I always enjoy seeing a photo of a Hollywood movie premiere, especially if it’s in color. This one was taken looking west along Hollywood Blvd from around Cahuenga Blvd. On October 21, 1961, Universal Studios held the premiere for their new movie, “Back Street” starring Susan Hayward and John Gavin at the Warner Bros. Theater. Those searchlights were powerful enough reach deep into the night sky – you wouldn’t want to accidentally stare into one!
The building that the Warner Bros. Theatre is in still stands, but the theater itself has been closed for decades. On the plus side, there are now shade trees. This image is from June 2024.
Yesterday’s post featured an 
In the 1930s, even LA’s dogs and cats got a lovely Art Deco hospital to go to. Moxley’s dog and cat hospital at 940 N. Highland Ave, Hollywood, just south of Santa Monica Blvd. Dr. Moxley built this hospital in 1930 and he and his family lived in the apartment on the 2nd story. I do love the little touches on the exterior, such as the groups of three dots, the chevroning across the balcony, and if you look closely, you can see the bas-relief animals along the front of the building.
Given how relentlessly urban and gritty Hollywood Blvd is these days, it can be hard to conceive that an afternoon perambulation down the boulevard could ever have looked as genteel as this. The view in this 1909 photo is Hollywood Blvd looking west from Wilcox Ave. Get a load of all that full, lush greenery on both sides of the sidewalk, not to mention those kids dressed up in their Edwardian finery.
It takes some imagination to picture a building like this existing in downtown Los Angeles, but thankfully we have this Kodachrome photo taken on June 10, 1957 to remind us what the heart of LA looked like once upon a time. We’re looking south down 7th St from Flower St. That lovely building on the left was called 
As an Angeleno motorist who regularly drives through the Hollywood and Vine intersection, I’d love it if once—just once!—it was this empty. In this 1932 photo, we’re looking west down Hollywood Blvd past the CoCo Tree Cafe on the northwest corner of Vine St. As far as I can tell, the Richard Neutra-designed CoCo Tree Café had opened that year and would occupy the corner spot until 1940, when Melody Lane took over. The white circle hanging from the lamp post was how Hollywood Blvd was decorated during the Christmas season when it was transformed into “Santa Claus Lane.” Each circular decoration featured a different motion picture star.
Loew’s, the parent company of MGM, opened the Loew’s State Theatre on one of the most prime (i.e. most highly trafficked) intersections in America: where Broadway meets 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles. It opened in 1921, and this photo was taken across the street in 1922. The movie playing there at the time was a flapper comedy called “Gay and Devilish” but it’s the banner at the top — PAGEANT OF PROGRESS AND INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION — that has me wondering what sort of new gadgets and inventions were on display.
Here we have an aerial photo of Disneyland taken in 1955, the first year it opened. We can tell it must have been early on in the park’s life because it still had orange groves right next door, and people were parking around their periphery—but mostly in the shade of those trees. And look at all that undeveloped dirt on the left. Disneyland opened as what we would now call a “minimum viable product” which left plenty of room for improvement. And 69 years later, they’re still changing, expanding, and updating.
In this evocative photo of yesteryear aviation, we’re watching a ground crew member loading luggage into a Fokker F-32 aircraft at Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale. Western Air Express bought two of these in the early 1930s for their routes around the West Coast. This was back when we could walk into an airline terminal, walk out of it, and onto the plane. Sounds idyllic doesn’t it…except that the cabins weren’t pressurized, those engines were probably as noisy as hell, and there was no in-flight entertainment unless you brought your own copy of William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” or Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” which were new novels in 1930.
