For a Pacific Electric Red Car to be able to go around a corner, it needed two fairly wide streets to intersect. In this circa 1940s photo (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about the date), a streetcar coming out of the San Fernando Valley and heading for the subway terminal in downtown LA is at Santa Monica Blvd and Highland Ave. In color shots like this we can see how eye-catching that red is—you could see them coming from miles away. As much as many of us miss the Red Cars, I don’t think any of us pine for the days when all that electrical wiring stretched overhead. It is a bit of an eyesore, isn’t it? The other detail that caught my eye is the typewriter store on the left. That’s something you never see anymore. In fact, I wonder if they still even make typewriters…?
Here is how that corner looked in January 2021.
The Sunset Strip section of Sunset Blvd is known for its nightclubs, restaurants, and gambling backrooms, but for a while – mid-1930s through to the ‘50s – there also was a mortuary. The Utter-McKinley Mortuary offered a 24-hour service, which I’m guessing came in handy if you overestimated your ability to party at 3 a.m. on the dance floor of Ciro’s. It would also have been convenient for mobster Mickey Cohen, who for a few years in the late 1940s owned the building next door. One report I read said that this was the funeral parlor from which director Raoul Walsh and a couple of pals took John Barrymore’s corpse and propped it up in Errol Flynn’s favorite chair as a practical joke they played on Flynn. The rather lovely French Colonial building is long gone and the site is now largely occupied by the Book Soup bookstore.
The Earl Carroll Theatre at 6230 Sunset Blvd, just east of Vine St, sure must have been a sight to see when all lit up at night like this—especially that enormous neon head on the side of the building ringed the theater’s famous slogan: “Thru These Portals Pass The Most Beautiful Girls In The World.” Judging from the cars, this photo was probably taken some time in the early 1940s.
Even before it was finished, Los Angeles’s new City Hall dominated the skyline. Of course, it helped that, at 32 stories, it was the tallest building around, but there’s something about its shape and pyramidal top that made it recognizable even when it was still just a bunch of scaffolding. The building’s dedication took place on April 26, 1928, so this photo would have been taken during the latter half of 1927. One of those billboards overlooking the parking lot is for a Warner Bros. movie called “Matinee Ladies” (co-starring future gossip maven, Hedda Hopper) which opened in April 1927.
It can sometimes be hard these days to know if a photo has been colorized or not, but my guess is that this shot of the dining room of the Vine Street Brown Derby in Hollywood is a genuine color photo. I haven’t encountered many color shots of one of the most famous restaurants in Los Angeles, so this is a rare treat. It’s not hard to imagine the place filled with faces as famous as the caricatures on the walls and the air filled with chatter about David O. Selznick casting a British actress as Scarlett O’Hara, or how Alfred Hitchcock will fare amid Hollywood-style filmmaking. I don’t know that I would have chosen purple carpet. The pink tablecloths compliment it, but I’m not so sure about that red upholstery.
I normally focus on vintage photos of Los Angeles and Hollywood, but I feel that the name Grauman (as in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre) is so synonymous with Hollywood that I’m grandfathering it in. This photo was taken in San Francisco after the devastating earthquake that leveled 80% of the city. Among the destroyed buildings were both Sid Grauman’s Unique and Lyceum theaters. Recognizing that the locals yearned for a return to normal, Sid swung into action. He borrowed a tent from a local preacher, salvaged some church pews and opened the Grauman’s Canvas Theatre on the grounds of his Unique Theatre on Market St, where he showed “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) to such success that he opened a second canvas theater where the National Theatre had once stood. Ever the showman, he promoted his enterprise with this reassuring message: “Nothing to fall on you but canvas if there is another quake.”
As cool as this 1959 Cadillac looks, it would have been a nightmare—for me, at least—to parallel park. Or to park at all, given how long it was. It may just be the angle of this shot, but it looks like it was as long as the Air Lite Luggage storefront was wide. Air Lite was at 6415 Hollywood Boulevard, which put it between Cahuenga Boulevard and Wilcox Ave. I wonder if the driver was shopping there, or was drinking at the next-door bar called—rather suggestively—My Desire. It looks like it could have been a bit barfly-ish, but I do like the sign. On the other side we can see 
Although this circa 1960 photo has been colorized, so we don’t know for sure that those cars were actually those hues, it’s such a strikingly rendered image that I wanted to share it as I found it. The Farmer’s Market is at the northeast corner of Fairfax Ave and 3rd St, Los Angeles, and while the cars parked there no longer resemble these beauties, the tower is still there and looks practically the same.