I do enjoy coming across a vivid Kodachrome photo, especially when it was taken at an iconic LA location. In this one, we’re looking north up Vine St across Hollywood Blvd toward the Capitol Records building, back when the American Airlines ticket office filled the northeast corner, and DuPars restaurant was just up the street. I have it on good authority that the newest car in this image is the salmon-colored 1957 Lincoln Premiere, so I’m pegging this photo at circa late 1950s.
Remarkably, this view hasn’t changed much. This image is from June 2021:
There were so many cars in the parking lot of the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena for the annual Tournament of Roses parade on January 1st, 1926 that it took very wide panoramic shot to fit them all in. And this was a time when there wasn’t a great variety in automobiles, so they pretty much all looked the same, which I imagine made finding your car after the parade a bit of a challenge.
Before Los Angeles’ famous streetcar network became electrified, the city ran cable-driven streetcars much like the ones up in San Francisco. In this 1893 photo, we seeing one of LA’s first cable cars as it runs northward up Broadway at 2nd Street. Interestingly, it looks like the whole thing is open to the elements—too bad if it’s raining! That building on the left with the pyramid roof was LA’s second city hall, which stood at 226 Broadway between 2nd and 3rd Streets until the current one was built in the mid 1920s.
In the aerial shot we’re looking at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio lot in Culver City on August 27, 1939. That year is generally considered Hollywood’s greatest year, having put out a huge number of classic movies, and so this photo shows what the most successful studio looked like during its most successful year. That intersection at the bottom is where Washington Blvd meets Overland Ave and those billboards on the corner advertised upcoming MGM pictures. At the top of the photo we can see the then-still-new white Thalberg administration building, which opened in 1938, and named after the MGM producer, Irving Thalberg, who had died in 1936 (and who is the subject of my novel, “
I don’t know whose idea it was for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway to run its tracks through the center of Pasadena, but it even with that long gate (on the right) it looks like an accident waiting to happen as the Chief service, outbound to Chicago, trundles across Colorado Blvd, squeezed between two buildings. On the left we can see an elevated flagman shanty armed with a warning bell—let’s hope it was enough to warn distracted motorists and pedestrians.
After five years of construction, May 3, 1939 was a big day for Los Angeles—it was the opening day for the new Union Station that consolidated rail services from the Union Pacific, Santa Fe, and Southern Pacific under one roof. A big part of the celebrations was a huge parade down Alameda St, which runs out front of the station. And, of course, never one to miss an publicity opportunity, Paramount Pictures contributed a Union Pacific locomotive (and five railway cars) re-painted for their new Cecil B. DeMille movie, “Union Pacific” starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea, which was opening nationwide two days later.
Here’s a view of downtown LA’s Broadway that we don’t often see. The photographer would have been leaning out of the window of around the 10th floor of the United Artists building at 933 S. Broadway, and pointed his camera north. On the ground floor was the United Artists Theatre, where stars like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin often held their premieres. (It opened on December 26, 1927 with a silent Pickford movie called “ My Best Girl.” From this high angle, we can see how the roads were painted for the streetcars. That narrow strip near the center of the image was where passengers waited.
I love this wonderfully atmospheric nighttime shot from 1912 of the entrance to a place called Wonderland, at 
Imagine stepping onto your patio and looking out across Los Angeles and this was your view. This photo was taken from the home of Arthur Brent (sometimes listed as “Bent”) who lived at 620 Siena Way in Bel Air. This photo is dated 1927 and by the looks of things, it was probably one of the only houses around. (Bel Air was founded in 1923 by Alphonzo Bell, this house was built in 1926.
