A Southern Pacific train chugs up Alameda St at 2nd St, which puts it a few blocks south of where Union Station will later be built on the edge of downtown LA. There is a flagman on the left helping to control traffic. I’m guessing those workmen on the left are laying down a third track along Alameda. Between the trains, the regular traffic, and the construction, this shot was probably taken amid a deafening din.
The California Hardware Company building on the left is still there. This image is from June 2022.
These days, the Los Angeles cityscape is filled with Rite Aid and CVS pharmacies who all look the same and feel interchangeable. It seems a shame that we no longer have individual pharmacies with their own personalities. This lovely shot is of the Lakeside Pharmacy at 10100 Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake, on the southwest corner at Mariota Ave. This shot is circa 1975, but the style of architecture suggests the building dates from much earlier.
If this circa late 1950s photo is anything to go by, Los Angeles freeways that resemble a parking lot aren’t a recent development. I’m not 100% certain, but I think we’re looking at the Pasadena Freeway near Elysian Park heading into downtown LA. If other photos I’ve seen of 1950s LA freeways are anything to go by, this urban nightmare scenario was relatively rare, but it does presage what will become a daily reality for many LA commuters.
Every now and then I come across a vintage photo of Los Angeles and find it hard to get my mind around the fact that it’s the same city. In this one, we’re looking north on Spring St from First St, downtown Los Angeles, circa late 1890s. Everybody’s dressed so formally, with only streetcars, bicycles, and horse-drawn carriages in sight. I’d love a chance to peek inside Hamburger’s department store on the left so see what goods they had for sale. I’m picturing lots of parasols, corsets, stiff collars, and riding boots.
Opening in 1923, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was also the home of the Summer Games of the 10th Olympiad, which took place between July 30 and August 14, 1932. This soaring bird’s-eye view was taken on August 7, when the Coliseum was at full capacity for the last day of track and field.
I do enjoy coming across a vivid Kodachrome photo, especially when it was taken at an iconic LA location. In this one, we’re looking north up Vine St across Hollywood Blvd toward the Capitol Records building, back when the American Airlines ticket office filled the northeast corner, and DuPars restaurant was just up the street. I have it on good authority that the newest car in this image is the salmon-colored 1957 Lincoln Premiere, so I’m pegging this photo at circa late 1950s.
There were so many cars in the parking lot of the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena for the annual Tournament of Roses parade on January 1st, 1926 that it took very wide panoramic shot to fit them all in. And this was a time when there wasn’t a great variety in automobiles, so they pretty much all looked the same, which I imagine made finding your car after the parade a bit of a challenge.
Before Los Angeles’ famous streetcar network became electrified, the city ran cable-driven streetcars much like the ones up in San Francisco. In this 1893 photo, we seeing one of LA’s first cable cars as it runs northward up Broadway at 2nd Street. Interestingly, it looks like the whole thing is open to the elements—too bad if it’s raining! That building on the left with the pyramid roof was LA’s second city hall, which stood at 226 Broadway between 2nd and 3rd Streets until the current one was built in the mid 1920s.
In the aerial shot we’re looking at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio lot in Culver City on August 27, 1939. That year is generally considered Hollywood’s greatest year, having put out a huge number of classic movies, and so this photo shows what the most successful studio looked like during its most successful year. That intersection at the bottom is where Washington Blvd meets Overland Ave and those billboards on the corner advertised upcoming MGM pictures. At the top of the photo we can see the then-still-new white Thalberg administration building, which opened in 1938, and named after the MGM producer, Irving Thalberg, who had died in 1936 (and who is the subject of my novel, “
I don’t know whose idea it was for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway to run its tracks through the center of Pasadena, but it even with that long gate (on the right) it looks like an accident waiting to happen as the Chief service, outbound to Chicago, trundles across Colorado Blvd, squeezed between two buildings. On the left we can see an elevated flagman shanty armed with a warning bell—let’s hope it was enough to warn distracted motorists and pedestrians.
