I do love a Kodachrome color photo that pops with color. But I especially love it if it’s looking north up Vine St from the Brown Derby restaurant to the Hollywood Blvd intersection. Those two blue cars turning into the 25-cents-per-hour parking lot immediately north of the Brown Derby (whose gold-yellow sign we can see at the far right) are a 1953 Cadillac convertible and a 1955 Mercury station wagon, so I’m dating this photo circa mid-1950s. The Capitol Records building north of this intersection would be brand new (or being built) as it opened in 1956.
Oscar on my Facebook page posted this photo showing Vine St looking south at around the same time.
This is how that view looked in May 2022.
The Dupar’s sign is visible. I’ve never noticed the Pepsi bottle cap before up on the left side. And that Plaza coffee shop one in amazing Kodacolor is just smacking. Hopefully it still exists in some storage somewhere. And we can just see the edge of the Brown Derby Coffee Shop’s overhang above those ladies coming toward us.
Iconic ’57 Chevy in the oncoming lane, which should nail it down a bit closer. 🙂
In the picture at the top you see the billboard for KNXT 2, and just below that and one building back you see in big black letters NBC.
This sign is on the theater at 1735 Vine Street originally opened in 1927 as the Hollywood Playhouse and changed ownership and names several times over the years. Designed by the Los Angeles firm of Gogerty and Weyl, Architects. Gogerty and Weyl produced a variety of commercial work in Hollywood during the 1920s. In the 1930s, the building housed the WPA Federal Theatre, and at about this time, it was a location for the CBS Radio Network’s shows, “Baby Snooks” and “My Favorite Husband” starring Lucille Ball.
That property was named The El Capitan Theatre in 1943, and was used for a long-running live burlesque variety show called Ken Murray’s Blackouts.
In the 1950s, still under the name of El Capitan, the theatre became a television studio, and it was from a set on its stage that Richard Nixon delivered his famous “Checkers speech” on September 23, 1952.
The Vine Street El Captain Theater was also Studio D for NBC and was home to some episodes of NBC’s ‘Colgate Comedy Hour’, and ‘This is Your Life’. NBC at Sunset and Vine had already turned radio studios into TV studios and ran out of room. In 1963, ABC bought the theater and named it The Jerry Lewis Theater after the show it was to be home to, but the Lewis show died after just 13 weeks. Within a few months, ABC had created ‘The Hollywood Palace’ show (January 4, 1964, to February 7, 1970) and renamed the theater yet again. It functioned as an ABC studio in the 1960s and 1970s, and became the setting for the “Merv Griffin Show.” During the 1965-1966 and in the mid-1970s, the “Lawrence Welk Show,” an ABC staple, was also filmed here. The theater was selected in 1965-1966 to tape the Welk show because it was the only one ABC had access to that was capable of color production. It was also the first West Coast venue for the Beatles in 1964.
In its next incarnation, entrepreneurs opened the Hollywood Palace, a leading Hollywood night club during the 1970s and 1980s; The Avalon Club, owned by John Lyon and Steve Adelman, was in operation as of 03/03/2004; Lyon and Adelman operated Avalon clubs in Boston and New York in 2004; interior design was done by CAN Resources of New York.
This was a beautiful theater inside. When I was a kid my mother took us to see video tapings of the Hollywood Palace TV show in 1968 when it was on ABC. Probably one of the very best variety shows on Television with the biggest stars. The interior was just beautiful as the theaters in downtown L.A. but the last time I was inside, the entire inside was painted all black. The walls and everything was black. All the beautiful plaster work no longer could be seen just so they could make it a night club. What a horrible thing to do. Like painting over a masterpiece.
https://martinturnbull.com/2018/08/27/el-capitan-theatre-formerly-hollywood-playhouse-1735-vine-st-hollywood-circa-1950s-2/