It’s hard for me to imagine a streetcar rattling through the sedate heart of Beverly Hills, but this photo shows the Beverly Hills station which stood on the corner of Cañon Drive and Santa Monica Blvd. The photographer was facing east because we can see the tower of the gorgeous Beverly Hills City Hall in the background through the spiderweb of overhead electric lines that powered the streetcars.
This is (very) roughly that same view in November 2023.
If there’s one thing this world needs it’s more donut-shaped coffee-and-donut shops with creative names like The Donut Hole. Pictured here in 1970, this one was at 15300 Amar Road in La Puente, around 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. I trust that driver entering via “Do-Nut Blvd” enjoyed his morning commute loaded up with the Hole’s offerings. This style of architecture is known a “mimetic” because the building itself mimics its purpose. You can see more examples of mimetic architecture in LA here.
Opening in 1968, The Donut Hole is still around today! This image is from December 2020.
A couple of days ago, I posted a circa 1906 photo looking north up a bustling Broadway. This one is much the same view, but from Third St and taken from what looks like the rooftop of one of the buildings on Broadway. It was taken earlier though, circa 1895. We can see the pyramidal-topped tower of the City Hall more clearly. But I want to draw your attention to the sidewalks. Is it just me, or do they look super-wide?
Andrew S. says: “This image is easily identified before 1905 due to the lack of streetlights, a good date marker to date images. In May 1905 Broadway was lined with 135 decorative iron Liewellyn lamp poles, with 7 electrolier light fixtures on top. A year later Main and Hill streets had them installed too.
There’s nothing like a vintage color photo of a parking lot filled with vintage cars to make you nostalgic—even if you were never there back then. This is LA’s original Farmers Market at 6333 W. 3rd St on the northeast corner of Fairfax Ave. It opened in 1934; this was taken in 1950, when its parking lot was filled with gleaming 1940s cars. I especially like that bronze one in the lower right corner. And by the way, there’s a word that means “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known” – it’s “anemoia.”
Farmer’s Market is still very much around. This image is from August 2022.
In yesterday’s photo of a streetcar is repainted as a “Flying Tiger” we saw the US Post Office Terminal Annex building in the background. It’s such an imposing building that I thought I would feature it today with this photo. Opening in May 1940, it stands next to Union Railway Station (which had opened a year before, in April 1939) at 900 N. Alameda St. It’s impressively grand for a building whose purpose was to sort the mail, which it did until 1998. This photo is from 1940, so the building was still brand new.
Here’s another shot, circa 1940s:
The building is still around and now houses a data center as well as a small post office. Someone on Twitter said that it’s also rented out for film & television, and that he had worked in the interior on a couple of productions. This image is from February 2022.
I couldn’t find a lot about this Life magazine photo dated May 4, 1944, but from what I’ve been able to piece together Los Angeles Railway repainted one of their streetcars as a “Flying Tiger” for the war effort. They were encouraging citizens who were ineligible to go into the military to become “a home front ace” which I take to mean become a streetcar driver. I’d love to have seen a color version because I’d imagine it made quite a striking sight rolling around LA. That building in the background is the Post Office Annex building at 900 N. Alameda St next to Union Station.
Here an advertisement for streetcar workers from the Los Angeles Daily News, June 2, 1943
On my Facebook page, Andrew C posted this frame of the streetcar is repainted as a “Flying Tiger” for the war effort.
Tiger jaw nose art appeared first on the P-40 in the Far East theater early in the war:
This is what the Post Office Annex building looked like in February 2019. It was LA’s central mail processing facility between 1940 and 1989, and now houses some sort of data center.
Some vintage photos are teeming with so much activity that you can just about hear the commotion. We’re looking north up a bustling Broadway from around Fifth Street in downtown LA. One of the banners stretched across the street reads: “Opening, Grand Midwinter Carnival and Oriental Exposition, Venice, Jan 14, 1906” so we can date this photo to around then. This is a Los Angeles largely reliant on horse-drawn transportation, a burgeoning streetcar network, and pedestrians’ legs, and I love how many multi-globe streetlights there are. The building on the right with the pyramidal roof was the LA City Hall, but my favorite feature is the big boot sign on the left. I assume Cummings was a bootmaker and cobbler—though I doubt how many people could see that sign eight or so floors from the sidewalk.
Leonard W. says: “W. E. Cummings was quite successful in the shoe business from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. He built and owned the building where his shoe business was located. He sold the business about 1908, at which time where was scandalous divorce, where his wife was accused of having an affair with his chauffeur.”
Here’s another photo taken of much the same view, but a little farther south down Broadway, probably taken on the same day by the same photographer:
This is how that view up Broadway from 5th looked in February 2023.
** UPDATE ** – Someone on Facebook said that this Coffee Pot
was actually at 8601 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills.
You’ve got to love a coffee shop with a pot on its roof as tall as the café itself. This was the Wilshire Coffee Pot that stood at 4600 W. Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, and served Ben-Hur coffee. This photo was taken in 1938, by which time Ben-Hur would have been well established as a brand. (According to one post I found, the Ben-Hur brand of coffee originated as a tie-in to the popular 1925 silent movie and disappeared in the 1950s.) That streetlight out front was known as a Wilshire Special and was only to be found along Wilshire Blvd.
Frank M. says: “It’s a percolator – only way anyone ever used to make coffee at home before the 1970s.”
4600 W. Wilshire puts this location at the southwest corner of Muirfield Rd. That lot is now home to – predictably – a parking lot, but at least it’s hidden behind a row of thick, green trees. This image is from November 2023.
The irony about this color photo of the Warner Bros. Hollywood Theatre at 6433 Hollywood Blvd is that neither of the movies playing at the time were Warner Bros. releases. “Bend of the River” was from Universal, and “As You Were” which was from a company I’ve never heard of (R&L Productions) which makes it a classic B-movie double-bill filler. “Bend of the River” came out in February 1952, so I’m pegging this photo at circa mid-1952. But at least we get treated to a color photo of Warner’s main Hollywood theater around a year before it was converted to the latest trend in movie-going: the curved-screen Cinerama experience.
This is how that theater looked in August 2022. Although the cinema has been closed since 1994, the marquee looks remarkably the same.
Last month, I posted a circa-1925 photo of a pair of locomotives parked in the forecourt of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. In the comments, someone posted a November 14, 1922 full-page article from the Exhibitors Herald about the opening of Sid Grauman’s new theater, which opened on October 19, 1922 with Douglas Fairbanks Sr’s Robin Hood. That article included this photo, which shows the eastern side of the Egyptian’s huge forecourt filled with moviegoers. A brass band dressed in what looks to be WWI-era military uniforms forecourt fills right side seems to be filled with. According to a Vanity Fair article I read, Hollywood’s first red carpet was unfurled that night. I wonder what happened to it.
Bix on Twitter said: “That’s Hollywood American Legion Post 43’s band. It would take a few more years before they could afford band uniforms, so they performed in their old WWI uniforms.”
Advertisement in Holly Leaves, dated Friday, February 3, 1933 for the upcoming Robin Hood playing at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre.
This is a photo I took of the forecourt of the newly renovated Egyptian Theatre when I was there on November 28, 2023. You can see more photos I took that night here.
