I love it when someone takes a random photo from the dashboard of their car. Especially if they’ve got color film in their camera—and perhaps even the vibrantly hued Kodachrome! We’re looking west down Wilshire Blvd from Dunsmuir Ave. Across the street is Mullen Bluett, a popular clothing store. We can also see the large neon sign for Silverwoods, an upscale menswear store. We can date it at 1956 because a British movie called “Private’s Progress” is playing at El Rey Theatre (at 5515 Wilshire, it opened in 1937 and it still around.) Judging from what appears to be a giant bunny in a top hat out front of Silverwood’s, my guess it was Eastertime, 1956.
The same view in April 2019:
The El Rey Theatre in 2019. Check out that terrazzo on the sidewalk. It’s almost gorgeous enough to make you look up from your cell phone!
Is that a well-dressed Easter bunny?
See also: Silverwoods menswear store, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, June 24, 1936.
I never know when or how I’m going to come across a vintage photo of Los Angeles. I found this one in a display in my doctor’s office. She inherited it from a doctor who had retired but was a history buff. It’s of the Southern Pacific Electric railway station on Chandler Blvd in North Hollywood. If the doctor’s caption can be believed, the photo was taken in 1927, which made me wonder what would have been around there back then. It was first known as the Lankershim Depot when it was built back in 1893, when North Hollywood was known as Lankershim—there really couldn’t have been much around back then! But I wanted to post this because the building itself is still there and has been repurposed as a Groundworks coffee shop.
Along with the Red Cars criss-crossing Los Angeles’s streetcar network, there were also the Los Angeles Railway Yellow Cars. Their system had 25 lines, designated with numbers and letters. We can see that car #1317 was on the “R” line from the letter posted in the box on the roof. The R line took Angelenos from Hancock Park to East Los Angeles by way of 3rd Street, Vermont Avenue, 7th Street, Boyle Avenue, and Whittier Blvd. 7th Ave passes by the southern border of MacArthur Park so I’m guessing that’s where this photo was taken (circa 1940s). I’m also guessing that tower we can see in the background is the Bullocks Wilshire department store.
Apparently this is the earliest-known photo of Los Angeles. Taken in around 1862, the anonymous photographer was standing on Fort Moore Hill, which is a block or two north of where the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels now stands. The view is looking east over to the Los Angeles Plaza, which is the circular plaza next to Olvera Street. The plaza is still there, as is the church, which was built in 1822, as well as Pico House, LA’s first luxury hotel, which opened in 1875. At the time, LA’s population was around 4400 so as we can see from this photo, everybody had lots of room to roam.
This house at 6286 Rodgerton Dr. stands high in the canyons of Hollywoodland. Judging by that snazzy roadster and yoo-hoo-ing flapper out front, I’d say this photo was taken circa mid 1920s, which means it would have been one of the first houses on the block. It would have been quiet at night with no rowdy neighbors (sound travels up and down those canyons) but who would you have gone to if you needed to borrow a cup of sugar?
A fun fact that not everybody knows about Beverly Hills is that every street has a different sort of tree planted along it. Many of them are different sorts of palm streets. These days, we’re used to many of those trees being 30 to 40 feet high but this photo reminds us that twas not always thus. This is a shot of North Canon Drive taken in the early 1930s when these palms were still quite new. I’m surprised they were planted so closely together—it gives a jungle feel to the street. But if course that became less of an issue the taller the palm trees became.
In this photo we can see the intersection of the Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevards at the western edge of Beverly Hills. The year was 1935 and the fountain (known as the Electric Color fountain) that stands at that corner was installed four years prior and is still there. What struck me about this photo—apart from that 1930s Greyhound bus and that snazzy roadster in the foreground—was all that empty land behind the fountain. I can’t imagine it stayed that way very long.
Most samples of hotel letterhead usually come pristine and unused so it was great to see this image of a letter that someone wrote while they were staying at the Garden of Allah in 1939. Seeing this brings a note of reality that showed someone was living their life and was moved to write to some who was obviously going through a rough patch. So they did what we all did before we had smart phone and could send off a text – we grabbed the hotel stationary and wrote a letter. By hand! (And the probably stole the hotel pen afterward.) And something else I didn’t know about the Garden of Allah – their cable address was GARDALLAH.
Oh, if only these walls could talk. This shot gives us a clear idea of what the inside of the Vine Street Brown Derby in Hollywood looked. I don’t have a date on this one it wasn’t until after the place opened in 1929 that a young a young artist who went by the name of “Vitch” offered to sketch caricatures of diners in exchange for a bowl of hot soup and a cup of coffee. The owner, Bob Cobb, agree and soon after that the walls started to fill with his celebrity caricatures, Given how many of them hang on the walls, I would guess this photo was taken well into the 1930s by which time the Derby had become a prominent fixture on the Hollywood social scene.
If we had been wandering around the Hollywood hills above the Sunset Strip in the early 1930s, this would have been the view looking southeast. The white tower near the center of the photo is the Sunset Tower, which opened in 1929 (as an apartment building before it became a hotel.) The house in the foreground is at 8440 Carlton Way. It was built in 1926 and is still there and, from what I can see, still fairly intact. The photographer might have been standing on empty land farther up the hillside, or he could have on Hollywood Boulevard. It doesn’t end at Laurel Canyon Blvd but continues to wind its way through the hills until it hits Sunset Plaza Drive. Either way, it was (and is) a commanding view.
