** UPDATE ** – This photo was taken on September 25, 1954, just before Red Car service ended there.
Oh, how I enjoy a color photo of yesteryear Hollywood. And that goes double if it’s got a Pacific Electric Red Car punctuating the scene with vivid red. We’re photo looking east along Hollywood Blvd from around El Cerrito Place, where the street car is heading west. In particular, I love seeing the sign for the Gotham Deli, which had opened in 1923 and I believe closed sometime in the 1950s. I don’t have a date on this one, but I’m guessing from the cars that it’s circa mid 1950s.
This is roughly how that same view looked in July 2024. Not quite so interesting, is it?
Here’s something we don’t see much of anymore: the open-air grocery store. This A&P (a popular chain) stood at the southwest corner of Sunset Blvd and N. Fairfax Ave. With the summers in LA being so long and hot, I’m kind of surprised that these stores existed at all – didn’t the celery wilt and the tomatoes shrivel? But stores like this did have greater curb appeal, along with the Streamline Moderne decoration on the roof. This particular A&P shared space with a Thrifty drug store, which possibly made for convenient one-stop shopping. Apparently the newest car in this shot is a 1939 Pontiac, so let’s call it circa early 1940s.
Here’s some gridlock I’m glad I wasn’t caught up in. A couple of Pacific Electric streetcars (the front one is heading to Glendale) block the intersection of Broadway and 6th, downtown Los Angeles. The motorist in the center of the photo looks like he’s about to hit the streetcar. Or maybe he’s trying to get out of the way of the second motorist, who is blocking the path of the third one, who has zipped in front of the streetcar. But is he now blocking it from moving forward? This photo is from June 1919, so I doubt there are any traffic signals to obey—or ignore, so I guess those pedestrians are crossing the street whenever it suits them. (Also note the Silverwood’s menswear store in the background.)
And from the Why Can’t We Have Nice Buildings Like This Anymore file comes the La Cienega Municipal Swimming Pool. It stood at 300 S. La Cienega Blvd, in Beverly Hills. The photo was taken in 1930, when the trees were still being planted and you could nab a decent parking spot. I really love those three peaked arches and wish I could find a photo taken much closer; I bet the tiles around each arch was gorgeous in real life.
I do like an atmospheric shot with loads of lighting illuminating the night—and this is a doozie. We’re looking north up Broadway from near 6th Street. It’s probably just the slow aperture of the camera lens to let in as much light as possible, but it almost looks like every electric bulb and neon in downtown Los Angeles was switched on that night in 1916. In this stretch of Broadway alone we can see three theaters on the 500 block of Broadway: Pantages, Clune’s Broadway, and Quinn’s Superba. I can’t help but wonder if the Angelenos who went to see a show that night enjoyed themselves.
This post follows on from 
In this photo we’re looking east along Sunset Blvd toward Crescent Heights Blvd, which is the eastern end of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. It was taken in 1967, and that striped building was Pandora’s Box, a nightclub and coffeehouse in a triangle-shaped island, and had been ground zero for a late-1966 counter-culture protest known as “the hippie riots.” In the background we can partially see the sign for Schwab’s Pharmacy, as well as a red sign for a place called Steak’n’Stein, which was a later incarnation of Googie’s Coffee Shop. And on the left we can see part of the sign for the Lytton Center of the Visual Arts which, along with the bank, occupied the old 
Back in the 1950s, when this aerial photo was taken, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was still a force to be reckoned with in the film industry, but its peak was behind it. Starting 1947, its competitors, Paramount, Warner and 20th Century-Fox, started to out-gross it. But it still had a vast backlot that that could stand in for pretty much any location in any era. Known as backlot No. 2 and totaling 37 acres, it stood on Overland Avenue across from the main lot, between Washington and Culver Blvds. A fire destroyed a portion of the sets in 1967 and the rest were demolished in 1974. Oh boy, how I would have loved to have had a chance to wander around them just once!
After the St. Francis Dam failed on March 12, 1928 near Santa Clarita, California, the authorities in charge of the Mulholland Dam became worried. The Bureau of Water Works and Supply had built both dams along similar lines, and if the Mulholland Dam it were to fail too, the result would be catastrophic because it keeps the Hollywood Reservoir from flooding Hollywood. In 1933-34, part of their solution to shore up the structure was to dump 330,000 cubic yards on the dam’s downstream face, which had the added benefit of hiding the dam from view. Out of sight, out of mind!
Every now and then, a photo comes along that make me want to a running into the screen: this is one such photo. This vibrant color photo is of Ben Frank’s restaurant at 8585 Sunset Blvd in the middle of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. It opened around 1962 in the very LA-centric architectural style known as Googie, which featured wall and roofs at kooky angles. Also very Googie is that space-age needle holding onto the neon sign. It’s job was to catch the eye of drivers cruising along the Strip—and I’m sure it did its job very well.
