Until I came across this photo, I never knew a bank existed that was open 24-7, but apparently the appropriately named “All Night And Day Bank” did exactly that. This photo was taken in April 1910 on a day when it looks to me like there was a run on the bank. All those people are crowding the sidewalks of the intersection of Spring and 6th Streets in downtown L.A. were certainly there for some reason. Note also the mix of horseless and horse-pulled vehicles trying to get through the people.
** UPDATE ** – there was a run on the bank!
It’s hard to believe that Los Angeles ever looked like this, let alone downtown L.A. This is Figueroa Street south of 16th Street, circa 1890. (
In this 1924 photo, we’re looking east along Hollywood Blvd from close to the Highland Ave corner. This is the south side of the street where the Hollywood Theatre is playing a Lewis Stone movie called “Why Men Leave Home” which was produced by a pre-MGM Louis B. Mayer Productions, and also featured a pre-columnist Hedda Hopper. The photo was taken before the theater was remodeled and acquired the angled marquee and blade neon sign that we see in a lot of later night shots of Hollywood Blvd. With lots of vehicles, streetcars, and pedestrians, it looks like Hollywood Blvd was quite a bustling thoroughfare in 1924.
Until I came across this circa 1930s photo, I wasn’t even aware you could see the Los Angeles City Hall from Olvera Street. Maybe you can’t these days. That street is so packed with stalls and shops and people, that it feels like it’s only little world. This guy with his donkey seem very at home there. I can’t imagine there were many donkeys to be found in downtown L.A. once this little guy clip-clopped into the great beyond.
This rather stunning aerial photograph was taken looking southeast across the Brunton studios in 1918. Brunton, which later evolved into Paramount Studios, is the line of buildings in the center-left. Melrose Ave is running diagonally across the middle, which means those paths running through the empty land in the bottom-left is the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. That empty block of land with the circular path is interesting. I don’t know what it was, but it would eventually become RKO.
In this photo we’re treated to a wide shot of three places along Hollywood Blvd east of Highland Ave: Henry Dine mens wear, Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, and the Pig ‘N Whistle restaurant. The theater and restaurant are still around, as is that three-tower building. At the time it was the Hotel Christie and is now a Church of Scientology building. Two Universal pictures, “Ladies Courageous” starring Loretta Young, and a filler called ‘Her Primitive Man” are playing at the Egyptian, which dates this photo to 1944.
These days, Universal Studios covers approximately 415 acres, including the studio and the theme park. But back in the mid-1910s, when this photo was taken, this all there was when the Universal Film Manufacturing Company moved its first studio at the corner of Sunset and Gower into the San Fernando Valley in 1915. (I believe this view was taken from Lankershim Blvd looking west to Ventura Blvd. It was a smart move because obviously there was LOTS of room to grow. Back then, they still would have been filming on open air stages, and a charging people 25 cents to see movies being made from the Visitors Observation Platform. That included a boxed lunch, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
The Hollywood Hotel opened in 1903 on what was then known as Prospect Ave. This photo was taken circa 1910, around the time the street got a new name: Hollywood Blvd. By then, streetcar tracks had been laid, and on the left side of this picture we can see a shaded bench, which I assume was where passengers could wait out of the California sun. Behind the hotel, we can see a glimpse of how empty the land still was, so the hotel REALLY must have stood out back then.
In its heyday, the MGM studio lot in Culver City covered more than the triangular site that grew out of the old Triangle Film Corporation facilities. Across Overland Ave, MGM’s vast backlot sprawled across what was known as Lot Two. This aerial shot shows us how big it was. For scale, look at the white house on the empty land to the left. Castles, harbors, New York city streets, whatever the script required, they had it. Or could build it. This shot shows us that it was all just a bunch of realistic looking facades. At the top of the photo, we can see the huge sound stages where indoor filming took place. This photo is from 1949, the year that the studio celebrated its 25th anniversary.
Sitting on the Pacific coast, Los Angeles was subject to blackouts and dimouts during WWII, so the city wasn’t lit up nearly as much as it had been before Pearl Harbor. But if you stood on the observation deck atop City Hall, and if you set your camera to a long exposure setting, and if you looked east toward Union Station (it’s the building with the tower) you could get a beautifully atmospheric image that glows with film-noir-ish intensity.