When a chiropractor named Dr. Ashley Manning opened the California Piano Supply Co. at 2251 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles in 1927, he knew that he’d need to do something bold if he was going to attract customers into his store, which was in a residential neighborhood. Manning must have been a big thinker because in around 1930, he built a large piano, measuring 40 feet high and 25 feet long, to the front of his store and painted it red. This, of course, provided no end of publicity opportunities—such as sticking four very young girls to pose on top of it. Although how Manning got them up there remains a mystery to me.
Here’s another shot using adults who, we may assume, climbed up there voluntarily:
Here is one of their advertisements:
This photo from possibly the 1950s shows how red it really was:
This is how that corner looked in November 2021. At least the building is painted red, but the corner looks so empty now, doesn’t it?
These days, Sunset Blvd is one of the longest, most crowded, and most famous thoroughfares in Los Angeles, so it’s quite a contrast to see this photo from 1900, when Sunset Blvd was an empty, unpaved street lined with pepper trees as far as we can see. Those branches are thick with leaves and look as though they would have provided a good amount of shade from the California sun.
What we’re looking at here is the stretch of empty land destined to be the future site of the Beverly Hills Hotel. This photo was taken in 1900 before there even was a development known as “Beverly Hills,” which didn’t come into being until around 1905. The Beverly Hills Hotel opened in 1912, so this photo gives us a good idea of how the hotel was first conceived as a rural getaway resort. Much of what we can see here are fields of lima beans.
I don’t know who these cool chicks were, or whose 1955 Chevy 210 sedan this was, but I love the hip mid-50s vibe of this colorful photo. In the top right corner we can see the roof of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which places them in a parking lot south of Hollywood Blvd. A 25-story office tower now occupies that line of white-painted stores behind them. And the spot where the women are standing is now a 5-story parking structure. But to the left of the photo is the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which is still very much around and a central part of the Hollywood Blvd social scene.
My last vintage L.A. Christmas photo for 2021 was taken in December 1953 looking east along Hollywood Blvd from around Cosmo St in Hollywood. The electrified decorative trees along Hollywood Blvd during that time were painted white—I’m assuming to mimic snow that fell in Los Angeles once every ten years. The big store in this picture is Foreman & Clark at 6353 Hollywood Blvd. They were a department store that I think of as being mostly for men, but if anyone reading this can tell me otherwise, I’d love to hear from you.
In the early days of Los Angeles, the rich built their fancy mansions on or near the top of the Bunker Hill neighborhood of (what we now call) downtown L.A. Not only because of the views, but the tops of the hills caught the best breezes, and in the age before air conditioning (and corsets for women) Angelenos took advantage of every breeze blowing their way. This photo, taken circa 1880s at Hill St near Fourth St, shows the wealthier homes looming on Bunker Hill over the more modest ones down below. It looks like Hill St wasn’t even paved yet.
In the 1960s and 70s, the Shrine Auditorium was the ultimate venue for musicians to play. If you played the Shrine, you’d made it, baby. But the version that stands on Jefferson Blvd at Royal St, near the University of Southern California south of downtown Los Angeles is the second incarnation. This photo, taken 1920, is the original version, known as the Al Malaikah Temple. Al Malaikah is division of the Shriners, aka the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, which is a Masonic society that goes all the way back to 1870. It’s a good thing this photo was taken, because 1920 was also the year that a fire broke out and gutted the place in 30 minutes. The new incarnation opened in 1926 and has played host to many Grammy and Academy Awards ceremonies.
I don’t know where on Franklin Ave this photo was taken, but it does give us a good idea of what the streets of Hollywood looked like back in the day. In this case, the “day” is circa 1920s. Before the palm trees became the most common type in Hollywood, it was the pepper trees that locals were most likely to come across, and to provide shade from the relentless Californian sun. However, they had a tendency to not play well with sidewalks, causing them to buckle with their roots, so in the 1910s the city began to replace them. They also sprouted TONS of berries, which probably played havoc with car windshields and squished underfoot. But still, they lent a genteel pastoral charm to the cityscape.
Sadly, we have precious few Googie-inspired coffee shops left intact around Los Angeles these days, but fortunately we do have photos of many of them in their prime. The Penguin Coffee Shop opened at 1670 Lincoln Blvd in Santa Monica in 1959, which is when this shot was taken. There’s something about that angular roof, the stonework on the pillars, and those beachball-shaped light fixtures that make me want to jump right into this image and order a burger with extra fries and a chocolate malted thick shake.
Most photos of the front of Disneyland are, understandably, taken from the outside looking in because it’s so lovely to look at. So I was pleased to find this one taken from the inside looking out. That’s the Disneyland railway station at the Main Gate and past it the vast parking lot. And beyond the parking lot is what looks to be the orange groves that used to blanket Anaheim. These days, that land is now the California Adventure theme park, and Disneyland visitors now park in a hug multi-level structure where the daily fee is $30(!) Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955, so what we’re looking at is opening day. My guess is that the photo was taken on top of the building where the “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” attraction now is (but wasn’t installed until 1965.)