This is a close-up of a photo taken across the street from The Broadway Department Store at Broadway and Fourth Street, Los Angeles, circa 1909. (See the full photo below) but I zoomed in because I wanted to show how packed with life the streets were. Not only is the sidewalk busy with formally dressed pedestrians, shoppers, window shoppers, but just in this stretch along there are six horse-drawn carriages, most of them with two horses. So the air was filled with both sounds (neighing, clop-clopping horseshoes, drivers calling) and smells (which we can all imagine) that we no longer witness. But now I’m wondering: can you parallel park a horse-drawn carriage?
Click on the above photo to get a larger view.
You can click on it a second time to zoom in even closer.
In 1924, a developer by the name of Francis S. Montgomery built the first commercial development along the Sunset Strip (although it wasn’t called that at the time. Back then, Sunset Boulevard wasn’t even paved over.) He called it “Sunset Plaza,” a name that has stuck all these years. Judging by the cars parked around the plaza, this photo was taken in the late 1930s. Can you imagine how gleaming white it must have been when it was still brand new?
The premiere of Twentieth Century-Fox’s “The Robe” at Grauman’s Chinese Theater was a big deal because it was the first CinemaScope movie to be released. In fact, Grauman’s had to be closed down for two days so that the theater could be re-equipped — “Shown on Our Curved Miracle Mirror Screen.” What I’ve never noticed before is seen in the lower right corner: Roosevelt Drugs store. It obviously took its name from the Roosevelt Hotel across street, which is where this photographer would have been standing to take this spectacular shot.
Ever since it opened in 1922, the shell at the Hollywood Bowl has undergone several incarnations. For the first five years, there wasn’t any shell at all. Then, in 1927, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son Lloyd designed the shell we see in this photo. This stepped pyramidal design was made out of leftover lumber from the 1922 Pickford-Fairbanks studio production of “Robin Hood.” It didn’t last long, though. By the following year, Wright had replaced it with an early version of the now-familiar circular shape.
This sure must have been a sight to see: the transportation of the fuselage of Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose—oops, sorry Howard: the H-4 Hercules to Long Beach Harbor on June 11th, 1946. It can’t have been a fast moving convoy so there would have been plenty of opportunity to take pictures as it wound its route. It started out at Hughes Airport in Playa Vista, along Sepulveda Blvd to Imperial Hwy to Crenshaw Blvd to Rosecrans Blvd to San Pedro St to Avalon Blvd. Between stopping traffic and uncoupling overhead power lines, the logistics must have been a nightmare!
This quaint and charming building shows us how small the great behemoth movie studios started out as. I don’t have a definitive date on this photo but what I take to be the main building of Universal Pictures looks like it could have been tucked away in the San Bernardino Mountains. The caption says “North Hollywood” which used to be called “Lankershim” until 1927, but is now known as Universal City—because the studio has grown to the size of one, with its own post office, police force, and fire brigade.
It’s in photos like this that we can see why filmmakers often wet the streets for a night shot as it adds greatly to the atmosphere. Especially if you’re filming the night noir streets of Hollywood. This is a circa 1939 shot of Vine Street from about halfway between Sunset Blvd and Selma Ave. The Tropics, a Polynesian-themed bar, was at 1525 N. Vine St. I love the bowling alley neon sign of the Hollywood Recreational Center and across the street, further north, the hat shaped sign of the Brown Derby.
The middle of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood isn’t the first place I’d have thought of if I’d wanted to raise casaba melons. But if this huge crop is anything to go by, apparently 101 years ago, it was the perfect place. These three melon farmers were standing at what is now the corner of Sunset Blvd and Harper Ave, which is now—of course it is—a parking lot.
