For those of you in Southern California:
I am so very excited to let you know that New York-based actress, Romy Nordlinger, is bringing her one-woman show about Alla Nazimova to Hollywood. “The Garden of Alla” tells the story of the ground-breaking, rule-breaking, mold-breaking star of stage and screen, who also established the famously infamous Garden of Allah Hotel at the gateway to the Sunset Strip. Romy will be performing in Los Angeles for the month of July 2023, and I urge you to catch this marvelous tribute to Alla Nazimova while you can.
More information on the show HERE.
Go here to grab your tickets HERE.
This photo from the early 1930s shows the lengths to which MGM’s PR department would go to publicize an upcoming Greta Garbo release. A billboard would have been easier, quicker, and cheaper, but this was one of their biggest stars at her peak, so they built this huge roadside display somewhere in LA and made sure the most important word got the most attention: GARBO. The “FEB 9” refers to the movie’s big premiere, which took place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on February 9, 1934 ahead of a 6-week run at a time when most movies got only one week.
What a spectacular moment it must have been when the photographer caught this image during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games at the Los Angeles Coliseum on July 30, 1932. At the time, the country was in the grips of the Great Depression, so these games were a huge morale boost. To contain costs, the Coliseum (which had opened in 1923) was renamed Olympic Stadium and was the focal point of the games through to the closing ceremony on August 14. But in a shot like this, you can almost hear the cheers of the excited crowd.
The graininess of this image makes me suspect that it is a frame from video footage. And if it is, I’d love to see the whole thing. Nevertheless, it gives us an idea of what it looked like when studio workers left RKO’s Gower St entrance at the end of a day making movie magic. Apparently this is from 1945 and I can’t help but wonder which movie they’d been working on. Was it RKO’s first Technicolor production, “The Spanish Main”? “The Enchanted Cottage” with Dorothy Maguire and Robert Young? Or that cinematic classic, “Zombies on Broadway”?
These days (or at least for anyone born in the late 1950s and later) Disneyland seems a fait accompli that’s always been there. But for Walt Disney, the guy in this photo, the project was a huge gamble that could have easily have been an embarrassing and empire-toppling failure. So it makes me wonder what was going through his head as he stood there watching his Sleeping Beauty castle come to life amid the scaffolding and rubble. (Spoiler alert, Walt, everything worked out fine.) Disneyland opened to much fanfare on July 17, 1955, so I’m guessing this photo is circa early 1955.
The May Co. department store at the corner or Wilshire Blvd and Fairfax Ave became an instantly iconic landmark (which it remains to this day now that the building houses the Academy museum.) But most photos of it are taken, understandably, of the outside. An interior photo is quite rare, so I was glad to find this one of the entrance to the beauty salon. I love the back-lit sign over the doorway. This photo was captioned “circa 1941” which is only a year after the store opened, and explains why everything still looks so pristine.
Here we have the Garrick Theater which stood at 802 S. Broadway, putting it on the corner of 8th Street in downtown Los Angeles. This photo is circa 1913, which means the theater was only a couple of years old, and freshly renamed the Garrick, which may have been why the photo was taken. On the other hand, it might have caught the photographer’s eye because all that electric light must have been quite striking amid an otherwise inky black night.
In this photo, we’re looking west along a gloriously uncluttered Wilshire Blvd from Commonwealth Ave. The two-toned building on the right was the Town House Hotel and further into the distance, we can see the iconic tower of the Bullocks Wilshire department store. This photo was identified as being 1929, which is the year that both these places opened. So for the locals, they would have been fresh additions to the skyline.
I don’t know where on Main St in Riverside this circa 1915 photo was taken, but it does show us a few things: (a) how beautiful buildings lend themselves to a textured cityscape, (b) how most cars looked practically the same, and (c) those bicycles parked haphazardly across the sidewalk remind me of those ubiquitous electric scooters, thus proving some things never change.
And to complete my triptych of the intersection of Wilshire Blvd and Western Ave in the 1920s (