When Angelenos want to get away from it all, they have no shortage of places to go: the mountains, the beaches, the desert, north to Santa Barbara, south to Mexico. But one of the nicest getaways lays (as the song goes) 26 miles across the sea (from Long Beach, that is): Santa Catalina Island. This aerial shot was snapped on June 26, 1936 and takes in the town of Avalon snuggled into Avalon Bay. That circular building near the bottom is the Casino, which opened in 1929 at a cost of $2 million. It’s not a gambling house, however, but a ‘casino’ in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning a place where people have fun. In this case, that fun mostly took place is the huge Casino ballroom that still hosts many fun events.
This satellite photo from Google Earth shows us what the town, bay, and Casino looks like today.
From what I can tell, all the bicyclists stopping traffic at the intersection of Washington and Culver Blvds in Culver City are women, so I bet there was something special going on. From the look of the cars, this photo was taken circa late 20s/early 30s, a time when (I’d imagine) that sort of thing didn’t happen every day. In the background, we can see two water towers. They would have belonged to MGM (now Sony) and the studios now known as The Culver Studios but back then would have run by Cecil B. DeMille and/or Pathé and/or RKO, depending on the year.
As if the entrance to Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park wasn’t colorful enough with that gold prospector and mule statue welcoming funsters to the park, but in this photo, we’ve also got a two-toned orange-and-white 1955 Oldsmobile at the stop light.
My focus has always been vintage photos of Los Angeles, usually up to the late 1950s, sometimes into the 60s and 70s if the subject is interesting or the image is extraordinary. But yesterday I came across one of the most striking photos I’ve ever seen of the Hollywood sign and had to post it. Taken by Ted VanCleave in 2015, it gives us a rare opportunity to experience the iconic sign close up. That’s the Hollywood Reservoir – aka Lake Hollywood – in the background. You can clearly see the sign from the lake, but this view of the lake from the sign is really something.
This is the sort of photo I love because it’s of a famous spot but taken from a different angle. Those steps on the right are of the NBC studios at the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. 99% of photographers take photos of the studio while standing on that corner behind the semaphore traffic light. When this photo was taken in the early 1950s, that corner was occupied by the Radio City Pharmacy and Fountain Grill, so this photo is a rare shot of that. And that semaphore signal wouldn’t be there for much longer as they were gone by 1956.
I love this shadowy shot of the famous Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios sign. I especially love the way the light of the dusk sky contrasts with the murkiness of that empty alley which had probably, just a few hours earlier, bustled with studio workers. The photo was taken by a Life magazine photographer in 1935, so I wonder which movies were in production that day. David Copperfield? Mutiny on the Bounty? A Night at the Opera?
The concept of drivers pumping their own gas was unknown until Gilmore Oil opened their self-serve gas station near Farmer’s Market at the corner of Third St and Fairfax Ave in 1948. I don’t know if they came up with the catchy name of “Gas-A-Teria” or some wisenheimer did as he was pumping his gas, but the nickname caught on. In order to encourage drivers to do what they were used to other people doing for them, Gilmore offered their customers a 5-cent-per-gallon discount. It did the trick as we can see from this circa late 40s photo.
When someone recently sent me this interior shot of Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Blvd, they asked me if I thought that was Dick Haymes with his hands on Sidney Skolsky’s shoulders at the center of photo. I don’t know if that’s Haymes, but it looks like Skolsky to me. (Sidney Skolsky well-known column “From A Stool at Schwab’s” appeared in Photoplay magazine.) At any rate, it shows us how popular Schwab’s was. At one spot the crowd at the counter is three people deep and spills over into the retail area. I bet the energy in there was a tonic for people enduring the grind of trying to make it in Hollywood.
In this photo, we’re looking east along E. Ocean Blvd toward the 16-story Villa Riviera Hotel in Long Beach. At one time, Joseph M. Schenck of 20th Century-Fox studios and his movie-star wife Norma Talmadge, owned the hotel. The photo was taken in 1934, less than a year after a huge earthquake rocked the entire Long Beach area. Although shaken violently, the hotel sustained no worse damage than a few cracks and falling plaster. What strikes me about this photo—apart from the charming if somewhat lopsided streetlights—is the lack of lanes painted on the road. Looks like a perfect recipe for a multi-car accident, if you ask me.
From the always-interesting Shorpy website comes this color-popping shot of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royale parked directly in front of the entrance to Disneyland. Disney’s theme park opened in 1955 so it was still fairly new when this shot was taken. Long gone are the days when you could just drive up to the entrance and drop people off. (Oh boy, wouldn’t it be great if we could still do that?) In fact, could we ever? This photo looks like “movie parking” – when Doris Day needs to go to Bergdorf’s, bingo, she finds a parking spot right out front – so maybe this was an advertising photo for Dodge. What do you think?