This circa 1910s shot treats us to an unusual angle of the Hollywood Hotel at the northwest corner of Hollywood Blvd and Highland Ave. The hotel opened in 1902, so it had probably only been around for a dozen years or so. I love how that lone figure is walking alongside the streetcar tracks—and why not? It’s not like there was any great danger of being run down. We can see only one vehicle in the whole image. It’s also interesting to see what preceded the 13-story First National Bank building on the northeast corner. The modest two-story building with the awning housed the Bank of Hollywood, which went under in the 1930s.
Here’s an ad for the Bank of Hollywood:
What a different 102 years makes. In this 1922 aerial photo, we’re looking northwest across Beverly Hills toward the Hollywood Hills. These days, of course, every square inch of all that empty land is filled in with manicured lawns, outsized swimming pools, and enormous mansions. But without them, we can see more clearly how Beverly Hills was planned along gently curving lines. That road along the bottom thickly lined with trees is Charleville Blvd. What a shame those blocks and blocks of lush greenery couldn’t survive the march of progress.
If one of the purposes of a cinema’s design is to attract the eye, then the Baldwin Theater at 3741 S. La Brea Ave in the Baldwin Hills part of Los Angeles sure fulfilled that goal. Here we see it on the night of its grand opening, August 10, 1949, when five searchlights raked the night sky. When I see a building with soaring arches like those, I think of the first McDonald’s fast food restaurant. I wonder if that’s where they got the idea. (That’s a joke, by the way. Well, mostly…)
Some vintage photos sure know how to pop, don’t they? In this one, we’re looking at the Valley Plaza shopping mall on Laurel Canyon Blvd in North Hollywood. Opening in 1951, it was one of the first in the San Fernando Valley. According to one report I read, it was the largest shopping center on the West Coast and the third-largest in the US. This view is looking across Victory Blvd from the Mobilgas station on the southwest corner. This photo is circa late-1950s, when gas was around 30 cents a gallon (currently here in LA in December 2024, it’s around $4.40 per gallon) and the rest rooms are so clean, Mobil advertised them!
There are several things I like about this photo taken December 1953 on the southeast corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Blvds: the vibrancy of the color (which means it’s probably Kodachrome), the two-light semaphore traffic signal, and the metallic Christmas trees decorating Hollywood Blvd. This photo (looking north up Cahuenga) shows more clearly how snow was painted on them, which probably looked funny to people back east buried under two feet of actual snow.
In this colorful Christmastime photo, we’re standing on the south side of Hollywood Blvd looking northwest past the Highland Ave intersection toward the Hollywood Hotel with the white cupola. Between the different colored cars and the red tiles on the hotel’s roof, we can see how bright and cheery the holidays were in Hollywood back in the mid-1940s, when this photo was taken. I like the addition of the silver bells strung over the boulevard and I’d imagine they caught the lights nicely.
If the caption hadn’t told me where this photo was taken, I never would have guessed. This is the 122-room Dome Hotel, which stood on the corner of 2nd St and Grand Ave in downtown Los Angeles from the early 1900s until it burned down in 1964. That’s a pretty good run for a Victorian hotel, which were highly susceptible to fire. In the background, we can see the grainy outline of the Richfield Tower. It didn’t come down until 1969, so in 1960, when this photo was taken, it was still a iconic part of downtown’s cityscape. The Broad Museum now occupies the site of Dome Hotel, and that vacant lot is now home to the striking Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Yesterday’s photo showed a closer daytime view of the electrified Christmas trees that used to decorate Hollywood Blvd for the holidays. This one give us an idea of how they looked all lit up at night. I’m so glad this photo is in color so that we can see how pretty the boulevard used to look back then. The photographer was standing on the northeast corner of Hollywood Blvd and Highland Ave looking west. We can glimpse the Owl Drug Store on the left (i.e. the southwest corner) and as this photo is circa late 1946, the Hollywood Hotel would still have been standing on the right as it didn’t come down until 1956.
This photo of glamour girls “helping” to put up electrified Christmas trees on Hollywood Blvd illustrates something I don’t think I ever quite realized: how big those holiday season decorations were. With actual humans for comparison, they were much bigger than I’ve ever thought. We can see that with Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in the background, they were on the south side of Hollywood Blvd, and from the angle, I’d say they were at around the Orange Dr. corner. The Hitchcock movie “Spellbound” was playing at the time, which dates this photo to late 1945, the first Christmas after the war. (“Spellbound” played Grauman’s for 5 weeks from November 9 to December 13)
I could find very little information on this photo, but here’s what I could piece together: It was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life Magazine in 1936. That’s a 1933 Ford Victoria going for a drive in what I presume to be the Hollywood Hills. But as that house under construction appears to be on its own, my *guess* is that the photo wasn’t taken in Hollywoodland as I’d have thought by the mid-1930s, there might have been more development. Wherever that house is/was, I can see why the owners built there: it looks like it commanded a wonderful view across Los Angeles.