I don’t know what was going on at the Santa Fe Railway’s La Grande railway station at 2nd St and Santa Fe Ave in downtown Los Angeles in this day in around circa 1910, but my guess is that someone famous and/or important was arriving and Angelenos turned out in droves to see him or her. Or maybe this is just the 1910 equivalent of going to the airport on Memorial Day long weekend.
With the opening of Union Station, the La Grande station was close in 1939, and was torn down in 1946. This building is now on that site. This image is from December 2020.
This rather marvelous edifice was called the Looff Hippodrome on the Santa Monica pier, photographed circa 1920. It was built in 1916 by Charles Looff to hold a Looff Carousel. (Looff was a German-born builder of hand-carved carousels and built the first carousel at Coney Island in 1876.) I’d love to have seen this in color because it looks like those pointy doo-dahs on the turrets were different colors. And from the sign out front, I’m guessing rides cost 5 cents.
Here we see the main entrance to Universal Studios on Lankershim Boulevard in Universal City, which was the municipality that Carl Laemmle opened in March 1915 to house his new and expanded filming facility in the San Fernando Valley. The caption on this photo dated it at circa 1916, so what we’re seeing here is the original entrance. I’m surprised the words UNIVERSAL STUDIOS aren’t emblazoned across that archway, but you can bet that tower in the background was designed to be used in filming.
This nighttime view was taken looking north from the observation deck of L.A. City Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Those two streets are Main and Spring toward Chavez Ravine where Dodger Stadium would be built in the late 1950s. This photo was taken in 1943 when the city was under wartime dim-out restrictions. In reality, the streets wouldn’t have looked this well-lit, but with a long camera exposure, the streets of L.A. look like rivers of light.
The moment I saw this photo, a song started up in my head. “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley…” That song is, of course, from MGM’s “Meet Me in St. Louis” which is set in 1904. This photo was taken on July 4th, 1902, so I was close. What’s going on here is that Angelenos are boarding Pacific Electric’s streetcar #219 on its first day of service from Los Angeles to Long Beach. Maybe their Julys weren’t like our Julys, but I still pity the two women boarding the streetcar in floor-length dresses.
And from the “They Sure Don’t Make ’Em Like That Anymore” file comes this gorgeously ornate building that once upon a time stood at the northwest corner of Wilshire Blvd and Berendo St. It looks like it housed a group of stores with maybe a large one anchoring the corner block with perhaps second-floor offices? It must have been lovely to see in real life. And those decorative urns—they would have been quite large, probably taller than the average person.
I don’t know the reason for this photograph, but we’ve got four women motorists standing in front of their automobiles outside the Hotel Virginia on Ocean Blvd at Magnolia Ave in Long Beach. The hotel opened on April 1, 1908, so I’m putting this photo at circa 1910s. I can’t imagine there were too many female motorists back then, so maybe these woman shared a love of automobiles and drove around in a convoy.
Here we have a circa 1917 view of one of L.A.’s most complicated intersections, where Main, Spring, and 9th Streets converge in downtown Los Angeles. I don’t know how these people managed to negotiate this 5-way intersection without traffic lights, but apparently they figured it out. It’s also probably why there is an elevated police traffic box – that’s the booth in the center of the photo. But what did he do when he got up there? Yell at reckless drivers?
In this photo from 1957, we’re looking north up Vine St from Selma Ave. On the left we can see what was then known as the Huntington Hartford Theatre (now the Montalban), the Hollywood Plaza Hotel (now a retirement home), and The Broadway department store on the Hollywood and Vine corner (now loft condos). If the people in this shot could see how built up that section of Vine St is nowadays, they’d probably keel over.
One of the few buildings in L.A. that has barely changed from the day it opened in 1956 is the circular Capital Records building on Vine Street just north of Hollywood Blvd. This photo, taken in 1958, shows us a rare glimpse of the building with virtually all its lights on. There’s a sign in the foreground showing 25 cents for parking one block north of Hollywood and Vine. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.