This photo gives us an idea of what Third Street in downtown Los Angeles looked like in around 1890. That prominent hill in the background is Bunker Hill, which got flattened in the 1960s. We can see that the street wasn’t sealed yet, which must have made it very hard going for the horses to negotiate that steep hill during the wet season. And look how wide that sidewalk is. Where that made on the right is walking with the two kids, it doesn’t look sealed either. But ahead of them, in front of the 2-story mansion it looks like it’s been nicely paved over. And that makes me wonder if homeowners were responsible for their stretch of sidewalk back then…?
Neil B. says: “As far as I know at least into the 1970’s home owners or apartment house owners were responsible to maintain their bit of side walk. If someone is injured for example due to cracks, raised pavement or something than the owner or their insurance is responsible. How strictly adhered to this is I no longer know as the infrastructure has so greatly deteriorated during past decades. In any case back then I might imagine that if you had money you showed your affluence by paving in front of your dwelling. The city probably did not have the money or organisation to pave the varied and growing areas. It must have been a bit chaotic but an interesting time. Leveling Bunker Hill was a bit of a fools errand actually. Every hill and valley in LA were created by Earthquakes. One doesn’t notice when driving an auto how steep some streets are unless you are cycling as I did along Wilshire between the Hilton Hotel and Westwood Village.”
Tony V. says: “Bunker Hill was not “flattened”. A visit to The Music Center, The Broad or The Disney Concert Hall can prove that. Bunker Hill today is not as high as it was originally by about 60 feet. All the other Downtown Los Angeles hill tops have been lowered over the years in the belief that it made them more appealing for development.“
Are any of us really all that surprised that Liberace had a piano-shaped swimming pool in the backyard of this home in Sherman Oaks? If anything, I’m surprised he bought a house in the Valley and not Beverly Hills. This photo was taken in 1954, which was three years before the 405 Freeway was built half a block from his house.
…sigh… Don’t you just love an eye-popping Kodachrome (which I only assume this is) photo? Especially when the photographer was standing on the west side of Vine Street, Hollywood looking at the Brown Derby restaurant over a brown 1953 Chevrolet. Look at that Western Airlines billboard “Air Coach” – were they advertising themselves as the Greyhound of the skies? And that 25-cent parking lot seems like a fair price.
This photo of the Wilcox Drug Store on the southwest corner of Selma and Wilcox Avenues in Hollywood was taken around 1942. It looks to me like it was a quintessential mid-century corner American drug store: Coca-Cola sign, sells liquor, newspaper stand, open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, barber shop next door, semaphore traffic signal out front. It was part of the Wilcox Hotel, so it was probably fairly busy all day long.
I know, of course, Los Angeles of a hundred years ago bears little resemblance to how it looks today. But I still went a bit bug-eyed when I came across this photo from 1920 looking east along Wilshire Blvd near La Brea Ave. I can see all of three cars on the road, the shoulders look like they aren’t even sealed, the only development is a billboard (for car tires, naturally), and in the distance are a couple of oil wells. If the caption to this photo hadn’t said it was Wilshire Blvd, I never would have known.
I took one look at this photo and thought “I’ll never complain about the parking at Disneyland again.” This shot was taken on Disneyland’s opening day, 17 July 1955. These days, they have pictures of characters to help you remember which section you parked in. But back then, it looks like you were on your own. Imagine being poor family parked in the last space in the back row. Yikes.
Just think, if this propeller-driven aerial trolley prototype had been more successful, this could have been the form of mass transit that Los Angeles adopted instead of the Red Car streetcars. This photo was taken in Burbank, circa 1912, where its inventor, Joseph Fawkes built an 840-foot-long test track through his apricot and walnut orchard for his experimental monorail that he dubbed the Aerial Swallow. But ultimately the Burbank city council went with the Pacific Electric Railway, which meant that L.A. would have to wait another 50 years before it saw its first workable monorail at Disneyland.
The Hill Street tunnels that used to connect Temple and First Streets in downtown Los Angeles are long gone. (Grand Park is there now.) But when they were around, they sure made for an atmospheric sight, especially on foggy evenings such as October 11, 1954 when this very film noir shot was taken by Howard Maxwell for the Los Angeles Times. I wonder what the guy under the streetlight was waiting for.