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Judging by the cars parked outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, I figured that this pristine photograph was taken fairly early on in the theater’s life. But then my friend Kurt from GraumansChinese.org told me the poster in the bottom left corner was of Cecil B. DeMille. This indicated that this shot was taken during the debut run of his film, “King of Kings” which had its premiere on May 18, 1927 ahead of an impressive 24-week run through to the end of October. Only one of the independent stores in the complex was open back then. On the right side was Lickter’s Chinese Smoke Shop. They specialized in hand-rolled, gold-tipped, monogrammed cigarettes and would later install a neon sign that said: “A Puff from Hollywood.”
Of course, the “puffing” that goes on in Hollywood these days is of an entirely different nature…
Four smartly dressed women sit on a bench waiting for a Wilshire Blvd bus at the corner of Arden Ave, circa late 1930s. Three of them are reading newspapers, which is the 1930s version of checking their cell phones. Seeing them sitting there together makes me wonder if they’d been to The Ebell, one block further west. It’s the building on the right with the line of rectangular windows. The Ebell is still around. It’s a philanthropic organization founded in 1894 by women, for women—because they couldn’t trust that the menfolk always had their best interest at heart, which, let’s face it, was a smart move.
This photo of Angelenos out for a stroll along Windward Ave at Venice Beach circa 1915 kind of makes me wish they had Kodachrome back then. Abbot Kinney’s “Venice of America” project was only 10 years old at that point so everything would still have been fairly fresh and still as Kinney had envisioned it in all its faux Venetian glory: the architecture, the straw hats, the motorcars, the electric lights, and that “WELCOME” sign we can see all the way in the background.
In this photo we’re treated to a pre-automobile Los Angeles. It’s the corner of Broadway and Ninth Street, where your choices of transportation were: streetcar, horse-and-buggy, bicycle, or your legs. (Note the full-length dress suit on the woman at the far right, dating this photo to circa 1912.) A couple of decades later, this corner would be come much more prominent when the Eastern-Columbia department store, clad in its striking turquoise tiles, opened in 1930.
Without telltale cars, it’s hard to date this wonderful night shot of the Holmby Hall clock tower building on the corner of Westwood Blvd and Weyburn Ave in Westwood, just near UCLA, but I’m guessing it was probably taken not long after it was built in 1929. I’m sure the Westwood Village developers, the Janss brothers, we proud to see their idea come to life. Holmby Hall was the first shop building to be erected in village. And it’s a credit to Westwood that it’s still around. Mind you, it’s a Seven-Eleven but it’s still there. And even Westwooders need somewhere to go when they have a 2am craving for a hot dog and neon blue slushie.
Back around the turn of the century, going to the beach meant more than throwing your towel down onto the sand and cracking open a paperback. You also had the option of going to a public bath house. This photo shows us the inside of the North Beach Bath House salt water plunge on Santa Monica beach in July 1901. When it opened in 1894, it was considered the finest bath house in LA County and I’m not surprised considering the size of the pool, but it also offered beach goers a bowling pavilion, rooftop garden, and ballroom. It also offered shade from the California sun for people who didn’t have access to SPF30 sunscreen.
The sight of a concreted Los Angeles River is so common these days that we don’t really give any thought to perhaps once upon a time it was an actual river with a natural river bed. In fact, it was like that until March of 1938 when LA experienced rains so heavy that the LA River flooded, which resulted in 144 deaths and thousands of homes being destroyed. Not long after that, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began channeling the river with concrete. In this then-and-now image I’ve put together, we can see an almost dry stretch of the river in Studio City circa 1937 and how that same stretch looked in 2015. It might look ugly but it does the job—and gave speed demons a place to illegally race their cars.
California’s plentiful sun and fresh sea air has long been a draw for ailing and half-frozen Easterners. So finally landing on California soil must have been a relief—especially if this is where they dug in their toes. This is the Hotel Arcadia, which was built by developer J.W. Scott, who, in the 1880s, set about building Santa Monica’s first luxury hotel. The site he selected was on Ocean Avenue between what is today Colorado Ave and Pico Blvd and he named his hotel after Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, the wife of the co-founder of Santa Monica, Colonel Robert Baker. His ambitious project – the hotel had 125 rooms when it opened on January 24, 1887 – set the standard for upscale, beachside hotels. It’s long gone, of course, but was only the first of such places that now dot the Santa Monica shoreline.
As far as I can tell, this shot of a line of stores in the West Hollywood stretch of Sunset Blvd near San Vicente Blvd was taken in the early to mid 1930s, back when developers built stores with more individuality, like adding a turret or those triangular decorations above the doorway. It’s a sign of the times that Western Union has the biggest storefront of the lot. Next door is “Roberti French Dry Cleaners.” Does anybody reading this know if French dry cleaners differ from regular ones?
This this photo, we’re looking at the southeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard in 1934. These days that corner is filled with an oval-shaped, brown glass skyscraper. But back in the 1930s, it was the location of a mini-golf course called the Wilshire Links, which was owned by Mary Pickford. It, of course, is long gone but at least the Fox Wilshire Theatre we can see in the background is still with us, albeit now known as the Saban.
