The Beverly Hills Speedway opened on February 28, 1920 on a lot bounded by Wilshire Blvd, South Beverly Dr, Olympic Blvd, S. Lasky Dr. It was a wood-boarded, oval-shaped race track with seating for an impressive 70,000 race fans. It was only around for 4 years – the final race was held February 24, 1924. It was very popular in its day, but good luck finding your car afterward. You’d be okay if the roof of yours was white, otherwise you’d be smart to allow a couple of extra hours at the end of the day.
Here is a photo I found showing the location of the Beverly Hills Speedway. (It’s a bit misleading, though, as the Beverly Wilshire Hotel faces north, not south as pictured here. But I’m sure you get the idea.)
This is how that land looks today—wall to wall housing. It’s why the Speedway didn’t last too long: that land got way too valuable to use it driving cars around in a circle.
One name for this 1896 photo could be “Out with the Old, In with the New.” A new electric streetcar is passing an old cable streetcar at the corner of Spring and 1st Streets in downtown LA, looking south. And on the other side we can see horse-drawn carriages, which were the main form of transport before cable cars. The clock on the right shows the time to have been 8:17, so what we’re seeing here is peak-hour traffic, 1890s style. With so much hustle and bustle, it’s not hard to imagine the noise that must have been filling the air at that moment.
In 1939, Rita Hayworth was still an up-and-coming starlet (she had a minor role in “Only Angels Have Wings” starring Cary Grand and Jean Arthur) when she posed for this photo stepping off the northeast corner of Wilshire Blvd and N. Beverly Dr. in Beverly Hills. Behind her is a tri-light traffic signal. In 1931, those lights began to replace the semaphore signal, and Wilshire was the first street in LA to get them. I can’t imagine Rita’s controlling studio boss, Columbia’s Harry Cohn, would’ve been too happy to see a Warner Bros. theater in the background.
In this rather amazing aerial photograph, we looking east from Beverly Hills. That main street is Santa Monica Blvd and what used to be known locally as “Little Santa Monica Blvd” is where those train tracks are. (The small building right at the bottom in the center is the Beverly train station.) All that development in the distance is Hollywood. This photo is from around 1924, so Hollywood would have been fairly well established. But look at all that empty land between Beverly Hills and Hollywood. Empty, unused, and available to be picked up for a song!
Whenever I see a photo like this, I’m often amazed to see a locomotive pulling a line of passenger carriages along a track laid out along city streets. Maybe it was a common sight back then, but it still makes me wonder how many accidents this sort of thing caused. Or maybe pedestrians always saw that big shiny round headlight casing coming from a mile away. This locomotive was Southern Pacific GS-3 class, 14 of which were made in late 1937. This photo was taken at the intersection of Alameda and Aliso Streets in downtown Los Angeles. That tower in the background is part of Union Station, which had opened on May 3rd,1939, so I’m guessing the photo was taken later than year, when the station was still a brand-new addition to the LA skyline.
Not all buildings have to be grand and ornate to catch the eye. They can also be striking with simple, clean lines like this J.C. Penney store. It stood at 1202 3rd St, Santa Monica, on the corner of Wilshire Blvd. This photo was taken in 1949, decades before that corner became the end of the Third Street Promenade pedestrian mall. This photo is empty of vehicle and people traffic so I guess it was taken early on a Sunday morning which was probably the only time nobody was around.
I’m so glad the photographer of this 1965 image was using color film. Otherwise we might never have known that 1960 Chevrolet Impala zooming past the Theme building at Los Angeles International Airport (which had opened in 1961) was such a vibrant red. Whenever I see cars like that, I wonder how the heck the driver pulled off parallel parking. Lots (and lots) of practice, I suppose.
In this remarkably crisp aerial shot from 1932, we’re looking north from south of Sunset Blvd across Hollywood to the Hollywood Hills. They were still sparsely populated with lots of room for more and more homes. The image is so detailed that we can see, from left to right: the Roosevelt Hotel, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the El Capitan Theatre, Hollywood High School, Hollywood United Methodist Church, streetcars along Highland Ave, and the Hollywood First National Bank building on the corner of Hollywood and Highland.
