Los Angeles has a number of instantly recognizable buildings, and this one happens to be a favorite of mine. Maybe because it’s Art Deco, maybe because it gives an air of solidity and dependability. It’s the sort of thing you want in a newspaper, which this building was designed to house. It was the new home of the LA Times under construction on the southwest corner of Spring and 1st Streets in downtown LA in 1934 ahead of its 1935 opening.
The LA Times no longer occupies the building, but it’s still there. This image is from June 2021.
For those of us over a certain age, this billboard will take you back to the time when travelling abroad meant having to get travellers cheques as a safe way to carry money with you. It was especially annoying when traveling around Europe during a pre-Euro age when each country had its own currency. This circa 1930 billboard stood outside Stendahl Art Galleries at 3006 Wilshire Blvd, a block or two east of the Bullocks Wilshire department store.
Roy Knabenshue was an aeronautical engineer and aviator, who worked with the Wright brothers, so he was there at the very start of aviation. He was big into dirigibles and was the first person to make a dirigible flight over New York in 1905. In this photo, he’s flying 13 brave and trusting thrill-seekers over the Raymond Hotel in Pasadena in 1913. (The Raymond was popular with Easterners who came to California to escape the brutal winters.) I’d have been very wary going up in that thing. It looks awfully flimsy, if you ask me.
Going on the 1935 Ford in the foreground, this photo of Carpenter’s drive-in restaurant at the corner of Glendale Blvd and Silver Lake Blvd was taken some time in the mid-to-late 1930s. And it was certainly still around in the mid 1940s when it was used as a location in Warner Bros.’s “Mildred Pierce.” I’m also curious about that tower in the back ground. The Rite Spot was a restaurant, and the two places combined made up what was known as Carpenter’s Village.
We’re so used to the word “car wash” that I think I just assumed they were always called that. But this photo from 1927 shows that they were also called an “auto laundry.” Or, at least, that’s what the El Patio Auto Laundry and Gas Station at 260 S. Vermont Ave called it, and I think I like their version better. It was called “El Patio” because of the large building with the ornate towers on the left. It was the very popular El Patio Ballroom, which was later known as 
I read somewhere that in 1924, the downtown L.A. intersection of 7th St and Broadway was the busiest in the world with 504,000 people crossing those streets each day. I knew it was a busy intersection, but “busiest in the world”? I found that hard to believe. Until, that is, I came across this photo, from 1916, but if this is what it truly was like on any given day, you’d do anything to avoid it, wouldn’t you? I pity everybody in this photo, but most of all I pity that poor white horse on the right.
The Automobile Club of Southern California building on Figueroa St. south of downtown Los Angeles is a marvelous example highly photogenic architecture, and has often been captured on film over the years. But it’s rare to see a shot taken directly overhead, as this one was sometime in the 1930s. What’s even more interesting is that on its roof is painted the names, distance, and direction of four local airfields: Vail Airfield in Montebello, Griffith Park Aerodrome (
