Built in 1928, the William Penn Hotel at 2208 W 8th St, Los Angeles always catches my eye whenever I drive past it. To me, it looks like it’s been plucked out of some centuries-old East Coast city and plopped down into the middle of LA. You don’t see many buildings like this anymore, and certainly not in that part of town, a block south of MacArthur Park, which makes it all the more striking when you come across it. Back in 1929, when this photo was taken, the area would have been a rather desirable place to be, not too far from crowded downtown but with lots of space and fresh air, so I can see why someone built a hotel there in the late 1920s. But with the Depression just around the corner, I wonder how the hotel fared in its early days.
Here’s another (undated) photo that Carrie B. sent me. She found it among her late father’s belongings.
The William Penn is still around. It’s now an apartment block called The Sinclair. This is how it looked in May 2022.
This aerial photo from 1964 reminds us of something that used to be ubiquitous, but is now quite rare: the drive-in theater. The one we’re looking at here in this 1964 aerial shot is the Victory Drive-in Theatre at 13037 Victory Blvd in North Hollywood. Its opening night showed “My Dream Is Yours” and “Ma & Pa Kettle” on May 25, 1949, when land in the San Fernando Valley was cheap enough to make a drive-in theater financially feasible. This one had room for 650 cars, and had a 28-year run, closing on February 13, 1977, showing “Bound For Glory” and “Aloha, Bobby and Rose.”
I don’t have a lot of information on this coffee shop, but I find this image so evocative of 1950s LA coffee shops that, for me, at least , it’s enough. This color night photo is of Pick’s coffee shop at 11925 Santa Monica Blvd in West Los Angeles. With is neon-lit zigzagging roofline, I suspect it qualifies as being in the Googie style, but I’m not 100% sure. At the very least it’s Googie-adjacent. Either way, it looks very inviting for a late-night feast of coffee and pancakes, doesn’t it?
During the week of August 31 to September 7, 1955, Los Angeles experienced its worst-ever heatwave, reaching a record peak of 110° on September 1st. And then on September 13 (69 years ago today!), this spell of hot weather and a low inversion layer led to the highest recorded ozone level in Los Angeles history. And you know what ozone is the major ingredient of? Smog! So here we have some nutty Angeleno who thought he’d take walk through the worst smog Los Angeles had ever seen. He was on the corner of First and Olive Streets in downtown Los Angeles. The smog was so thick that we can barely see the outline of LA City Hall.
I don’t normally post photos taken as recently as the 1980s, but apart from a couple of tell-tale details, this one could be from pretty much any time in the past hundred years, not specifically 1983. This is the front entrance of the train station that the Southern Pacific Railroad built at 400 W Cerritos Ave, Glendale, California, in 1924. How nice it must have been to live in a time and place where even structures as utilitarian as train stations were designed and built to please the eye.
In this photo (which has a very postcard-y feel to it) we’re looking northwest across the Hollywood Freeway. That overpass on the left is Hollywood Blvd and if we look much farther into the background, we can see the Hollywood Sign. These days, you’d have to be driving along that stretch of the Hollywood Freeway (aka “The 101”) on Sunday mornings to encounter traffic as light as this, which for a 21st century Angeleno, looks like heaven. The pale green vehicle in the center appears to be a 1955/56 Chrysler, so let’s called this image circa mid-1950s. The Hollywood Freeway was completed in 1952, so if this photo is anything to go by, it was still heaven to drive on 3 or 4 years later.
I don’t know when George Berkel opened his music store at 446 S. Broadway in downtown LA, but this photo was taken on July 1, 1914. So George, quite sensibly, decided to feature his most popular product in the biggest, brightest sign. Pianolas were upright pianos that used a paper roll to play the keyboard automatically. Before the advent of record players, they were the most popular way of making music in your home. Who needs to mess around with all those tedious piano lessons when you can get the pianola to do it for you? The first few decades of the 20th century were the pianola’s peak years, so I’d think that being located on Broadway, Mr. Berkel did a roaring trade. He certainly made sure night-strollers knew where he was.
We’re looking east along Hollywood Blvd from Highland Ave on what looks to be a dark and inky night. I love how the Hollywood Theatre is lit up like a beacon tempting moviegoers. They probably didn’t have to try very hard with an A-list double feature pairing “Love Affair” with “Three Musketeers.” Both those movies came out in the first half of 1939, so I’m calling this “circa 1939.”
The building in the background of this circa 1887 photo was the Arcadia, a luxury-for-the-time oceanfront hotel in Santa Monica (open from 1886 to 1909) on Ocean Ave between Colorado Ave and what is now known as Pico Blvd. In the foreground we can see the “Thompson Switchback Gravity Railroad” which looks like an early version of a rollercoaster, but was how hotel guests were transported from the Southern Pacific railway station that was 500 feet from the hotel. As I understand it, using gravity to propel the carriages meant the railroad didn’t need to use coal. And it would have given guests a bit of a thrill, too.
Oh, how I enjoy a color photo of yesteryear Hollywood. And that goes double if it’s got a Pacific Electric Red Car punctuating the scene with vivid red. We’re photo looking east along Hollywood Blvd from around El Cerrito Place, where the street car is heading west. In particular, I love seeing the sign for the Gotham Deli, which had opened in 1923 and I believe closed sometime in the 1950s. I don’t have a date on this one, but I’m guessing from the cars that it’s circa mid 1950s.