Angels Flight funicular and Elk Building, downtown Los Angeles, circa 1910s
This color postcard of the Angels Flight funicular was most likely taken in the 1910s and shows us how much of what we think of as downtown Los Angeles (which was probably just “Los Angeles” to the locals) was dotted with the sort of large homes we can see to the left. It looks so sedate, doesn’t it? The “VEG” in the sign nearer the lower right hand corner is the large sign for the Vegetarian Cafeteria that stood the corner of 3rd and Hill Streets for most of the first two decades of the 20th century.
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Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds rollercoaster ride under construction, as seen from the Submarine Lagoon, circa early 1959
The Matterhorn Bobsleds ride feels like it’s been at Disneyland forever, but it wasn’t constructed until 1959. Interesting, it started out as a great, big pile of dirt that resulted from the construction of Sleeping Beauty’s castle. To pretty it up, they covered it with “snow” and added toboggans. Then, when Walt Disney visited Switzerland to “Third Man on the Mountain,” he fell in love with the beauty of the Matterhorn mountain and an idea for the first-ever tubular steel roller coaster was born, and opened June 14, 1959.
Aerial view of the La Brea Tar Pits along Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, circa 1924
In this circa 1924 aerial view of the La Brea Tar Pits (looking from the north, so that’s 6th Street along the bottom and Wilshire Blvd along the top) we can see that by the mid-1920s, quite a few houses have started to fill in all that empty land south of Wilshire. But north of 6th Street would still have been punctuated with oil wells too valuable to replace with housing. (After WWII, that area would become the Park La Brea housing complex.) Meanwhile, in the middle, those tar pits keep bubbling away.
Interior of Chasen’s Restaurant, 9039 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles
One of the classic Hollywood restaurants I wish I could have experienced is Chasen’s on Beverly Boulevard near Doheny. Acting on the advice of director Frank Capra, Dave Chasen opened “Chasen’s Southern Pit” in December 1936. It had 6 tables, an 8-stool counter and a 6-stool bar, and he dispensed chili at 25 cents a bowl and a couple of BBQ ribs for 35 cents. It’s a credit to him (and his world-famous chili recipe) that he was able to build it into one of the go-to joints around town filled with a who’s who of Hollywood heavy hitters. Dave also invented the Shirley Temple after an incident when Shirley was there and got upset because she wanted a drink just like her parents. What surprises me about this photo is that huge empty space to the left. It seems like a waste. If you’re reading this and went there, can you tell us why?
Daniel says: “They served most everything from carts they wheeled around. But honestly, I think it is the angle of the photo that makes the empty space seem so HUGE (and the camera always tends to distort space anyway), I don’t remember it looking that “empty.” At the bottom right corner you see those shadows…that’s from another set of identical booths running along that wall. I was lucky enough to go several times, including the last day of service.”
Exterior of Chasen’s Restaurant, Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles:
In 1926, a stretch of Oxnard’s beach was transformed into Hollywood-by-the-Sea – fifty miles west of Tinseltown
In 1926, some bright spark—a real estate developer, I imagine—got the inspired idea to develop a deserted stretch of the beach at Oxnard and rename it something more appealing: Hollywood-by-the-Sea. These days, the drive from Hollywood to Oxnard takes about an hour on the Hollywood Freeway, but back then, the real Hollywood must have felt like it was a million miles away. In the photo below, you’ll see that it was pretty sparse but all that wide open space and fresh sea air would have made a nice change from the bustle of the city. And the name stuck—sort of. It’s now called Hollywood Beach.
These next two shots were taken in 1929:
And what’s a California beach without a Californian bathing beauty:
The area as it is now:
Federico said: “Early Hollywood studios had trekked to the Beaches there for the expansive Sand, most notably part of production for Rudolph Valentino’s ‘The Sheik’ in 1921. Some scenes for it were also shot in the Dunes of Guadalupe, which is North of here in Santa Barbara County. All that was kind of the catalyst to create Hollywood by-the-Sea. And, being a pretty new resident in Ojai/Ventura County, there actually ARE some really nice parts of Oxnard, like Silver Strand and Hollywood Beach, as this area is known today. I was amazed, after back to school and end of Summer, there was just nobody around.” See also Rudy Valentino – The Sheik (Behind the scenes)
Paramount Famous Players Lasky studios, 5451 Marathon St, Los Angeles, 1930
These days, we’re used to Paramount studios taking up a long swath of Melrose Ave but in times long past, the studio lot was on Marathon, a street that has now been swallowed up by the ever-growing needs of a powerful movie studio. What was originally the Robert Brunton studios, became United Studios in 1921 until Famous Players-Lasky bought them in 1926, and in 1927, Famous Players-Lasky took the name Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. This photo was taken in 1930 and I love the grandeur of the building closest to the photographer. It looks more like something you’d see in Europe.
The Biltmore Hotel under construction and Pershing Square, downtown Los Angeles, 1922
In this rare panorama taken in 1922, we can see the Beaux Art architecture of Biltmore Hotel taken shape across a leafy Pershing Square with a huge fountain in the middle. When the Biltmore opened in October 1923, it was LA’s first international-level luxury hotel and instantly earned the nickname “The Host of the Coast.”
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Tagged Biltmore Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles, Hotels, Pershing Square
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The Orpheum Theatre, 838 S. Broadway, downtown Los Angeles, the night RKO’s premiere of “Cimarron” – February 6, 1931
These days, the Orpheum Theatre is one of the shining lights of Broadway theaters due to its superb restoration. But back in the day, after it opened on February 15, 1926, as the fourth and final Los Angeles venue for the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, it hosted everything from burlesque to jazz and, as we can see from this 1931 photo, movie premieres. On February 6th, RKO held the LA premiere of their version of the Edna Ferber novel Cimarron with a “Huge Stage Show – Mighty Male Chorus – Augmented Orchestra.” (LA history fun fact: The Orpheum replaced the Mission Theatre, which is where Valentino shot to Hollywood stardom after the LA premiere of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.)
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Tagged Broadway, Downtown Los Angeles, Movie Premiere, Night photo, Theaters
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Columbia Studios at the corner of Sunset Blvd and Gower St, Los Angeles, 1939
In 1939, some intrepid photographer climbed onto the roof of the CBS Columbia Square studios on the northwest corner of Sunset Blvd and Gower St and took a photo of Columbia Studios, where they could have been filming “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” I’ve always assumed that Columbia studios filled the corner but from the looks of the Columbia Drug Co. drugstore, there was a line of stores along Sunset. That water tower in the distance belonged to Warner Bros. when they still maintained the studios where they filmed “The Jazz Singer.”
That same corner in 2018. Now that I think about it, I should never have assumed that the Columbia lot didn’t extend to the corner. Nowadays, there’s a restaurant where those stores used to stand.
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Tagged Columbia Pictures, Movie Studios, Stores and Shopping, Sunset Blvd
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Mulholland Highway sounds like an overly grand name for a road that curves around the western edge of Beachwood Canyon in the Hollywood hills for maybe a couple of mines but hey, LA is built on grand dreams. Like most of the roads in Hollywoodland, the highway (not to be confused with Mulholland Drive) was built in the mid-1920s before, as we can see here, hardly any of the houses started appearing.