We 21st century Angelinos are so used to looking south down Vine St past Yucca St, Hollywood and seeing the circular Capitol Records building that it can be easy for us (well, for me, anyway) to forget it wasn’t always there. Opening in 1956 between Yucca St and Hollywood Blvd, it became an instant icon of the Hollywood skyline. This photo (I’m guessing circa 1930s) was taken well before that, when the site was a parking lot and home of the Hollywood Barn that now stands across the street from the Hollywood Bowl. In this photo was can see the streetcar tracks that stretched along Vine St before turning east on Yucca.
This is how that same view looked in August 2022. That (Art Deco? Streamline Moderne?) building on the southeast corner is still with us and in excellent condition.
cap
Jungleland was an animal theme park in Thousand Oaks, 35 miles west of downtown LA. When it opened in 1926, as an animal training and housing facility for the Hollywood movie studios, Thousand Oaks was in the middle of nowhere, so those 170 acres would have come cheap. It started out as Goebel’s Lion Farm, and later the more exotic Goebel’s Wild Animal Farm. Over the years, it went through various purposes (many TV shows and movies were filmed there, such as “Tarzan”, “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, and “Birth of a Nation” as well as being was home to MGM’s Leo the Lion) and went by different names. But in the late 1950s, when this photo was taken, it was changed from World Jungle Compound to Jungleland. It would eventually close in October 1969, when its 1,800 animal occupants were sold at auction.
Continuing the theme from yesterday’s post of the Igloo ice cream store, today we have a gas station fashioned to resemble an iceberg. I get the igloo-iceberg-ice cream connection, but why you would build a gas station to look like an iceberg is beyond me. Unless, of course, it was purely to be eye-catching to passing motorists, which is all you need to do, really. I have no idea when this place was around or where; the caption merely read “Los Angeles, California.” But it is something I wouldn’t be at all surprised to come across if I were driving around LA in the 1920s or 1930s.
You’ve got to love the idea of a Los Angeles ice cream store fashioned to look like an iceberg. It’s a gimmick, sure, but it’s a gimmick that was obviously working because the Igloo Ice Cream store had plenty of customers. Technically, this is call mimetic architecture, which describes a building which resembles in some way the product it sells. This one stood at 4302 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles in the late 1920s. I admire the way they even included a little three-mast sailing boat, which I assume is an ice-cutter—and probably the only ice-cutter ship in all California.
As a 21st-century Angeleno, it’s rather shocking to see all the empty land around Los Angeles International Airport. And to see all the parking spaces surrounding the Theme Building. And only one runway. These days, every square inch of what you can see in this vintage photo is packed. How nice it must have been back in 1964, when this photo was taken, to drive up to LAX, find a park, and then see your loved one off at the gate lounge. No security, no scans, no lines, and most of all no need to take off your damned shoes.
I have very little information about this shot of two people playing golf at night, but triangulating the neon signs of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, the Broadway-Hollywood department store, and the Pantages Theatre, I’d say it was taken somewhere near the corner of Selma and Argyle Aves. In 1931 the Dyas department store became the Broadway-Hollywood. By that time, the Plaza Hotel had opened (1925) as had the Pantages (1930), so we can at least say that this photo was taken after 1931. I am a bit surprised that there was enough land so close to Hollywood and Vine by the early 1930s to hit golf balls.
In this eye-catching aerial photo, we’re looking down at the RKO movie studios in Hollywood. That road stretching from the upper left to the lower right is Gower St, and the wider road it deadends at the bottom is Melrose Ave. Where Gower meets Melrose is the famous corner where RKO had a huge cement globe with its iconic radio tower on top. But in this photo, it’s not there yet. Nor is the soundstage it sat on. Instead, that area is the studio parking lot. This photo came with no date, but I’ve seen a similar one, which was dated 1930, so I guess this was taken around that time, too. In the far upper right corner we can see the soundstages of neighboring Paramount, and in the far upper left, the open land of the Hollywood Cemetery which was founded in 1899, and both of which are still there. RKO on the other hand is long gone, and those studio facilities are now part of Paramount.
I doubt that I’ll ever tire of finding new-to-me photos of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Blvd, especially if they’re in color. This photo is dated 1950, and I’m wondering if it was taken after a refurbishment. That teal carpeting and those green and orange chair upholstering look very ‘50s to me, but were probably very modern to Cocoanut Grove patrons. I’m surprised at the size of the dance floor. Is it just me, or would you have expected it to be bigger?
These days, the Scottish-themed steak house called the Tam O’Shanter Inn at 2980 Los Feliz Blvd in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles is famously known as one of LA’s longest running restaurants and is where Walt Disney often used to dine during his early days as a struggling animator. But back in 1924, when this photo was taken, the place had only been open for a couple of years, and was still the size of a house that looked like it had been plucked from a remote Scottish village and plopped into the middle of a rapidly growing town.