Having created the Pacific Electric Railway in 1901, Henry E. Huntington open his streetcar line to Long Beach on July 4, 1902, and fortunately, a photographer was around to capture the moment its first passengers. The line started at the corner of 6th and Main Sts in downtown Los Angeles then headed south, terminating at the corner of Ocean Blvd and Pacific Ave. Does anyone know how long that journey was in 1902? I’d imagine that it would’ve taken quite a while, so I hope those Angelinos in their suits and neckties and floor-length dresses were comfortable in the July heat.
David H. says: “That was actually an interurban car, not a streetcar as the Long Beach line was an interurban line because it ran between cities. The yellow cars and some of the PE cars were streetcars. The interurban cars ran on the same tracks as the streetcars when in the cities and drew power from the same overhead wires. The interurban cars were larger and much faster than the streetcars that ran within the city. I have been a PE/LARY afficionado for 45 years. he last red car stopped running in early 1961. That was the Long Beach line. The last of the LARY/yellow cars stopped running in 1963. I believe it was the same for the few trolley bus lines.”
Front page news on the Riverside Morning Enterprise, June 3, 1902:
It looks like the LA premiere of Eddie Cantor’s “Whoopee” – was a big deal this particular night in late 1930. United Artists pulled out all the stops: crowds on both sides of Broadway, searchlights, a public address van (on the left), a marquee ablaze with light. It was worth all the trouble, too, because “Whoopee” was a huge hit. It was an early color movie that made a movie star of Cantor who until then had largely been known as a Broadway headliner. According to Wikipedia, it also features future stars Betty Grable, Paulette Goddard, and Ann Sothern as “Goldwyn Girls.”
We 21st century Angelinos are so used to looking south down Vine St past Yucca St, Hollywood and seeing the circular Capitol Records building that it can be easy for us (well, for me, anyway) to forget it wasn’t always there. Opening in 1956 between Yucca St and Hollywood Blvd, it became an instant icon of the Hollywood skyline. This photo (I’m guessing circa 1930s) was taken well before that, when the site was a parking lot and home of the Hollywood Barn that now stands across the street from the Hollywood Bowl. In this photo was can see the streetcar tracks that stretched along Vine St before turning east on Yucca.
cap
Jungleland was an animal theme park in Thousand Oaks, 35 miles west of downtown LA. When it opened in 1926, as an animal training and housing facility for the Hollywood movie studios, Thousand Oaks was in the middle of nowhere, so those 170 acres would have come cheap. It started out as Goebel’s Lion Farm, and later the more exotic Goebel’s Wild Animal Farm. Over the years, it went through various purposes (many TV shows and movies were filmed there, such as “Tarzan”, “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, and “Birth of a Nation” as well as being was home to MGM’s Leo the Lion) and went by different names. But in the late 1950s, when this photo was taken, it was changed from World Jungle Compound to Jungleland. It would eventually close in October 1969, when its 1,800 animal occupants were sold at auction.
Continuing the theme from yesterday’s post of the Igloo ice cream store, today we have a gas station fashioned to resemble an iceberg. I get the igloo-iceberg-ice cream connection, but why you would build a gas station to look like an iceberg is beyond me. Unless, of course, it was purely to be eye-catching to passing motorists, which is all you need to do, really. I have no idea when this place was around or where; the caption merely read “Los Angeles, California.” But it is something I wouldn’t be at all surprised to come across if I were driving around LA in the 1920s or 1930s.
You’ve got to love the idea of a Los Angeles ice cream store fashioned to look like an iceberg. It’s a gimmick, sure, but it’s a gimmick that was obviously working because the Igloo Ice Cream store had plenty of customers. Technically, this is call mimetic architecture, which describes a building which resembles in some way the product it sells. This one stood at 4302 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles in the late 1920s. I admire the way they even included a little three-mast sailing boat, which I assume is an ice-cutter—and probably the only ice-cutter ship in all California.
As a 21st-century Angeleno, it’s rather shocking to see all the empty land around Los Angeles International Airport. And to see all the parking spaces surrounding the Theme Building. And only one runway. These days, every square inch of what you can see in this vintage photo is packed. How nice it must have been back in 1964, when this photo was taken, to drive up to LAX, find a park, and then see your loved one off at the gate lounge. No security, no scans, no lines, and most of all no need to take off your damned shoes.
I have very little information about this shot of two people playing golf at night, but triangulating the neon signs of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, the Broadway-Hollywood department store, and the Pantages Theatre, I’d say it was taken somewhere near the corner of Selma and Argyle Aves. In 1931 the Dyas department store became the Broadway-Hollywood. By that time, the Plaza Hotel had opened (1925) as had the Pantages (1930), so we can at least say that this photo was taken after 1931. I am a bit surprised that there was enough land so close to Hollywood and Vine by the early 1930s to hit golf balls.
In this eye-catching aerial photo, we’re looking down at the RKO movie studios in Hollywood. That road stretching from the upper left to the lower right is Gower St, and the wider road it deadends at the bottom is Melrose Ave. Where Gower meets Melrose is the famous corner where RKO had a huge cement globe with its iconic radio tower on top. But in this photo, it’s not there yet. Nor is the soundstage it sat on. Instead, that area is the studio parking lot. This photo came with no date, but I’ve seen a similar one, which was dated 1930, so I guess this was taken around that time, too. In the far upper right corner we can see the soundstages of neighboring Paramount, and in the far upper left, the open land of the Hollywood Cemetery which was founded in 1899, and both of which are still there. RKO on the other hand is long gone, and those studio facilities are now part of Paramount.