Aerial shot of new development between Wilshire Blvd and Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, 1924
It’s hard to think Los Angeles land ever being this empty, even as recently as 1924, when this aerial was taken. We’re looking a swath of land to the immediate west of what we now think of as Century City. The border to the north is Wilshire Blvd and to the south is Pico Blvd. That’s Westwood Blvd on the west and Fox Hills Drive on the east. If you look closely, you can see that houses have only just started to dot the landscape. Fast forward 100 years and every square inch of that land is filled in.
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Tagged 20th Century-Fox, Aerial photographs, Los Angeles, Wilshire Blvd
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Night shot of the Brown Derby restaurant and Eddie Cantor gift shop, Vine Street, Hollywood, circa late 1930s
I love shots of buildings that are creatively lit up at night and this one of the Vine Street Brown Derby glows with charm. I’m putting this one at the late 1930s because next door is the Eddie Cantor Gift Shop, which started showing up in photos taken of the Derby in the 30s. In the 1930s he was one of the world’s highest-paid radio stars so I’d love to know why Cantor felt the need to open a gift store. Perhaps he was all too aware of the vagaries of showbiz and felt it a wise move to diversify his income. I wonder what he sold – Eddie Cantor ashtrays and bobbleheads, maybe?
UPDATE:
I got to thinking about Cantor’s store, why he opened one, and how long it was open for. My googling led me to David Weinstein who wrote “The Eddie Cantor Story: A Jewish Life in Performance and Politics” (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PS54JM4/ ). So I contacted David and asked him if he could answer these questions. He wrote back and told me:
“Cantor understood the power of celebrity. From the time he headlined on Broadway during the late 1910s, he was a master of promotion (especially self-promotion) and marketing. Along these lines, for a short time in 1937, I believe that there were at least two Eddie Cantor Gift Shops in Los Angeles. The Vine Street store in your picture opened in 1936 or 1937 and closed within a year.
Cantor was active in actors’ labor unions, including the Screen Actors Guild during the 1930s. He served as SAG’s president from 1933 to 1935. Cantor opened a gift shop in the SAG building, circa 1937. The address of the gift shop was 8749 Sunset Blvd. and SAG’s address was 8743 Sunset. The attached ad (see below) from the Screen Guild Magazine (July 1937, page 22), gives you a sense of what the store carried. It wasn’t filled with celebrity products from Cantor and other stars, but was a more general gift shop for “bric-a-brac” and antiques.
David’s website is: https://www.davidmweinstein.com/
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Tagged Brown Derby, Hollywood, Night photo, Restaurants, Stores and Shopping
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Court Flight funicular, between Temple and First Streets, downtown Los Angeles, 1940
Angels Flight is the most famous funicular in downtown Los Angeles but it wasn’t the only one. There was also Court Flight, which ferried passengers up the steep incline of Bunker Hill between Temple and First Streets. Also unlike Angel’s Flight, passengers were only charged for the ride up. This photo was taken in 1940, long before the leveling of Bunker Hill and removal of all those old Victorian mansions. In fact, three years later Court Flight burned down under somewhat mysterious circumstances. That large building in the background is the old Los Angeles Hall of Records building. It lasted until 1973.
The old Los Angeles Hall of Records building (1911-1973)
Waiting for a bus at the corner of Wilshire Blvd and Arden Ave, Los Angeles, circa late 1930s
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.
That same view in April 2019:
Windward Ave, Venice, California, circa 1915
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.
Looking south down Broadway from the corner of Ninth Street, downtown Los Angeles, circa 1912
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.
Tony V says: “The building in the center is Hamburger’s, later known as the May Co. Built in 1906, it is currently undergoing rehabilitation with plans for retail, office and hotel space.”
The same view in April 2019:
The Eastern-Columbia department store building has now been converted to residential lofts:
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Tagged Downtown Los Angeles, Stores and Shopping, Streetcars
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Night shot of Holmby Hall clock tower building, corner of Westwood Blvd and Weyburn Ave, Westwood, Los Angeles
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.
Daytime shot probably taken at around the same time:
That same view in September 2017:
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.