If you’re going to call your movie house the Liberty Theatre, it make sense that you would install a 12-foot Statue-of-Liberty-type figure on top of the roof. This place stood at 266 S. Main Street in downtown Los Angeles from the 1910s .The double bill playing the day this photo was taken was a Clara Bow picture, “The Primrose Path” with “Adventures in the Far North” which places this photo at circa 1925. That’s quite an elaborate three-panel display they’ve got out front—but was it was enough to convince that guy looking at it to buy a ticket? The theater came down around 1930, which leaves me to wonder what happened that facsimile of Lady Liberty.
The Liberty looked rather nice at night, too. This photo is from 1912 when tickets cost only 5 cents.
This is how that block looked in June 2021:
In this photo, we’re treated to a glimpse of how Pershing Square in the middle of downtown Los Angeles used to look back when it was filled with lush, shady greenery. I don’t have a date on this photo, but all those trees and shrubs were dug up in the early 1950s when a multi-level parking lot was put in, so I’m guessing this is from the late 1940s? Whatever the year, it was when retired gentlemen would go to parks and read the newspaper cover to cover with their similarly minded pals, as we can see in the left foreground.
The Mulholland Dam (named after William Mulholland, who designed the Los Angeles Aqueduct) holds the Hollywood Reservoir in place up in the Hollywood Hills. Construction began in 1923 and this photo shows it still being worked on, but I’m guessing it’s nearing completion because the north side of the dam is filling with water, so this photo is circa 1924. It is now designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and is part of a wonderful trail which allows you to walk around the whole reservoir.
The idea of a café built in the shape of a Spanish galleon (a reproduction of the one helmed by explorer, Juan Cabrillo, when he discovered California) proved to be a very popular idea when Abbott Kinney’s “Venice of America” development opened in 1905. This photo was taken that same year, when the Ship Café also opened, by Baron Long who would later run the Biltmore Bowl nightclub at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. When Prohibition kicked in, this place became a popular destination where thirsty Angelenos knew they could get some—ahem—“tea.”
If this photo hadn’t come with a caption, I doubt that I would have recognized where this photo was taken. What we’re seeing an early shot of the construction site of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. They broke ground on January 9, 1926 so I’m guessing this shot was taken a few months later. That slope we can see is the slope of the auditorium seating, which is being dug out by steam shovels. I wonder if the guys driving those things realized they were helping to build what would become the world’s most famous movie house.
Los Angeles is a city of eclectic architecture, but this one sure takes the prize. It’s the bath house at Ocean Park, which is the beach sandwiched between Santa Monica and Venice. I don’t know who chose to build it in the Moorish style, but you can bet that everyone knew what it was and where it was. Built in 1905, this photo is from circa 1910—back when going to the beach still meant you didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t show much skin.
You know how in the movies, someone yells “Lights! Camera! Action!” (Well, they do that in the movies about making movies, anyway.) Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be up on the catwalks in the rafters of a soundstage during production? I knew it took a lot of lights to shoot a movie, but this is crazy. Now I understand why it took so long to light a scene. This photo was taken at Universal Studios when Life magazine sent photographer John Dominis to tour the studios in 1963.
The piers along Santa Monica and Venice beaches in California have taken on several incarnations during the past 150 years (due to the vagaries of weather, fire, technology, trends) so it can be hard sometimes to tell one from the other. Identifying this 1924 shot of the Santa Monica pier, however, is made easy by the building on the right. It’s the Looff Hippodrome, which housed the Looff’s carousel. (Charles Looff invented the carousel in the 1800s.) What surprised me is how close the rollercoaster was to the road. I’m used to seeing the Santa Monica pier’s rollercoaster set much farther back. This one is under construction, but from the sign near the middle of the photo, they were calling it the “Whirlwind Dipper.”
Los Angeles is a city of eclectic architecture. If you look long and hard enough, you’ll find pretty much every style represented here, including this one inspired by a famous castle in Yorkshire in Britain. Known locally as Castle York, it was more properly known as the J.J. Haggarty mansion, named for the man who owned a high-end department store which he named after himself. Castle York stood at 3330 W. Adams Blvd, in the West Adams section of L.A., and from the looks of it, Haggarty really did believe that man’s home is his castle.
What we’re seeing here is the back of the 45-by-60-foot screen of the Vermont Drive-In that opened on October 23, 1947 at 17737 S. Vermont Ave in Gardena, not far from Redondo Beach. (The opening double bill was “Dear Ruth” starring William Holden and “Fear in the Night.”) I’m not sure what’s going on in that painting. I think it’s Snow White dancing with the dwarfs next to a five-foot mushroom. I suspect the subtext here is that they all ate some of the mushroom and now they’re all tripping . . . or at least enjoying nature—a lot.