Back in the 1950s, when this aerial photo was taken, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was still a force to be reckoned with in the film industry, but its peak was behind it. Starting 1947, its competitors, Paramount, Warner and 20th Century-Fox, started to out-gross it. But it still had a vast backlot that that could stand in for pretty much any location in any era. Known as backlot No. 2 and totaling 37 acres, it stood on Overland Avenue across from the main lot, between Washington and Culver Blvds. A fire destroyed a portion of the sets in 1967 and the rest were demolished in 1974. Oh boy, how I would have loved to have had a chance to wander around them just once!
Kirk H. says: “That building in the lower right hand corner is the M-G-M Cartoon Department, home of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Tom & Jerry, Tex Avery, and Screwy Squirrel, among others.”
These days Backlot No. 2 is occupied by housing, but at least there’s a nod to what used to be there, with names like Astaire Ave, Garland Dr., and Skelton Circle. This image is from December 2023.
After the St. Francis Dam failed on March 12, 1928 near Santa Clarita, California, the authorities in charge of the Mulholland Dam became worried. The Bureau of Water Works and Supply had built both dams along similar lines, and if the Mulholland Dam it were to fail too, the result would be catastrophic because it keeps the Hollywood Reservoir from flooding Hollywood. In 1933-34, part of their solution to shore up the structure was to dump 330,000 cubic yards on the dam’s downstream face, which had the added benefit of hiding the dam from view. Out of sight, out of mind!
Every now and then, a photo comes along that make me want to a running into the screen: this is one such photo. This vibrant color photo is of Ben Frank’s restaurant at 8585 Sunset Blvd in the middle of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. It opened around 1962 in the very LA-centric architectural style known as Googie, which featured wall and roofs at kooky angles. Also very Googie is that space-age needle holding onto the neon sign. It’s job was to catch the eye of drivers cruising along the Strip—and I’m sure it did its job very well.
On October 26, 1929, “The Taming of the Shrew” starring Hollywood’s original power couple – Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks – opened at the United Artists Theatre, 929 S. Broadway in downtown LA. It was the first sound version of the play on film and only Pickford’s second talkie, which seems to me like an awfully ambitious project to take on when everyone was still trying to figure out how to make talking pictures. Maybe that’s why the running time was only around 65 minutes – they cut out half the play! But as we can see from this photo, the entrance to the theater looked pretty spectacular at night.
The Brown Derby restaurant at 1628 Vine St being one of the most popular joints in Hollywood, it’s rare to find a photo of it without cars parked out front or people passing by or waiting under the awning. So I do wonder how this photographer managed to pull off the impossible. But it does give us a clear view of the building that compassed not only the restaurant, but the Record Room to the south and the 24-hour coffee shop to the north. Without and vehicles or fashions to narrow down the date of this photo, I’m going to guess sometime in the 1950s because I believe that’s when the coffee shop replaced the part of the building that had once held the Eddie Cantor Gift Shop (yes, that Eddie Cantor) in the 1930s and a liquor store in the 1940s.
In this shot, we’re seeing the premiere of 1946’s highest grossing motion picture, “The Best Years of Our Lives.” It took place at the Palace Theatre at 630 S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles on December 25, 1946. I wouldn’t have thought Christmas Day would have been the best time for producer Sam Goldwyn to hold a premiere, but it didn’t hamper his movie’s success. It went on to become the highest grossing picture of 1946 and won most of the Academy Awards it was nominated for.
If the caption on this photo hadn’t said we’re looking west along Hollywood Blvd from Wilcox Ave, I would never have known. Who’d have thought Hollywood Blvd had ever been filled with two-story Victorian homes featuring huge, wraparound balconies and broad, lush front lawns. What a delight it must have been to take a walk around a neighborhood as tranquil as this one. And what a shock the people who lived this houses would get if they saw what the boulevard looked like these days. This photo was taken in 1903, the same year that the Hollywood Hotel opened half a dozen blocks west.
I have to tip my hat to this pair of intrepid motorists. The vehicle they’ve parked outside the headquarters of the Automobile Club of Southern California is a circa 1911 Kelsey Motorette. I don’t know why these guys thought a three-wheeled automobile was a reliable way to get wherever they were headed from the corner of at 8th and Olive Streets in downtown Los Angeles, but the guy behind the wheel—actually it’s just a steering stick—seems fairly confident that he and his buddy is going to get there. This photo was taken in 1912. I can’t imagine there were many sealed roads, so let’s join their crowd of admirers and wish them all the luck in the world.
Honestly, I don’t know what the heck was going on in front of the Gables Beach Club in Santa Monica when this photo was taken some time in the late 1920s. What I can tell is that the Gables Beach Club was the first of its kind built in Santa Monica. It opened in 1926 two blocks north of the California Incline (
The steeply graded road connecting the top of the Santa Monica cliffs to the beach is known as the California Incline. I’m used to it being an always-busy, two-lane roadway with a separated path for pedestrians and cyclists. So it’s a little jarring to see it as just a dirt path leading down to a railway line. The Southern Pacific Railroad operated along those tracks between the Los Angeles and the aptly named Long Wharf, which we can see jutting out into the water. The other major difference is how narrow the beach was back then. These days it’s probably twice a wide.
