I’ve read in a number of places that the intersection of Broadway and 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles was the city’s busiest intersection. I have not, however, been able to understand why that was. But when you see photos like this, you can see it must have been true. Here we can see a Los Angeles Railway “M” streetcar sometime in the 1920s. It’s rattling along Broadway en route to Inglewood while it looks like half of LA is crowding the sidewalk! The other side of the street (outside Boos Bros. Cafeteria) doesn’t seem nearly so packed. It makes me wonder why some of those people didn’t cross the street!
Riley G said: “It was a major streetcar transfer point.”
Keith J said: “And also right across the street is a branch of “The Bank of Italy,” founded by the great A. P. Giannini. This means that, definitively, the pic could not be later than 1930—as Wikipedia clarifies: “The Bank of Italy merged with the smaller Bank of America, Los Angeles in 1928. In 1930, Giannini changed the name from ‘Bank of Italy’ to ‘Bank of America.””
Andie P said: “In the fifties some of the streets had wider sidewalks on one side until the streets were widened in the sixties.”
It’s probably just the angle of the camera, but without the streetcar lines, Broadway seems much narrower nowadays. This image is from June 2024.
I doubt that I shall ever tire of looking at vintage photos of the Bullocks Wilshire department store. It stood at 3050 Wilshire Blvd between Westmoreland Ave and Wilshire Place. The store opened on September 26, 1929 and at the time it was is considered a risky venture because it was outside of downtown LA, where all the important stores were located. And then a month later, the stock market crashed—not exactly a primo time to open a very upscale, very large store. But Bullocks Wilshire survived, and by the time this photo was taken in the late 1930s, it was thriving as one of THE stores that people with lots o’ dough went to spend it.
As an Angeleno who often finds himself stuck in traffic, I take a measure of satisfaction knowing that my fellow Angelenos from yesteryear had to deal with much the same thing. These poor drivers were stuck in a traffic jam in around 1946 as they were on Wilshire Blvd (note the Wilshire Special streetlights.) The white building on the right is the Rex Arms apartments, which I suspect means we’re looking west down Wilshire from around Figueroa St and the cars were heading into downtown LA. It looks like those drivers turning onto a side street had had enough!
To my way of thinking, this photo is a quintessentially LA photo. There wasn’t much separating these Angelenos swimming at the Echo Park Community Pool from the Hollywood Freeway—just a triangle of grass and a wall. But for inner-city dwellers like these people probably were (Echo Park is adjacent to downtown Los Angeles) it was easier than catching three buses to the beach in the middle of summer. The Hollywood Freeway (aka “the 101”) opened in the early 1950s and this photo was taken in 1958, by which time the freeway saw lots of traffic each day.
These three cars are parked out front of CBS Radio’s Columbia Square studios, which opened at 6121 Sunset Blvd to much fanfare on April 30, 1938. It was home to CBS’s Los Angeles radio and television operations until 2007, which is an admirable run by anyone’s standards. It’s a pity we can’t make out who was listed on the marquee so see what show was playing that day, but that red station wagon is a 1955 Ford. By the mid-1950s, CBS was making television at the Columbia Square studios, too.
And from the “They Sure Don’t Make ‘Em Like That Any More” file comes the Fox Stadium Theatre at 8906 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles. It opened on March 5, 1931. This photo was taken later that same year, so everything we can see here is brand spanking new. As if the detailing on the main part of the building wasn’t enough, that tower is a masterpiece of Art Deco gorgeousness. And it had beacon at the top to warn low-flying aircraft.
This vibrant Kodachrome color photo is of the Pantages Theatre (back then the “RKO Pantages”) at 6233 Hollywood Blvd half a block east of Vine St. The billboard and marquee advertises movies from three different years: Divorce Italian Style (September 1962) and Yesterday Today Tomorrow (March 1964) and The Pawnbroker (April 1965) so this photo must have been taken ’65. I love checking out the neighboring stores: a personnel agency, and optical company (eyeglasses, I assume?) the Frolic Room (which opened in 1934 and is still around) a greeting cards store, and then much farther down the block is AE England, a Pontiac dealer. I also love that shade of green on the Pantages blade sign.
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This image gives us an idea of what the view across the northern end of downtown LA looked like in the late 1920s. From left to right, we’ve got the Hall of Justice, Old County Courthouse (the corner of Temple & Broadway), and the Hall of Records. And looming in the background is the “new” City Hall. It opened in April 1928, so I’m putting this at circa late 1920s. I don’t want to be Mr. Everything Was Always Better Back Then, but this collection of buildings do make for a more interesting skyline with each building quite different from its neighbor.
I could find scant information about this color photo of a Pacific Electric red car. It was taken on April 13, 1954 as the streetcar was trundling through Beverly Hills. I assume it was running along the Santa Monica Blvd track because those hills in the background look like the Hollywood Hills, which makes sense because the destination sign reads “Hollywood.”
In this May 1932 photo looking east along Wilshire Blvd from Detroit St, a few things catch my eye. Look at all that gorgeous detailing along the top of the building on the right. It almost looks like it’s wearing a crown. And on that streetlamp – they were called a Wilshire Special and were only on Wilshire Blvd – the “Detroit” street sign points north and south is in a style I don’t recall seeing before. And that big white building on the left is the only one in this photo that I recognize. It’s the E. Clem Wilson Building and was only three years old when this photo was taken. It caught my eye because I recently read that it was used as the headquarters of Daily Planet in the first season of the “Adventures of Superman” TV series. I guess that was before they switched to the more iconic LA City Hall.