From the always-interesting Shorpy website comes this color-popping shot of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royale parked directly in front of the entrance to Disneyland. Disney’s theme park opened in 1955 so it was still fairly new when this shot was taken. Long gone are the days when you could just drive up to the entrance and drop people off. (Oh boy, wouldn’t it be great if we could still do that?) In fact, could we ever? This photo looks like “movie parking” – when Doris Day needs to go to Bergdorf’s, bingo, she finds a parking spot right out front – so maybe this was an advertising photo for Dodge. What do you think?
** UPDATE ** – This Kodachrome photo was taken by Maurice Terrell.
Tammy B says: “Definitely a drop-off zone! I went here as a little girl in the 60’s and we’d get dropped off here or sometimes park and either take the trams in or walk if our parking spot was closer. I loved it when we parked in the Tinkerbell or Minnie Mouse areas. In the Indiana Jones queue you can see an Eeyore sign as a homage to the fact the queue sits on what was his parking area.”
Maggie CK says: “My MIL’s family built and owned the Alamo Motel just south of Disneyland. They would come inside the park on most weekdays to do their banking at the bank on Main Street (visible in the background, to the right of the train station). Having grown up a few blocks away, I remember these days fondly, and I definitely can recall the entrance looking like that. You can still drop people off at a plaza east of the entrance, but they’ll definitely have a bit longer walk. My kids grew up walking in from the parking lot out front (where DCA is now). Even as toddlers, we rarely used a stroller for them. They slept very well at night.”
In the late 1880s, the Glendale Hotel opened on Broadway in Glendale. It was built in the popular late-Victorian style – very elaborate with lots of levels and planes and detailing. I don’t have a date on this one, but there appears to be very little landscaping around the hotel, so I’m guessing it was taken in the 1890s. That horse-driven carriage seems to be from that era, too. It doesn’t look too comfortable so wherever those people were going I hope it wasn’t too far. In 1922 the hotel became the Glendale Sanitarium.
When the Beverly Wilshire Hotel opened at 9500 Wilshire Blvd in Beverly Hills on January 14, 1928, it was known as the “Beverly Wilshire Apartment Hotel” and operated as an apartment building not a hotel as we conceived hotels today. Back then, Beverly Hills’ population was less than 18,000 (it’s currently around 32,000) and nearby Rodeo Dr. was decades away from being the famous commercial strip it is today. Built on the site of the former Beverly Hills Speedway, it opened just a year and a half before the stock market crash, so it’s lucky to have survived the Great Depression (movie money may have had something to do with that.) This image was taken in 1937, by which time it had weathered the worst of the worst and was on its way to becoming the landmark hotel is today. And yes, it’s often referred to as “the Pretty Woman hotel” as this is where Richard Gere was living when he picked up Julia Roberts.
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I’m not sure what I like most about this photo of the RCA Victor building at 1510 Vine St in Hollywood, just north of Sunset Blvd. Is it sight of little Nipper? Or is it the circa 1952 Buick stopped in traffic out front? Or is it (what looks to be like) the miniature plane inside a glass bottle which appears to be a promo for the “Truth or Consequences” radio program that ran from 1940 to 1957?
In this glorious color photo, we’re looking north up Vine St in Hollywood. The cross street ahead of us is Sunset Blvd where the NBC studios were still standing on the northeast corner. The photo was taken in 1962, by which time NBC had converted their radio studios to television. A couple of years later those studios would be gone altogether. At the extreme right side of the frame, we can see the sign for Stan’s drive-in restaurant. I don’t know when it closed, but I suspect it didn’t last much longer, either.
No matter how many photos I see of downtown Los Angeles in the 1890s, I will always be amazed at how spread out and low-key and quiet it was before the discovery of oil and the development of the movies. In this photo, we’re looking northwest from Temple St between Broadway and Spring St in 1892. There are still many homes in the area, but commercial buildings like the one in the foreground have started to dominate. The large building in the right-hand background with the tower was LA’s second city hall and would be replaced by the now-iconic Los Angeles City Hall in 1928.
We tend to forget (or at least I do) that in the early days of radio (the 1920s and 30s) there were all sorts of radio stations set up by all sorts of businesses and organizations that you’d never get would have or want or need a radio station. This one is a good example. It was the studio for radio LMPC, which stood for the McMillan Petroleum Company, although why a company like that would need or want a radio station is beyond me. And apparently they agreed because in 1933, it was sold to the Beverly Hills Broadcasting Corporation, which made sense because this building stood at 9631 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills. But even *they* couldn’t make a go of it until June of 1934 when it was sold to a Detroit businessman who took on some well-known partners: Bing Crosby, (orchestra leader) Paul Whiteman, Amos and Andy, and silent film comedian, Harold Lloyd, which is when they dubbed their radio station “KMPC – the Station of the Stars.”
This place must have been a boon to Angelenos seeking a fun-in-the-sun vacation at the turn of the century, or Easterners looking to escape the harsh winters. By the 1890s, getting to California wasn’t so difficult with transcontinental railways now a standard service. But getting those last 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles to Redondo Beach was made easier by the Redondo Railway Company which deposited holidaymakers at the sprawling 225-room Hotel Redondo. The hotel offered all sorts of amenities, including a ballroom, bowling alley, golf course, as well as wood-floored tents for the less well-heeled. The hotel opened to the public on May 1, 1890, so I’m guessing this photo was taken in the 1890s. After some management changes, Prohibition proved to be the final blow to its heyday, and the hotel closed in 1920.
Yesterday (August 20, 2023) Los Angeles was subjected to a double-whammy: Hurricane Hilary, which brought rain and flooding, in the midst of which we also had a 5.1 earthquake. So I figured today I’d post freakish weather-related photograph: snow in LA! According to one list I saw, LA has had snow 19 times since 1882, but only twice this century. In this photo, we’re looking at “Gloria” the statue of a woman that adorned the start of the driveway that led from Wilshire Blvd to the Ambassador Hotel. From the looks of it, LA had quite a decent snowfall that day, and from the cars on Wilshire in the background was in the 1940s. If that’s right, this photo was taken in 1942, 1947, or 1949.