In this shot we have of a line of stores along Hollywood Blvd near Wilcox Ave: a cut-rate drug and sundries store, a men’s shop (clothing I assume), a billiards and snooker hall, a magic shop, and a circulating library (which was a cross between a bookstore and a library. People bought a subscription which allowed them to borrow books.) We rarely come across any of these sorts of businesses anymore, which is why I see this shot as a sort of microcosm of Hollywood in 1928, when the photo was taken.
Here is an ad for Ed Wise from 1930. His shop originally opened in 1920 across the street.
The street number over the billiards hall is 6419, which put it next door to the Warner Bros Theatre. This is how 6419 Hollywood Blvd looked in July 2024:
In 1953, Frank Sennes, former manager of the Hollywood Gardens nightclub, took over the famed Earl Carroll’s at 6230 Sunset Blvd and relaunched it as the Moulin Rouge. In a smart move, he kept the iconic “Most Beautiful Girl in the World” neon sign of a woman’s face that Carroll had commissioned, but otherwise made the place his own. This photo was taken on November 11, 1954 and reminds us why night scenes in movies often wet the streets before they start shooting: it adds loads of atmosphere
In this image (probably a postcard) we’re looking at the Original Farmer’s Market facing east from the corner of Third St and Fairfax Ave. If you ignore the huge Grove outdoor shopping mall that now stands next door, you can wander around the market and get a feel for what it was like to go shopping there in the 1930s and ‘40s. The market opened in 1934 and from what I can see, hasn’t changed much. Perhaps the stores themselves have, but not the mid-century feel of the place. The yellow car parked bottom right is a circa 1953 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and its blue neighbor is a 1953 Buick, so let’s call this one circa mid-1950s.
Following on from yesterday’s 1929 view of the William Penn Hotel, comes this similar building, the Windsor Apartments. This place was built in 1926 and this photo was taken a year later in 1927, when tree shade was meager but parking was easier. Its address is 3198 7th St, which means that side street is Catalina. And that means the building looked out across the Ambassador Hotel, which had opened in 1921. Its residents could have walked to the Cocoanut Grove, which I would have done often if I’d been living there at the time.
Built in 1928, the William Penn Hotel at 2208 W 8th St, Los Angeles always catches my eye whenever I drive past it. To me, it looks like it’s been plucked out of some centuries-old East Coast city and plopped down into the middle of LA. You don’t see many buildings like this anymore, and certainly not in that part of town, a block south of MacArthur Park, which makes it all the more striking when you come across it. Back in 1929, when this photo was taken, the area would have been a rather desirable place to be, not too far from crowded downtown but with lots of space and fresh air, so I can see why someone built a hotel there in the late 1920s. But with the Depression just around the corner, I wonder how the hotel fared in its early days.
This aerial photo from 1964 reminds us of something that used to be ubiquitous, but is now quite rare: the drive-in theater. The one we’re looking at here in this 1964 aerial shot is the Victory Drive-in Theatre at 13037 Victory Blvd in North Hollywood. Its opening night showed “My Dream Is Yours” and “Ma & Pa Kettle” on May 25, 1949, when land in the San Fernando Valley was cheap enough to make a drive-in theater financially feasible. This one had room for 650 cars, and had a 28-year run, closing on February 13, 1977, showing “Bound For Glory” and “Aloha, Bobby and Rose.”
I don’t have a lot of information on this coffee shop, but I find this image so evocative of 1950s LA coffee shops that, for me, at least , it’s enough. This color night photo is of Pick’s coffee shop at 11925 Santa Monica Blvd in West Los Angeles. With is neon-lit zigzagging roofline, I suspect it qualifies as being in the Googie style, but I’m not 100% sure. At the very least it’s Googie-adjacent. Either way, it looks very inviting for a late-night feast of coffee and pancakes, doesn’t it?
During the week of August 31 to September 7, 1955, Los Angeles experienced its worst-ever heatwave, reaching a record peak of 110° on September 1st. And then on September 13 (69 years ago today!), this spell of hot weather and a low inversion layer led to the highest recorded ozone level in Los Angeles history. And you know what ozone is the major ingredient of? Smog! So here we have some nutty Angeleno who thought he’d take walk through the worst smog Los Angeles had ever seen. He was on the corner of First and Olive Streets in downtown Los Angeles. The smog was so thick that we can barely see the outline of LA City Hall.
I don’t normally post photos taken as recently as the 1980s, but apart from a couple of tell-tale details, this one could be from pretty much any time in the past hundred years, not specifically 1983. This is the front entrance of the train station that the Southern Pacific Railroad built at 400 W Cerritos Ave, Glendale, California, in 1924. How nice it must have been to live in a time and place where even structures as utilitarian as train stations were designed and built to please the eye.
In this photo (which has a very postcard-y feel to it) we’re looking northwest across the Hollywood Freeway. That overpass on the left is Hollywood Blvd and if we look much farther into the background, we can see the Hollywood Sign. These days, you’d have to be driving along that stretch of the Hollywood Freeway (aka “The 101”) on Sunday mornings to encounter traffic as light as this, which for a 21st century Angeleno, looks like heaven. The pale green vehicle in the center appears to be a 1955/56 Chrysler, so let’s called this image circa mid-1950s. The Hollywood Freeway was completed in 1952, so if this photo is anything to go by, it was still heaven to drive on 3 or 4 years later.