Yesterday, someone sent me this Life magazine photo taken in 1948 from inside a very crowded Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Blvd and asked it was always like this. Never having been to Schwab’s myself, it’s hard for me to say. I do know that for decades it was a very popular place for film industry folks to gather, talk business, and dish the gossip. But I doubt it always quite as busy as this. This is shoulder-to-shoulder, shout-in-my-ear, good-luck-ordering-a-coffee crazy-busy.
** UPDATE ** – This photo was taken during a party hosted by the columnist Sidney Skolsky.
I didn’t expect the auto-colorizer to do such a good job on this one, but it turned out pretty well, don’t you think?
In this festive scene taken in downtown Los Angeles, we’re looking north up Broadway from 10th Street, which was later renamed Olympic Blvd in honor of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic games. The photo is dated 1929, and from the Christmas lights and bells strung up over Broadway, I think we can safely say it was taken in December. On the left we can see the multi-story Western Costume building in which was housed thousands of rentable costumes used by all the studios. And past it, we can see the blade neon sign for the United Artists Theatre, which had been built in 1927, so it was still fairly new when this shot was taken.
It’s good we’ve got photos like this one to remind us that once upon a time, downtown Los Angeles was filled with grand Victorian mansions. This circa 1895 shot was taken on the 200 block of S. Olive St near the top end of downtown. It must have been a lovely neighborhood to stroll around in back then.
Look at how genteel and quiet this view is. We’re peering west along Adams Blvd from Figueroa St, south of downtown Los Angeles and north the USC campus. I love how leafy and green everything is, especially with those young palm trees in the center median strip. This is from 1926, so the Angelenos motoring along Adams Blvd here had three more years of the Roaring Twenties before everything went pear shaped.
If L.A.’s freeways still looked like this, I’d probably be inclined to take them more often. We’re looking west up the Hollywood Freeway as it heads into the Cahuenga Pass. Traffic is remarkably light, so I’m guessing this photo was taken not long after this stretch of the 101 opened in June of 1940. In the left-center of the photo, we can see the “Muse of Music, Dance, Drama,” which is the 200-foot long, 22-foot high sculpture at the front of the Hollywood Blvd that was a Depression-era Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project installed in 1939.
In this rather stunning aerial view, we’re looking east along Wilshire Blvd. The cross street around cutting through the middle of the image is San Vicente Blvd, which means the street running along the bottom of the photo is La Cienega Blvd, and so the oval on the triangular plot of land is La Cienega Park. If you run your eye directly up from the park you’ll see a large white building. That’s the Carthay Circle Theatre, where many a splashy Hollywood premiere took place. This shot was taken in 1930 when the area was becoming quite developed—in fact, more than I would have thought, but there’s still a lot of empty land…but not for long!
This aerial shot gives us a wonderful bird’s-eye view of the Warner Bros. movie studios in Burbank in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. This was taken in 1933, which means they could have been filming “42nd Street” or “Gold Diggers of 1933” at the time. The top half of the lot is home to their extensive backlot where they could recreate anything from sailing ships to Sing Sing. The bottom half is filled with their 7 or 8 soundstage. One of them has the word “Mines” painted on its roof. It’s there to tell pilots that if they’re looking for Mines Field airport, it’s thataway. Today, Mines Field is known as L.A. International Airport.
Judging from the clothes on the people outside Sunset Blvd entrance to Hollywood High School (I’m looking at you, Mr. Brown Suit And Matching Hat in the lower left corner), I’m estimating that this photo was taken in the 1950s. So why then a couple of mid-1930s cars (one of them is a 1936 Pontiac) would be parked out front, I’m not sure. My guess is that they belong to students for whom a 20-year-old car was the best they could afford. Whatever was going on that day, it sure makes for a nifty photo.
