Here’s a view of downtown LA’s Broadway that we don’t often see. The photographer would have been leaning out of the window of around the 10th floor of the United Artists building at 933 S. Broadway, and pointed his camera north. On the ground floor was the United Artists Theatre, where stars like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin often held their premieres. (It opened on December 26, 1927 with a silent Pickford movie called “ My Best Girl.” From this high angle, we can see how the roads were painted for the streetcars. That narrow strip near the center of the image was where passengers waited.
The building and theater are still around, and are now the Ace Hotel and Ace Theater. This image is from September 2021.
No doubt that it was not the photographer’s intent to capture it, but any image with a Rio Grande Oil Company gasoline truck seems to be fairly rare. A controlled subsidiary of others, it was merged into Richfield and went out of existence by the late ’30’s. The brand name may have continued to exist as property of the conglomerate, later ARCO, but the name faded over time.