In this photo from 1957, we’re looking north up Vine St from Selma Ave. On the left we can see what was then known as the Huntington Hartford Theatre (now the Montalban), the Hollywood Plaza Hotel (now a retirement home), and The Broadway department store on the Hollywood and Vine corner (now loft condos). If the people in this shot could see how built up that section of Vine St is nowadays, they’d probably keel over.
Mary Mallory says: “The Jacob Stern family, who had lived in the Robert Northam house where the Hollywood Plaza is now, developed the hotel in the late 1920s as they saw how commercial that intersection had become. They sold off the land for The Broadway, etc. too.”
Roughly the same view in December 2020:
That old Broadway had wooden escalators.