We’re looking north up Broadway in downtown Los Angeles from 7th Street. According to the caption for this photo, those crowds of Angelenos packing both sides of the street came to see President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was 1938, which was the year of the mid-terms and apparently Roosevelt actively campaigned for candidates who were more supportive of New Deal reform. So I assume that’s what was happening here. In the background, we can see the blade sign for the Palace Theatre at 630 S Broadway, which was the third Orpheum Theatre to open in downtown LA. (Source: Noirish LA)
This is roughly how that view looked in February 2023:
In this photo, we’re looking north up Culver Blvd at the Culver Hotel at the intersection with Washington Blvd. This photo was taken in 1938, and we can see how the 6-story triangular-shaped hotel must have stood out. So I’m guessing that when it opened in 1924, it must have been visible for miles around. Conveniently located between MGM and the Selznick studio, it has played host to many film personalities, including most notably, the performers who played the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz.” That movie was filmed between October 1938 and March 1939, so it’s possible that they were guests when this photo was taken. (Source: Culver City Historical Society)
These days, it’s unlikely that you’d find a big-city hotel with so much lawn around it—land is too valuable! But back in the early 1920s, when the Ambassador Hotel was being built on Wilshire Blvd (between Mariposa and Catalina, it officially opened on January 1, 1921) empty land so far away from downtown .LA was plentiful. So why not set it back from the boulevard and give it a vast lawns around it? All this grass gave the hotel a sense of space and a resort type feel, which contrasted with the other luxury hotel, the Biltmore, which was smack-dab in the heart of downtown.
When I first saw this photo of the Angels Flight funicular in its original location next to the Third Street Tunnel, I thought “How wonderfully atmospheric to ride Angels Flight amid swirling fog.” But then I read the caption which said that the photo was taken from at LA Times article titled “Blanket of Smog Obscures View of City from Top of Angels Flight.” And then I saw the photo’s date: 1958, when LA was reaching the peak of its smoggiest era. Thank goodness the city government eventually introduced very strict car pollution laws, otherwise I can’t imagine many people would be willing to live in such a thick soup of clogged air. Oh, and all those backyard incinerators didn’t help, either. I can’t believe we used to do that without even thinking much about it.
Thanks to this Life magazine photographer, we get an idea of what it was like to drive east along Wilshire Blvd from the May Co department store on the northeast corner of Fairfax Ave. We can see the sign for Coulters department store featured in a photo I posted 5 days ago, but also the prominent sign for the Arthur Murray dance studio, which was on the corner of Stanley Ave. This photo was taken in March of 1949, and it looks like the Miracle Mile section of Wilshire was buzzing with activity. (Source: Life Magazine)
Around 15 years ago, before I embarked on my writing career, I worked at a store on Melrose Ave that had to move to a new location. It was a long, gradual process, but it was interesting to note that the fewer items we had in the store window, the more people stopped to look at the display. It led me to the observation that if people were presented with too many choices, they couldn’t make any choice at all. Clearly, that was not the marketing strategy at the Mid-City Cut Rate Drug Store at 3773 S. Western Ave on the northwest corner of Exposition Blvd. Clearly, they sold everything under the sun, which was handy for locals, but all that wordage distracted from the lovely features of the building itself…including the giant Bromo-Seltzer bottle next to the door. This photo is from 1941. (Source: calisphere.org)