In this photo (which has a very postcard-y feel to it) we’re looking northwest across the Hollywood Freeway. That overpass on the left is Hollywood Blvd and if we look much farther into the background, we can see the Hollywood Sign. These days, you’d have to be driving along that stretch of the Hollywood Freeway (aka “The 101”) on Sunday mornings to encounter traffic as light as this, which for a 21st century Angeleno, looks like heaven. The pale green vehicle in the center appears to be a 1955/56 Chrysler, so let’s called this image circa mid-1950s. The Hollywood Freeway was completed in 1952, so if this photo is anything to go by, it was still heaven to drive on 3 or 4 years later.
This is roughly how that view looked in May 2022. Shockingly, there’s about the same volume of traffic, which supports my theory that Google Streetview mostly sends out its 360° vehicles on Sunday mornings to get the clearest views.
As usual, the 50s photo looks much more pleasant and pristine and clutter free than the current photo. So much for progress!!!!!
Call me crazy, but it probably looks “more pristine and clutter free” because it had just recently been built.
I can remember going for rides for pleasure!
The camera is poised in the truncated alignment of North Van Ness Avenue. In the vintage photo you can see how this street above Hollywood Blvd. had a full line of palms on both sides…very visible from quite a distance. To the east there were more, but to the west they were not as common. Like the plentiful Eucalyptus brought in around the southland, the tall palms often were found as borders around citrus groves. (This section was once all in lemon trees.) If you expand the image and carefully examine the area past the building at the end of the northbound offramp, you might notice a patch of yellow forming a rectangle. That might have been a sign for a Richfield gas station that occupied the corner where the fire station with tower is now. It was torn down in the ‘60’s to create another station which is also gone. They seem to be gradually wiping out that palm row.
But why Al??? Those palms made it look so tranquil!!! Looks like a cement jungle these days!!!!
Aren’t a lot of the palm trees planted in the early 20th c. now reaching the end of their natural lives? They may be dying and not being replaced.
That’s been my understanding, too.
WOW!
I live in Chicago and was driving down 294 a couple months ago in the evening, and realized it looked just like a dystopian nightmare scene.
This reinforces we are not really evolving, doesn’t it?
Look at all of the greenery in the old picture. lawns and shrubs and such. Where did all that go? Now it looks like just a bunch of rocks and cement!!!
Beauty just does not seem to matter anymore when it comes to designing freeways.