Here we have a circa 1917 view of one of L.A.’s most complicated intersections, where Main, Spring, and 9th Streets converge in downtown Los Angeles. I don’t know how these people managed to negotiate this 5-way intersection without traffic lights, but apparently they figured it out. It’s also probably why there is an elevated police traffic box – that’s the booth in the center of the photo. But what did he do when he got up there? Yell at reckless drivers?
Here’s that same intersection in December 2020. It looks a lot calmer, doesn’t it?
In this photo from 1957, we’re looking north up Vine St from Selma Ave. On the left we can see what was then known as the Huntington Hartford Theatre (now the Montalban), the Hollywood Plaza Hotel (now a retirement home), and The Broadway department store on the Hollywood and Vine corner (now loft condos). If the people in this shot could see how built up that section of Vine St is nowadays, they’d probably keel over.
One of the few buildings in L.A. that has barely changed from the day it opened in 1956 is the circular Capital Records building on Vine Street just north of Hollywood Blvd. This photo, taken in 1958, shows us a rare glimpse of the building with virtually all its lights on. There’s a sign in the foreground showing 25 cents for parking one block north of Hollywood and Vine. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
One of the stops on my (very busy) time travel machine trip will be to Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip. Hollywood in its golden-era heyday was liberally sprinkled nightclubs. From 1940 to 1957, one of the most popular with the studio crowd was Ciro’s at 8433 Sunset Blvd on the Sunset Strip. It’s not that hard to find photos of the club’s exterior, but interior photos are harder to come by, mainly because the famous faces that filled it preferred to not be photographed during their off hours. So this photo is a rare chance to see what Ciro’s stage looked like. The room was easy to reconfigure as needed but who wants to join me at that four-top right in front?
In this gently bucolic scene, we’re looking west from the corner of Hill and 5th Streets, downtown Los Angeles, in 1883. That leafy green park is now Pershing Square. Back then the locals called it Los Angeles Park before renaming 6th Street Park in 1886, then changing it to Central Park in the early 1890s, which it stayed until Angelenos changed it once again in 1918 to Pershing Square. Unlike today, the park looks like it offered the locals a quiet escape from the bustle of a rapidly growing town. In the 1880s, the transcontinental railway arrived and Los Angeles turned into a boom town.
Until I came across this photo, I never knew that some models of the Pacific Electric Red Cars could be coupled together. And even then, it would be only in places with intersections wide enough to allow them to negotiate around the corner. This is the intersection of Colorado Blvd (part of Route 66) and Lake Ave in Pasadena. 
In this circa mid 1940s aerial photo of the Hollywoodland sign, we can see that its deterioration was starting to set in. The sign went up in 1923, so by this stage it was over 20 years old. Decay was bound to set in sooner or later—the “H” was practically gone altogether. We Angelenos are thankful that in 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce worked with the City of L.A.’s Parks Department to repair the sign. The “LAND” part came down and the remaining 9 letters got a full makeover. (I also love how this photo gives us a peak into the San Fernando Valley and shows us how there were still swathes of empty land.)
In the mid 1930s, radio station KFAC started broadcasting classical music from a building at 3457 Wilshire Blvd that once housed the showroom for Auburn and Cord automobiles. This rather spectacular photo showing how the radio towers were lit up at night. They must have been visible for miles around in low-rise 1930s Los Angeles. (The tower to the left belongs to the Wilshire Christian Church – known today as Oasis Church.)
Some bright spark in MGM’s publicity department decided that a great way to garner attention for the movie “Hollywood Revue of 1929” (the studio’s second feature-length musical, and one of their earliest sound films) was to create a huge billboard and get 16 chorines to climb up and pose on it. What could go wrong? So they built the billboard pictured here in a parking lot on the northeast corner of Wilshire Blvd and Shatto Place. As a feat of engineering, it’s actually quite impressive, but I wouldn’t want to be one of those girls risking life and limb to promote a movie. (A version of this event takes place in the first book in my Hollywood’s Garden of Allah series, “
