Throughout all my photographic wanderings around the history of Los Angeles, this is the first time I realized there was a mortuary right on Sunset Boulevard. It opened in the mid-1920s at 8814 Sunset Blvd (next door to the building that houses Book Soup today) as the O’Donnell Mortuary. In 1936, it became part of the Utter-McKinley Mortuaries chain, and probably did a thriving business because by the 30s and 40s, Mickey Cohen and company ran most of organized crime in LA, and a lot of it was centered on the Sunset Strip. How convenient it must have been to send the bodies down the street to the local mortuary.