This photo from Life magazine give us a rare bird’s-eye view of the Sunset Strip at night. This was taken circa 1957 from the roof of the Sunset Tower at 8358 Sunset Blvd (back when it was an apartment building; it’s now a hotel.) I love the way pockets of light punctuate the hills above the strip. The building near the center of the photo is the Hacienda Arms Apartments aka Piazza del Sol. It was built in 1927 and are still there, beautifully maintained, and still fighting off the urban legend that it housed a notorious brothel in the 1930s.
The Hacienda Arms Apartments in March 2018:
For more info on the Hacienda, see Out of the Ashes
You’ve got to love a company that builds a 16-story structure for something as prosaic as storage but decorates it like it’s a vertical palace. They even put a pergola on top, and on top of that an ornate archway, and on top of that, a flag pole. Talk about adding eye candy to the Angeleno cityscape. This is the American Storage Company building at 3636 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, circa 1929. Seeing as how that’s the year of the stock market crash, if the building had gone up a year later, it probably wouldn’t have been nearly so pretty. Amazingly, it’s still around and still a storage facility.
What better shape for a café than a coffee pot? In this circa 1925 photo, we’re treated to the Wilshire Coffee Pot café at 8601 Wilshire Blvd on the northwest corner of Stanley Drive in Beverly Hills. The sign reads: “Stop & sip, Ben-Hur Drip” – the Ben-Hur brand of coffee (which originated San Diego) would have been having a field day at the time with the release of the MGM blockbuster of “Ben-Hur” starring Ramon Novarro. We can also catch a glimpse of one of those large homes that used to line Wilshire back then. These days, that lot is now a gas station. It was inevitable, I suppose, that Wilshire would become a completely commercial thoroughfare but the keeping the odd home home might’ve been a cheery reminder of yesteryear.
I love how the drive-in restaurants of Los Angeles were often repurposed once the life of the original business had run its course. In a former life this had been a Carpenter’s sandwich stand – home of the 15 cent steak sandwich, folks! –on the northeast corner of Wilshire and Le Doux in Beverly Hills. But by the 1950s (this photo is from 1957) it had been converted and expanded to a Delores Drive-in. It’s hard for me to look at photos like these and not have the theme song to “Happy Days” start up in my head.
In 1927-28, those fizzy brains in the MGM publicity department decided to take their mascot lion on a world tour. Too bad for Leo that the plane crashed in the Arizona desert. Lucky for Leo, though, he survived. 
The Beverly Hills Speedway was an enormous (1.25-mile) racetrack made of wood that stood south of Wilshire from 1920 to 1924 between Lasky Drive to the west and Beverly Drive to the east. In this aerial photo we can see how popular its racing events were. Get a load of all those cars parked along the southern perimeter—and this was taken in 1922, when car ownership wasn’t nearly so high as it would later become. We can also see how Beverly Hills itself was still only getting going. All that land to the west and north is still untouched.
And here was I thinking that free hotel shuttle buses were a new thing. This circa 1910s photo shows the free transport offered by the Occidental Hotel at 438 S Hill Street for guests who were arriving into downtown Los Angeles at the Santa Fe Railway’s La Grande Depot which used to stand between today’s 2nd and 3rd Streets. That’s more than a mile away so I’m sure the guests were happy that the hotel offered this service. Especially with those huge and heavy wheel-less traveling trunks people used to travel with back then.
When I found this circa 1937 shot of the Creswell Drug Store, 8801 Wilshire Blvd in Beverly Hills, I hoped that the Spanish Colonial Revival style building with the gorgeous cupola atop its turret had survived the wrecking ball, but alas no. In its place today stands a sleek, white, minimalist building with expansive windows that I’m sure ideally serves the purposes of its tenant, Steinway Pianos, but I think the Los Angeles cityscape is poorer for its loss. I’m very glad that someone thought to preserve its memory with this snapshot.
The Hollywood Hotel had only just opened when this photo was taken. The photographer was standing on an unpaved Highland Ave but being 1902, I doubt that he had to worry about traffic. Except, perhaps, a runaway horse and carriage. Maybe that one parked at the curb on the right. The hotel eventually took up the entire block but from this photo, we can see that it was originally quite a small place with only 16 guest rooms.