In this photo we’re looking north up Broadway from 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles. Normally, it wouldn’t be so deserted, but this photo was taken during a transit strike in 1946. Public transit was the main way Angelenos traveled to downtown so without the streetcars, businesses would have really suffered. But we do get an uninterrupted view of the lights of Broadway in the mid 1940s, including the Lowe’s State Theatre that was, according to the neon, open all night. I wonder if that was a holdover from the war years when theaters showed movies 24 hours a day to accommodate war factory shift workers.
The Loew’s marquee is still there, even though the theater is no longer in operation. This image is from April 2019:
In this photo we’re looking north up Broadway from 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles. Normally, it wouldn’t be so deserted, but this photo was taken during a transit strike in 1946. Public transit was the main way Angelenos traveled to downtown so without the streetcars, businesses would have really suffered. But we do get an uninterrupted view of the lights of Broadway in the mid 1940s, including the Lowe’s State Theatre that was, according to the neon, open all night. I wonder if that was a holdover from the war years when theaters showed movies 24 hours a day to accommodate war factory shift workers.
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