As a 21st century Angeleno, I take some measure of comfort in this photo looking east along Wilshire Blvd from Western Ave. I wouldn’t have imagined that Wilshire Blvd would have often seen traffic has heavy as this. Not that it’s heavy by the standards of the 2020s, but for circa late 1930s, when this photo was taken, it would have been a lot. Or maybe not so much for this particular intersection, which was one of LA’s busiest at the time. We can see on the right that the theater that had once been known as the Warner Bros. Western Theatre had changed its name to the Wiltern. Originally known in 1934 as The Wil Tern, it inevitably and conveniently evolved into the more sensible “Wiltern” (an amalgam of WILshire and wesTERN.)

Friend W. said: “That intersection was incredibly busy til post-WW2. In 1928, the city traffic commission recorded nearly 75,000 automobiles and double-decker buses passing through Wilshire and Western on one particular day, making the intersection reportedly the nation’s busiest.”

This is roughly how that view looked in May 2024