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.
** UPDATE ** – The light colored car at the left is probably a ’36 Buick and the medium one at the right might be a ’37 or newer GM car but I can’t find a match for the hood side vents. The photo is probably circa late ’30s.
The Stendahl Art Galleries building is still there, as is the Bullocks Wilshire building down the street. This image is from May 2022.
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 (
The caption to this photo read “Transferring mail from an ocean liner to the Goodyear Blimp in Los Angeles Harbor” which left me wondering: Was the liner arriving into LA, in which case couldn’t the mail just taken off the ship? Or if the liner was leaving LA, how much mail could they have already accumulated? It seems to me that transferring something like mail from a little row boat to the Goodyear Blimp sounds awfully tricky with an all-too-real danger that the mail might end up in the Pacific.
I wish Wilshire Blvd still looked this calm and peaceful. We’re looking east along Wilshire from Camden Dr. in Beverly Hills circa 1936. This was before Rodeo Dr. became the mecca of luxury shopping that it later became. Back when this photo was taken, it was just a regular type of street where local Beverlyhillians shopped. The J.J. Haggarty department store on the right is gone, but the Beverly Wilshire Hotel is still with us. Around the middle of the photo, we can see the hat-shaped sign for the Beverly Hills Brown Derby restaurant, which opened at Wilshire and Rodeo in 1931. Its busiest night was Thursday, which was the traditional maid’s night off.