This 1959 photo reeks of cruising down Hollywood Blvd on a Saturday night looking for trouble in all the wrong places—and probably finding it at the Movie Town Motel. Past the Hawaii Theatre on the right was the Florentine Gardens, home to one of the more risqué floorshows in Hollywood. Both the theater and the nightclub buildings are still there but neither of them have operated for years. The Chevrolet and Ford lots on the left is now a huge Toyota dealership, and the Movie Town Motel is now called the Vibe Hotel and Banana Bungalows—but it’s probably best not to ask why.
My thanks to Jim Lewis for these two photos of the Hawaii Theatre:
Roughly the same view in January 2017:
Sadly, Florentine Gardens and the Hawaii Theater are just shells of their former selves. This image is from December 2020:
In this photo we’re looking west along a busy and bustling Hollywood Blvd from around Wilcox Ave. MGM’s “Ivanhoe” is playing at the Iris Theater at 6508 Hollywood Blvd. It came out in summer of 1952, although I don’t think the Iris was a first-run theater. That huge neon Coca-Cola sign that dominates night photos of Hollywood Blvd was in place. It’s a big more striking when it’s lit up, though. By the look of the bus, this is the period where they had started to replace the streetcars. The tracks are still in the road, which indicates the beginning of the end was within sight.
The Music Center at the top end of downtown Los Angeles (or the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, as it’s officially known) is where a lot of theater happens: musicals, plays, opera, ballet, and in the 70s and 80s, the Academy Awards. But until I came across this photo, I never gave a thought about what once stood in its site. I don’t know if the St. Angelo Hotel was still standing in April 1955, when Dorothy Chandler began fundraising for a permanent home for the L.A. Philharmonic, but I’d say chances are good that it was. This photo was taken in 1928, and it was a fairly typical type of hotel of its era. I love the big, wide balcony where guests could sit and catch a cool evening breeze as there would have been no air conditioning for these people.
I don’t know if it was legal for these kids to ride their Go-Kart on an unfinished stretch of the 101 (Hollywood) Freeway near Woodman Ave in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, but you can’t blame them for wanting to ride an empty freeway while they could. The sign in the distance says the upcoming exits are Woodman, Coldwater Canyon, and Laurel Canyon which means the photo was taken looking southbound.
For those of you who indulge in daydreaming about what it would be like to sit poolside at the Garden of Allah Hotel (where my 
I don’t know about you, but personally, I would be dubious about buying a house through a reality company who operated out of an office shaped like the Egyptian Sphinx—even if the name of that company was called Sphinx Realty. It seems an odd name for a realty company, even for the early 1920s. Did they call it that so they’d have an excuse to build the sphinx at 537 N. Fairfax Ave (opposite what would later become Fairfax High School)? Whatever the reason, if that “FOR RENT” sign is anything to go by, it didn’t seem to have worked.
Sherry’s restaurant, at 9039 Sunset Boulevard was one of the Sunset Strip nightspots of the late 1940s, not just popular with movie stars, also with mobsters. In July of 1949, those movie stars learned that mixing with the mob was dangerous to their health when, in the wee hours of the 19th, an assassination attempt was made on the head of the national crime syndicate’s gambling and vice operations in Southern California. Mickey Cohen and his party were leaving Sherry’s at 3:55 a.m. when shots rang out across Sunset Blvd. It was a scene from a real-life Warner Bros. picture! Cohen survived the assassination attempt but I pity the owners of the car in the foreground with five bullet holes. Or maybe it was a story they dined out on for years.
Lest we forget that the land north of Wilshire Blvd—now home to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, the Park La Brea housing development, and The Grove shopping mall—was once empty land, here’s a photo of oil well dotting the La Brea Tar Pits in 1910. At this time, there would have been development much further north along Sunset Blvd and Hollywood Blvd but at this time, Wilshire wasn’t even paved over yet. And it would be another 30 years before developer A. W. Ross saw the area’s potential developed Wilshire as a commercial district which he dubbed The Miracle Mile, a name we Angelenos still use today.
As far as Los Angeles parks go, MacArthur Park tends to hog the limelight (mainly because someone left the cake out in the rain, if you catch my meaning.) However, four blocks west of it, is a smaller, less-known Lafayette Park, and that’s the park we can see in this photo of the corner of Wilshire Blvd and Hoover St, where the popular Simon’s drive in restaurant stood. Simon’s was a popular chain with more than 20 locations around L.A. in the 1930s and ‘40s. This photo was probably taken from the roof of the Townhouse Hotel in, I’m guessing the late 1930s, which Simon’s was at its peak—but if anyone can tell me different, I’m open to suggestions
In this aerial shot of the Metro Pictures movie studios in 1921, the horizontal street at the top is Melrose; the next one down is Waring, followed by Willoughby, then Romaine. Taken three years before merging with the Samuel Goldwyn Studio and Mayer Productions to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and moving to Culver City, the biggest names at Metro that year were Alla Nazimova and a soon-to-be-famous Rudolph Valentino. That long white set near the top left corner was for Uncharted Seas, the movie Valentino was making when he met Natacha Rambova just before the release of his breakthrough role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
