I’m glad that someone thought to take a shot of the back of the 300-foot set that D.W. Griffith built at the intersection of Sunset Blvd and Hollywood Blvd in Los Feliz for his colossus of a movie, “Intolerance.” (1916) According to one report I read, he used more than 3000 extras and the daily cost of employing them sometimes reached $12,000—and that was a lotta moolah in 1915! At the top of the set was can see a banner “Intolerance or ‘The Mother and the Law’” which was the original name of the movie until Griffith expanded the movie to included three more storylines. I’m guessing they meant it as an advertisement for the coming movie, but at 300 feet in the air, I’m wondering how many passers-by actually saw it.
The caption to this photo was something like “Marathon dancers at Venice, circa 1923.” But I always thought that the marathon dancing craze grew out of the evermore desperate financial straits of the Great Depression. The girls are all in bathing suits, which suggests that they were at Venice Beach, but these funsters don’t exactly look like they’ve been dancing for 23 nonstop hours. In fact, they look like they’re all whooping it up, Roaring Twenties style for about ten minutes. Surely that means they were due for a bathtub gin break?
It’s hard to believe that this Art Deco gloriousness was a supermarket, let alone the first one in Los Angeles. Hattem’s opened in 1927 at 8039 South Vermont Ave. Not only that, but it was open 24 hours a day and issued trading stamps. (Monday was double stamp day!) If you ask me, the era of LA supermarket peaked with its first incarnation and it’s been downhill ever since!
This shot is from 1931:
The building is still there, largely intact, is now a Church of Scientology community center. This is how it looked in March 2019:
In the land where citizens would bring a searchlight to the opening of a supermarket (see: https://wp.me/p5XK3w-WL) it seems fitting that it would also be home to the world’s largest spotlight. This 60-inch wonder of the electric age was first seen at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, after which Thaddeus Loew brought it to his Echo Mountain resort. Evidently, it was visible 60 miles away on Catalina Island, which isn’t surprising considering it burned with the intensity of 100,000 candles, which, when magnified by a massive reflecting lens mirror, became 375 million candlepower. There was no practical reason to have it there other than to draw attention to his resort, but this is LA after all, the capital of Draw Attention To Oneself.
The Echo Mountain searchlight at night, circa 1895:
Evidently simply “Garden of Allah, Hollywood, Cal” was enough of an address to ensure that George Burrows got his copy of The Hollywood Reporter. Of course it was enough! Everybody knew of it!
From the look of this photo from 1925, I’m guessing it was a big deal when the Shriners held a convention in town. Or at least they wanted Angelenos to know they were there and parked two stands with camels and palm trees outside the Broadway department store at Broadway and 4th St in downtown Los Angeles. All those flags are probably part of it, too. Even without all that going on, we can see how jam-packed Broadway was back then. Not just the street itself but those sidewalks are almost shoulder-to-shoulder.
I especially love that bus on the left hand side:
When I googled “Shriners 1925” I found them doing this. It’s a dance called the “Yama Yama.” Also, check out their shoes!
And this is the old Broadway department store at Broadway and 4th in 2019:
The 20,000-square-foot, 32-room Castillo del Lago was built by oil baron Patrick Longden in Beachwood Canyon, in 1926. This photo was taken that same year with the then 3-year-old Hollywoodland sign in the background. As we can see from the empty land around it, it really must have stuck out and been visible for miles around. In the 1930s, good-looking gangster-about-town, Bugsy Siegel ran a gambling operation out of the place, which seems an odd choice considering how distinctly visible it was. Then again, Bugsy didn’t scare easily.
The official address of the Castillo del Lago is: 6342 Mulholland Highway, Los Angeles, CA 90068. Here is how it looked in 2019:
Technically speaking this highly ornate entrance to the Villa Carlotta apartment building, 5959 Franklin Ave is called Churrigueresque, which means “relating to the lavishly ornamented late Spanish baroque style.” But I prefer to think of it as “over-the-top in the best possible way.” And it’s still there and in beautiful shape.
Never wanting to miss an opportunity at promoting a great job they were doing with the war effort, this circa early 1940s billboard outside the Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank is telling the world that not only was this “The home of Warner Bros. pictures,” but that they were “combining good citizenship with good picture making.”
I’m glad that someone thought to take a shot of the back of the 300-foot set that D.W. Griffith built at the intersection of Sunset Blvd and Hollywood Blvd in Los Feliz for his colossus of a movie, “Intolerance.” (1916) According to one report I read, he used more than 3000 extras and the daily cost of employing them sometimes reached $12,000—and that was a lotta moolah in 1915! At the top of the set was can see a banner “Intolerance or ‘The Mother and the Law’” which was the original name of the movie until Griffith expanded the movie to included three more storylines. I’m guessing they meant it as an advertisement for the coming movie, but at 300 feet in the air, I’m wondering how many passers-by actually saw it.
The caption to this photo was something like “Marathon dancers at Venice, circa 1923.” But I always thought that the marathon dancing craze grew out of the evermore desperate financial straits of the Great Depression. The girls are all in bathing suits, which suggests that they were at Venice Beach, but these funsters don’t exactly look like they’ve been dancing for 23 nonstop hours. In fact, they look like they’re all whooping it up, Roaring Twenties style for about ten minutes. Surely that means they were due for a bathtub gin break?
In the land where citizens would bring a searchlight to the opening of a supermarket (see: https://wp.me/p5XK3w-WL) it seems fitting that it would also be home to the world’s largest spotlight. This 60-inch wonder of the electric age was first seen at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, after which Thaddeus Loew brought it to his Echo Mountain resort. Evidently, it was visible 60 miles away on Catalina Island, which isn’t surprising considering it burned with the intensity of 100,000 candles, which, when magnified by a massive reflecting lens mirror, became 375 million candlepower. There was no practical reason to have it there other than to draw attention to his resort, but this is LA after all, the capital of Draw Attention To Oneself.
From the look of this photo from 1925, I’m guessing it was a big deal when the Shriners held a convention in town. Or at least they wanted Angelenos to know they were there and parked two stands with camels and palm trees outside the Broadway department store at Broadway and 4th St in downtown Los Angeles. All those flags are probably part of it, too. Even without all that going on, we can see how jam-packed Broadway was back then. Not just the street itself but those sidewalks are almost shoulder-to-shoulder.
The 20,000-square-foot, 32-room Castillo del Lago was built by oil baron Patrick Longden in Beachwood Canyon, in 1926. This photo was taken that same year with the then 3-year-old Hollywoodland sign in the background. As we can see from the empty land around it, it really must have stuck out and been visible for miles around. In the 1930s, good-looking gangster-about-town, Bugsy Siegel ran a gambling operation out of the place, which seems an odd choice considering how distinctly visible it was. Then again, Bugsy didn’t scare easily.
Technically speaking this highly ornate entrance to the Villa Carlotta apartment building, 5959 Franklin Ave is called Churrigueresque, which means “relating to the lavishly ornamented late Spanish baroque style.” But I prefer to think of it as “over-the-top in the best possible way.” And it’s still there and in beautiful shape.
Never wanting to miss an opportunity at promoting a great job they were doing with the war effort, this circa early 1940s billboard outside the Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank is telling the world that not only was this “The home of Warner Bros. pictures,” but that they were “combining good citizenship with good picture making.”