California doesn’t always knock down its important historical architecture! Case in point: this McDonald’s Hamburger fast-food restaurant is the third one built for the chain (it opened on August 18, 1953) and is now the oldest one still in existence. It’s at 10207 Lakewood Blvd in Downey, which puts it around halfway between downtown Los Angeles and Disneyland. But the main reason why I like this photo from September 6, 1954 is how striking the neon lighting is, especially those swooping arches, and silhouette of that car parked on the far left.
The restaurant hasn’t changed too much. This image is from March 2021.
No wonder they called it the Roaring Twenties with this sort of shenanigans going on. This shot was taken at the Lido pool at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Blvd. It’s undated, but by the looks of the clothes, I’d say this is from the 1920s. I don’t know who the musicians were, but my guess is that it was the house band at the hotel’s popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub. The guy second from the left appears to have nothing to do. I wonder if he was the piano player.
It’s hard to imagine that any part of downtown looked like this, let alone 20 years into the 20th century. (The cars we can see are circa late 1920s.) The road we can see in this photo is Spring Street (see below for update) which runs alongside what then would have been the newly opened Los Angeles City Hall (which opened in 1928) that we can see in the background. It’s amazing that Spring St was still a meandering dirt road. I’m guessing this stretch was around about where the 101 Freeway now cuts across the top of downtown L.A. The “Auto Park 15 cents” sign refers to Sunset Blvd ends just north of the 101.
Whenever I come across the name “Googie’s” I inevitably think of the restaurant next to the famous Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Blvd that lent its name to a whole architectural style. So I was surprised to find this (undated) photo of another Googie’s restaurant. This one stood at the corner of Fifth and Olive Streets in downtown Los Angeles. That’s quite very central location—it overlooked Pershing Square, in the heart of the city. That lush green vegetation we can see would have been part it—this is back when Pershing Square was actually a park and not the stark square it is today. But that kooky angular, striped awning would have caught the eye of hungry passersby, which of course was the whole point.
This photo gives us a chance to see what Grauman’s Chinese Theatre looked like before it opened in May 1927. Not all that different from what it looks like now, it’s the surrounding environment that’s changed. The empty lots to the immediate west and east later became parking lots and are now highly developed. Orchid Ave on the right is gone completely, and the wing of the Hollywood Hotel past it is, of course, long gone. More interesting than that, though, is the sidewalk out front of the theater. These days it’s where the stars on the Hollywood Walk of fame stretch for blocks and blocks, but back then it was an interesting checkerboard of dark and light squares.
The building is still around and in great condition. It now houses the 
This was the Merrill store and apartments building that stood at 812 American Ave (now Long Beach Blvd) in Long Beach – the photo was taken in 1936. I’m posting it for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a striking example of Art Deco architecture—look at beautiful detailing. We rarely see that anymore, and it’s great that it appears to have survived the Long Beach earthquake from three years earlier. But secondly, look at the name of the business on the left side: Love Garment Manufacturing Co. Hmmm…it does make me wonder what constituted a “love garment” in 1936. Was this place Long Beach’s answer to Frederick’s of Hollywood?
This circa 1915 photograph shows us Orange Grove Ave in Pasadena. It gained a “Millionaire Row” nickname when people with money (often from back east who’d come to Pasadena to escape the brutal Northeastern winters) built large estates. We can see one in the background with a distinctive domed turret. It belonged to the impressively named Professor Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe. According to Wikipedia, he was “an American Civil War aeronaut, scientist and inventor, mostly self-educated in the fields of chemistry, meteorology, and aeronautics, and the father of military aerial reconnaissance in the United States.” He was also that Lowe that Mt Lowe north of Pasadena was named after.
There’s a lot of life going on in this pre-horseless-carriage photo taken in the late 1800s of downtown Los Angeles. Specifically, we’re looking west along 2nd Street from Spring St, only a couple of blocks south of where Union Station is now, but back then was home to Chinatown. How different the city must have felt back then with streetcars and horses providing most of the transportation, and the quickest way to reach someone was to pop into the telegraph office on the left and send a message to your cousin in Boise.
The caption on this photo read “Twenty-Five Mile Ocean Drive, Santa Monica” but Ocean Dr is only a few miles long and it doesn’t hug the Santa Monica coastline like the road in this photo does. So I’m guessing it was actually taken just north of Santa Monica on the road that is now known as PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) which is a six-lane highway that runs along the water all way up to Point Magu. This photo is circa 1915, so I don’t know what this intrepid motorist would do if his car broke down.
