In this colorful Christmastime photo, we’re standing on the south side of Hollywood Blvd looking northwest past the Highland Ave intersection toward the Hollywood Hotel with the white cupola. Between the different colored cars and the red tiles on the hotel’s roof, we can see how bright and cheery the holidays were in Hollywood back in the mid-1940s, when this photo was taken. I like the addition of the silver bells strung over the boulevard and I’d imagine they caught the lights nicely.
This is roughly how that view looked in July 2024.
If the caption hadn’t told me where this photo was taken, I never would have guessed. This is the 122-room Dome Hotel, which stood on the corner of 2nd St and Grand Ave in downtown Los Angeles from the early 1900s until it burned down in 1964. That’s a pretty good run for a Victorian hotel, which were highly susceptible to fire. In the background, we can see the grainy outline of the Richfield Tower. It didn’t come down until 1969, so in 1960, when this photo was taken, it was still a iconic part of downtown’s cityscape. The Broad Museum now occupies the site of Dome Hotel, and that vacant lot is now home to the striking Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Yesterday’s photo showed a closer daytime view of the electrified Christmas trees that used to decorate Hollywood Blvd for the holidays. This one give us an idea of how they looked all lit up at night. I’m so glad this photo is in color so that we can see how pretty the boulevard used to look back then. The photographer was standing on the northeast corner of Hollywood Blvd and Highland Ave looking west. We can glimpse the Owl Drug Store on the left (i.e. the southwest corner) and as this photo is circa late 1946, the Hollywood Hotel would still have been standing on the right as it didn’t come down until 1956.
This photo of glamour girls “helping” to put up electrified Christmas trees on Hollywood Blvd illustrates something I don’t think I ever quite realized: how big those holiday season decorations were. With actual humans for comparison, they were much bigger than I’ve ever thought. We can see that with Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in the background, they were on the south side of Hollywood Blvd, and from the angle, I’d say they were at around the Orange Dr. corner. The Hitchcock movie “Spellbound” was playing at the time, which dates this photo to late 1945, the first Christmas after the war. (“Spellbound” played Grauman’s for 5 weeks from November 9 to December 13)
I could find very little information on this photo, but here’s what I could piece together: It was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life Magazine in 1936. That’s a 1933 Ford Victoria going for a drive in what I presume to be the Hollywood Hills. But as that house under construction appears to be on its own, my *guess* is that the photo wasn’t taken in Hollywoodland as I’d have thought by the mid-1930s, there might have been more development. Wherever that house is/was, I can see why the owners built there: it looks like it commanded a wonderful view across Los Angeles.
Yesterday, Alison Martino added this photo to 
This photo is a reminder that not everything to come out of the Great Depression was drab and dreary. Beverly Hills City Hall at 451 N. Crescent Dr. at Santa Monica Blvd, seen here circa 1936, was constructed in 1931 and 1932 as the rest of the country was hitting rock bottom. Officially, it was built in a style known as “California Churrigueresque” (and if you can pronounce that second word, I tip my hat to you) which is a type of Spanish Revival architecture. According to one report I read, when it opened in 1932, the L.A. Times called it the “largest and most expensive city hall of any municipality its size in the country.” Seeing this photo of it, it’s not hard to see why.
Before it became one of Los Angeles’s vital east-west arteries, Sunset Blvd was nothing more than a dirt track. This circa 1900 photograph, reportedly taken near what would become the intersection of Sunset and Fairfax, captures that simpler time. At its center, a team of horses stands against a sparse landscape—just telegraph wires stretching toward the Hollywood Hills in the distance.
The bucolic building we’re seeing here is Hollywood’s second hotel. The first one, the Sackett Hotel, was on the southwest corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Blvds. This one was called the Glen-Holly Hotel, and it opened 7 years after the Sackett in 1895 on the southeast corner of Ivar and Yucca Sts, a block north of Hollywood Blvd. Among the group of people standing out from is C.M. Pierce and his wife. More than anything it shows how rustic Hollywood was back then. If it took Hollywood 7 years to get a second hotel, it makes me wonder how many people needing accommodation were coming to Hollywood back then.
This rather forlorn Christmas tree is actually quite historical. It was set up on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl before the Bowl even had a shell. Although the Bowl officially opened on July 11, 1922, a number of performances took place on the stage (it was little more than just a wooden platform) in late 1921, when this photograph was taken. It’s quite a stark contrast to how the Bowl looks these days.