I’ve read in a number of places that the intersection of Broadway and 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles was the city’s busiest intersection. I have not, however, been able to understand why that was. But when you see photos like this, you can see it must have been true. Here we can see a Los Angeles Railway “M” streetcar sometime in the 1920s. It’s rattling along Broadway en route to Inglewood while it looks like half of LA is crowding the sidewalk! The other side of the street (outside Boos Bros. Cafeteria) doesn’t seem nearly so packed. It makes me wonder why some of those people didn’t cross the street!
Riley G said: “It was a major streetcar transfer point.”
Keith J said: “And also right across the street is a branch of “The Bank of Italy,” founded by the great A. P. Giannini. This means that, definitively, the pic could not be later than 1930—as Wikipedia clarifies: “The Bank of Italy merged with the smaller Bank of America, Los Angeles in 1928. In 1930, Giannini changed the name from ‘Bank of Italy’ to ‘Bank of America.””
Andie P said: “In the fifties some of the streets had wider sidewalks on one side until the streets were widened in the sixties.”
It’s probably just the angle of the camera, but without the streetcar lines, Broadway seems much narrower nowadays. This image is from June 2024.
To the right of Boos Bros Cafeteria is the Bank of Italy.
On November 1, 1930, the Bank of Italy changed its name to Bank of America.
And Boos Bros. became Clifton’s Brookdale. I remember these sidewalks being thick with people out shopping. Bullocks downtown department store was across the street from the bank.
One thing that’s a bit creepy about this snap is the guy at center just above the bottom who is hatless and facing the camera while walking southward. He kinda looks like Lee Harvey Oswald! I hope Time Tunnel was just one of those television fantasy productions and not an actual serial episodic documentary. It’s all just too One Step Beyond.