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.
Matt H. says: “There was a railway track up Alameda, coming from the south, and continuing northward, to Cornfield Yard, just north of this area. It was gone by 1956.
This image was captured 83 years later, in June 2021, when the traffic was lighter that day and the palm trees were taller.
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.
Even this color photo of the Gilbert 5 – 10 – 25 cent store at the corner of East I St and Avalon Blvd in Wilmington (near Long Beach) was taken 1977, it looks like something out of the 1950s—well, except for the sign for the $11 bean bags. That’s a bit of a giveaway, I suppose.
Yesterday I posted a 
This photo is almost painful for me to look at. In 1951, Pershing Square, which had long been considered the center of Los Angeles with its shade trees and lawns and fountain, was ripped up so that a five-level parking structure could be built underneath it. And because of that, when it came time to recreate the square, the amount of earth needed to support large, shady trees was no longer there, so instead LA got…concrete. I know that downtown needed more parking, and to dig down was a practical solution, but it seems an awful price to pay.
The workmen building the Janss Steps on what was then the new campus of UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) in the Westwood part of LA would probably never have guessed what would eventually come to fill that wide-open pastoral landscape stretched in front of them. The college’s early students and faculty must have felt they were out in the boonies.
The February 17, 1948 premiere of “Adventures of Casanova” at the Bruin Theater in Westwood attracted a huge crowd of movie fans, which is surprising because it wasn’t released by a major studio, nor did it boast any big stars. I guess the producers hired a very good publicity person. Or maybe those moviegoers thought the lead was played by Errol Flynn.