On January 25, 1958, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz closed escrow on the Culver City studios and backlot that had once belonged to RKO-Pathé and before that David O. Selznick. After paying $6,150,000, they took possession of the property and hung out the Desilu shingle. After that, television soon became the primary business conducted on the site. You can always tell which studio this is by the iconic multi-columned admin building known as The Mansion, which Selznick used as his logo.
Here is a list of show made by Desilu Productions in 1964:
The studios are still there, now known as the Culver Studios and is where Amazon films most of its films and TV shows. This image is from a November 2021 article on Urbanize.
There’s something about (I presume this is) a Kodachrome photo that brings a scene to life with vibrant color. We’re looking north up Highland Ave from Hollywood Blvd. That light blue car on the left is a circa 1961 Porsche, so let’s call this shot circa early 1960s. That blade neon sign on the right: Power House Cocktails makes me wonder how strong those cocktails were! It’s also a little weird to see the Hollywood United Methodist Church without its huge red ribbon that it first erected in 1993 to honor World AIDS Day and is still there.
How cute is this? These kids gathered outside a Signal gas station at 2222 W. Florence Ave because they belonged to the Signal Tarzan club. It took me a while to figure out that Signal gasoline’s logo was of Tarzan fighting an alligator with the motto “The Power of Tarzan.” It explains why so many of those little boys are dressed up in their Tarzan outfits. I also love how Signal’s sign included a pair of semaphore traffic signals.
Yesterday, I featured a photo of the 
If only the Hollywood Freeway was still like it was when this photo was taken in 1952. We’re looking north through the Cahuenga Pass (on the left are parts of the freeway is still under construction) when there were still streetcar lines running down the middle. This shot was taken from the Pilgrimage Bridge which takes drivers from Cahuenga Rd to the Ford Amphitheatre. It’s called the Pilgrimage Bridge because The Ford started out life in 1920 as a venue for “The Pilgrimage Play” which was performed every summer throughout the 1920s.
I don’t have a lot of information about this photo (so if you have anything to add, I’d love to hear from you) other than this must be Wilshire Blvd because those street lights were made specifically for Wilshire and were called Wilshire Specials. My guess is that we’re looking east somewhere toward the downtown end of Wilshire. All I know for sure is that I’d love it if traffic along Wilshire Blvd was still like this.
Following on from yesterday’s photo of the 
The filmmakers at the Goldwyn Studios (fomrerly the United Artists studios) at Santa Monica Blvd and Formosa Ave in Hollywood had an extra headache when using the backlot. It was the enormous Hollywood gasometer, which was a holding tank for natural gas. I would imagine they came up with all sorts of clever ways to mask it—or maybe they had a standard matte painting they would superimpose over every shot the gasometer loomed over—which was probably every shot. I’m guessing this photo was taken in the 1930s.
This is photo of the business card for Hotel Hollywood on the corner of Hollywood Blvd and Highland Ave. The fact is says “NOW OPEN” suggests that this comes from circa 1903, which is when the hotel opened. Its telephone was “Hollywood Main 111” – does that mean it got the first telephone in Hollywood? And $2 per day for an American Plan (breakfast, lunch, and dinner included) sounds like a good deal to me. Interestingly it doesn’t list an address – if it did, it would have said Prospect Ave instead of Hollywood Blvd – but I do love how it bills itself as the “Chief Hostelry of the Favorite Foothill Resort of Los Angeles.”