a universe science couldn’t imagine.

A young Steve Jobs showing off the Macintosh computer in 1985. Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Girls in traditional Korean dress gathered outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1984. Bill Nation for The New York Times

Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, in his office in 1977. United Press International

The sense of space and time and nature bristling all around made you feel free. The work force was composed of Koreans, Japanese, Mexicans, African-Americans, Italians, Irish and Jews. To work together is to know each other. My mother and father worked in the same school. Soon after they met, my mother told her husband that she realized she didn’t love him.

Cesar Chavez and Coretta Scott King in 1973. Librado Romero/The New York Times

A beach scene near San Diego in 1949. Edward Sievers

Ronald and Nancy Reagan on the campaign trail in Paso Robles, Calif., in 1976. Teresa Zabala/The New York Times

Southern California, then and now, was more than a place, more than a picture of beauty. There were also beatings and riots, Southern bigotry that also moved west and white ownership of everything from the department store to the words they lent out in the library. And there was another thing. When the Southern Negro finally felt a modicum of freedom after centuries of racial domination, there arose long festering anger mixed in with that sunlight, blood tinting the drifts of seaweed.

The Golden Gate Bridge counted its suicides while real estate developers made sure that certain people were kept out of prime neighborhoods.

Part of the picture is hard jazz on Central Avenue and black women so beautiful that Hollywood had to feel the shame of its ways.

Dorothy Dandridge during the filming of “Carmen Jones” in 1954. Bob Willoughby/Globe Photos

A Trans World Airlines flight over San Francisco Bay in 1939. The New York Times

Architect Paul Revere Williams at work with a draftsman in his office in the 1950s. Paul R. Williams collection

I still spend a lot of time in California, but I don’t live in the salad days of these photographs. My fictional detective, Easy Rawlins, still does, however. The other day a fragment of an Easy story came to mind. In this story he came to a house in the hills above my mother’s people’s neighborhood. Following him on those crooked streets I found myself remembering a house I once visited. The pine-and-glass domicile was nestled in the hills where a stream ran under the wall and across the floor of the split-level home. They built the house right over that stream because California was just so beautiful they didn’t want to keep any of it out.

Images of mid-20th-century California bring back the dreams that outshone even the beauty of the place. A beauty so great that it hurts even today when my father and Lily and my mother are all gone. Their dreams still pulsate in the hills and forests and seas.

The International Surf Festival at Hermosa Beach, Calif., in 1965. Bob Martin for The New York Times

Activist, writer and professor Angela Davis in 1971. Associated Press