It’s not hard to find photos of the original Brown Derby restaurant located on Wilshire Boulevard—you’ll find a number of them posted here—but it’s more rare to find a wider photo giving us an idea of the immediate area. Unfortunately, I don’t have date for this photo, but we can see the Brown Derby in the middle. On the other side of the corner is the Zephyr Room restaurant attached to the Chapman Park Hotel Bungalows, which was where the female athletes were housed for the 1932 LA Olympics. Across the street, on the right hand side, we can see the impressive towers at the front of the Ambassador Hotel. The tall building behind the Derby is the Gaylord Apartment building which is the only building in this photo that’s still standing.

By the 1940s, though, we can see it was a lot more built up: