This photo is a reminder of two things that Venice, California used to have: canals and oil wells. To be fair, there is still a handful of canals left in what is known as the Venice Canal Historic District. But there are certainly no more oil wells blanketing the area as we see in this circa 1930 photo. Without any landmarks other than the bridge, it’s hard to know where this photo was taken, but I do know that when Abbot Kinney envisaged loftily idealized “Venice of America,” he most certainly did not imagine it would be covered with stinky noisy oil wells.
Todd von H. said: “This is Grand Canal running down to the Marina channel. Not one of Kinney’s canals, but part of the Short Line development that went in a year. Kinney’s canals and development became part of LA. His canals were filled in. The later development was not and so survive today. There are several of these large bridges. This may be the one featured in Touch of Evil where Orson Welles’s corrupt cop dies in the trash filled canal.”
John J. “What you’re looking at is the Playa Del Rey Oil Field and the future Marina del Rey. The canal is the main canal that went from Playa Del Rey to Venice. There were no oil wells in Kinney’s Venice of America, other than in the 1930s, when two wells were drilled off of Venice fishing pier. The canals that still exist also had nothing to do with Venice of America. They were built adjacent to the Ocean Strand tract by the Short Line Beach syndicate.”
I can only imagine (with this help of photos like this) what it must have been like to drive around Los Angeles in the 1930s. This is the Selig Commercial Building that went up on the northwest corner of Western Ave and 3rd St, four blocks north of Wilshire in 1931. The sight of those black and gold terracotta tiles shining in the sun must makes me wonder if it was inspired by the black-and-gold Richfield Oil building that went up in downtown Los Angeles in 1928. I don’t have a date on this photo, but by the looks of the cars on the far left, I’m guessing 1970s?
Most photos I’ve come across of the Hollywood Hotel on the northwest corner of Hollywood Blvd and Highland Ave are in black and white, so I’m always happy to find a genuine color shot. This one was taken in 1950, when the hotel was only six years away from succumbing to the wrecking ball. In reality, it had started to go downhill, but you wouldn’t know it from the exterior we can see here. It was a lovely, atmospherically rambling place so it was a shame we lost it. But the place had no private bathrooms, and by the 1950s, travelers weren’t prepared to put up with trotting down the hall when a block away was the Christie Hotel which offered en suites to all rooms.
What a magnificent view of Los Angeles City Hall lit up at night. Standing at 200 N. Spring St in downtown, the building’s dedication ceremony took place on April 26, 1928. The caption for this photo pegged the date as 1928, so for Angelenos, the sight of City Hall lit up at night would still have been new, especially as it was the tallest building in the city. In the background we can see the word TIMES lit up on the LA Times building on the northeast corner of Broadway and 1st. In the foreground a neon sign reads: “Evening Herald” which referred to the Los Angeles Herald newspaper that ran from 1909 to 1931 until it merged with the Los Angeles Express to become the Los Angeles Herald-Express. (Source: Huntington Library)
Stan’s was a popular chain of drive-in restaurants in the 1940s and 50s with more than a dozen locations around Los Angeles—most of them formerly Simon’s. This image isn’t a photo but a freeze-frame taken from Columbia’s “The True Story of Lynn Stuart” (1958) at the Stan’s on the southeast corner of Sunset Blvd and Virgil Ave across the street from the Vista Theatre. Although it’s from a movie, I think it gives us a real-life feel of what it was like to be parked at a Stan’s while waiting for our order of a cheeseburgers, double fries, and chocolate malted thick shakes. With all that neon tubing on the roof, I’d imagine it also look pretty cool at night.
I’d never heard of the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Pico Heights until I found this circa 1892 photograph. Established in the 1880s, it was centered around Pico Boulevard roughly between Alvarado St and Normandie Ave, which puts it roughly a mile south of MacArthur Park. (The name “Pico Heights” was erased from maps during the 1970s.) In this shot we see a Los Angeles Consolidated Electric streetcar decorated for Washington’s birthday. It’s not the first streetcar from yesteryear I’ve seen decorated for a holiday, so I’m guessing it was a popular thing to do because these people—who I presume did all that decorating—went to a lot of trouble gussying up their streetcar.
And from the “You Don’t See Many of These Things Anymore” file comes this photo of a newsstand. But not just any newsstand — the longest I’ve ever seen, and the only one to have its own neon sign. The sign appears to read “Home Town Papers,” but aside from every newspaper imaginable, it always appears to be selling every magazine in existence, as well as pocket books, which were paperbacks small enough to be carried in a pocket The caption to this photo simply said that it was taken in 1960 in downtown LA but not where. One of the comments suggested it was taken on Sixth St between Hill and Broadway, but there appears to be no sidewalk, so who knows. Wherever it was, it looks like it had something for everyone.
In a city of marvelous movie palaces (the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Pantages, the Million Dollar) one of the most famous and most loved cinemas in Los Angeles was the Carthay Circle Theatre, which opened in 1926. It stood at 6316 San Vicente Blvd, and as this aerial shot shows, it had quite a bit of empty land around it—at least in the early 1940s, when this image was captured. And that empty land would have been handy because the Carthay Circle became one of the go-to venues for big Hollywood premieres, including The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Marie Antoinette (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939), Fantasia (1940). All those limos and press and fans needed to go somewhere. The theater was demolished in 1969. (Source: Calisphere)