I always enjoy coming across photos like this one where nothing in particular is happening. Just another day looking south down Broadway from 4th St in downtown Los Angeles in 1931. Photos like this remind us how lively downtown LA used to be—look at that packed sidewalk. I don’t think I’ve seen those triangular banners strung across Broadway before, but there are a lot of them. Does anybody recognize them or know what they represented?
** UPDATE ** – The consensus on Facebook seems to be that those triangular banners were in celebration of Fiesta de Los Angeles in recognition of the city’s birthday.
This is that same intersection in February 2023. It may have been taken early on a Sunday morning but it sits in stark contrast with the bustling energy of the 1931 photo, doesn’t it?
When I first saw this photo, my “Oh, what a lovely dawn!” reaction turned to a horrified “Oh my God!” when I read the description. The glow behind downtown Los Angeles is from an atom bomb test conducted on June 4th, 1953 in Yucca Flat, Nevada, which is 300 miles away. If it was this bright in LA, I hope the townsfolk of Las Vegas (80 miles southeast) were wearing two pairs of sunglasses that night. The tower with the light that we can see at the center of the photo is the 
Abbot Kinney, the man who conceived the huge “Venice of America” project on what we now know as simply “Venice Beach,” also built a vast amusement pier, which he opened in 1905. It featured an auditorium, dance pavilion, fun house, roller coaster, tea garden, aquarium, roller rink and a bowling alley (among other attractions.) Unfortunately, it all came to an end just before Christmas of 1920 when a fire broke out and consumed the whole thing. But before that, someone went up in an airplane and took this marvelous shot of the pier. Equally interesting is seeing how beyond the canals development, the land was pretty much empty. That’s certainly not the case anymore!
This color photo gives us an idea of what LA’s most famous intersection looked like in around 1941. The photographer would have been standing on the second or third floor of the Taft building on the southeast corner of Hollywood and Vine. He pointed his camera past the ornate streetlight and the semaphore traffic signal to the northwest corner occupied by the Melody Lane diner. It would have still be rather new as it occupied the site from 1940 until 1955, when Hody’s took over. There seem to be a number of patriotic banners flapping in the breeze, so maybe it was the July 4th long weekend.
I’ve been researching the restaurants of Los Angeles for quite some time now, and am always delighted to find a new one. Especially when it’s a chicken dinner restaurant because I always find myself thinking of Mildred Pierce. I’m sure Mildred’s chicken was very good, but could it hold a match to the Ferncroft Inn who made the bold claim that it’s the place “where chicken melts in your mouth”? At 670 S. San Vicente Blvd it probably benefited from being close to the popular Carthay Circle Theatre.
I don’t know if Charlie Chaplin could actually play a keyboard, but here he is at the organ of the 
These days, the road through Elysian Park is known as Stadium Way (because it runs past Dodger Stadium) but back the 1920s, when this photo was taken, it was called Avenue of the Palms for fairly obvious reasons. It’s kind of funny to see palm trees without trunks, but the city knew that in time they’d grow to make a picturesque frame for drivers.
In this circa 1930s photo, we’re looking north across homes nestled into the Hollywood Hills toward the Mulholland Dam that holds back Hollywood Reservoir, aka Lake Hollywood. On March 12, 1928, the similarly built St. Francis Dam 30 miles northwest of LA collapsed causing the grave concerns that a similar fate might befall the Mulholland Dam. Consequently, tons of dirt was packed against the dam’s wall to make it more secure—and I suspect to help the people living in these houses forget that they lived in the path of a possible deluge.
I don’t have a lot of information on this photo, but from what I can piece together, it appears to be from the late 1890s when the Tally-Ho carriages would take groups of locals and tourists from Los Angeles (which back then was pretty much just downtown LA) where they would pick up passengers at the main hotels and take them through Pasadena, where more people would join the convoy, and then onto Altadena, where most of them would ride the funicular up Mt. Lowe. Like most trips back then, it would have been at a leisurely clip-clop pace through an untamed landscape like we can see the background.
Here we see a shot of an Easter service taking place at the Hollywood Bowl. There was no date on this photo, however the very first Easter service was held in 1921, and the first shell wasn’t built until 1926, so let’s call this photo circa early to mid 1920s when all they had was a wooden stage and a parking lot off to the side. That cross on the hillside, I wonder if it’s filled with a choir?