Yesterday, after I posted a 1942 photo of the Hollywood Theatre and its neighbors, someone sent me a second photo from almost exactly the same angle, but 15 year later, in 1957. Let’s compare the changes. Italian Kitchen has new sign and now offers pizza! And cocktails! See’s Candies is still there, but the bookstore is now an outlet store. Hollywood Theatre has changed its blade sign and is now open all night. That week it was playing a 20th Century-Fox double bill: “Sea Wife” and “Hell on Devil’s Island.” The theater’s neighbor to the west has undergone a makeover and Coffee Dan’s has now opened. And in this 1957 photo, we can see the sign on the Max Factor building to the south.
The Bruce Torrence book, Hollywood: The First 100 Years, published in 1979, says that the Hollywood Theater’s marquee was the first one ever that was angled toward motorists driving along the boulevard to catch their attention.
Open all night. Open 24 hours. Ahhh, those were the days. Ever since Covid, nobody is ever open 24 hours anymore… at least in my area. Can’t even find a grocery store that is open past midnight, and I am often coming home from one thing or another at 12:35 am, or 2 in the morning.
I heard that the popularity of pizza in the US zoomed up after WWII. It was always popular in places with large Italian immigrant populations, like NYC, but it wasn’t as widespread as spaghetti in the rest of the country. But G.I.s who’d eaten pizza in Italy during the war loved it and helped to spread it a lot farther.