Most aerial photos of Los Angeles I find look out across LA or Hollywood or sometimes the San Fernando Valley. So it’s nice to find one that looks directly down. This is from 1938, and those three main north-south streets are Cahuenga Blvd, Vine St, and Gower St. The east-west street at the top of the photo is Santa Monica Blvd, which means that park at the far right is the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (known back then as Hollywood Memorial Park.) And directly to the south of that, we can see the soundstages of Paramount Studios. And on the left are a few open fields. There aren’t many of them left in Hollywood anymore.
This satellite image from 2022 covers much the same area.
I always wondered where the name came from. Per Wikipedia:
“A farmer from Hawaii named John T. Gower brought in the area’s first harvesting equipment and built his home near this street before his death in 1880, a time when Hollywood was an independent city. Upon Hollywood’s annexation by the city of Los Angeles in 1910, this street was named in his honor.”
It also figures prominently in Warren Zevon’s great “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” – although, to fit the meter of the lyric, he calls it Gower Avenue.
Oddly enough, everything below Santa Monica was Colegrove (or adjacent developments) and not within the legal boundaries of the incorporated City of Hollywood. Under Los Angeles control this is the “Hollywood District” so they could essentially drop in names that actually have nothing to do with original Hollywood. Was Gower farm above or below this line? And isn’t this how they got the name for Capra’s own Mr. Gower and his drugstore in “It’s a Wonderful Life”?