A previously unseen (by me, at least) photo of the Garden of Allah Hotel is always cause of excitement around these here parts. (My thanks to Jerry for sending me this one.) It’s odd that there is neither a car nor a person in this photo. Where was everybody? Maybe it was 7am Sunday morning? At any rate, without a car in sight, it can be hard to pin down a year. All I have to go on is that big tree in front of the main building. In this photo from circa late 1920s – https://wp.me/p5XK3w-2WU – it barely reaches the roof and doesn’t hide the building. So that plus 15 to 20 years of grown, makes me think this photo is mid-to-late 1940s. If anybody has another theory or observation, I’d love to hear from you.

I had someone on Fiverr color it for me to give us a better idea of how this view would have looked to the photographer, who, I assume, was probably standing on the nearby Chateau Marmont Hotel:

Apparently there are a couple of ways to get photos without people or cars: one is to take multiple photos and combine them together, though this would have been much more difficult pre-Photoshop. The other is to take a really long exposure (usually with a neutral density filter) so the moving objects just blur out to be non-noticeable.