It’s hard to know what day of the week this view looking east along First St toward the LA Times building in downtown LA was taken, but in the early 1940s, it was probably often this sedate and not that hard to find street parking. The lanes painted on First St look very fresh, don’t they? What also catches my eye is the billboard on the right for the Hollywood Bowl. I wonder who was playing there that month.
This is how that view currently looks today:
And this is a February 2021 view of the LA Times building. It no longer houses the newspaper, but at least nobody has torn it down (yet.)
I believe from the opposite view you can still get a nice look at the building but the unsympathetic modern addition destroys the building’s presence from this perspective. The addition was done by noted architect William Pereira (famed for the Transamerica building in San Francisco amongst other great work) in the early 1970s but in my opinion it consumed rather than complimented Kaufman’s original art deco plan. Sometimes putting two great architects together is like having two cooks in the kitchen.