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Old Posted Feb 19, 2011, 5:19 PM
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sopas ej sopas ej is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: South Pasadena, California
Posts: 6,847

I LOVE Cole's. I'm glad it still exists, though I liked the really old feel it had before its renovation, back in the days when they had sawdust on the floor, and you were running the gauntlet of scary/schizophrenic homeless and panhandlers to walk to the entrance, and when you were driving and stopped at a red light at the intersection of 6th and Los Angeles Street, bums would descend on your car and start rubbing the windows with newspaper. And this was the early 1990s.

I've never been to the Varnish. To get to it, you have to go through a door in the back of Cole's. Cole's already has a bar in the front, but I guess the Varnish is more of a "speakeasy." I believe they opened only a few years ago.

Here's a shot of the Pacific Electric building, with Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet, as it was called. The USC Archive captioned this as being between 1900-1920. Uh, yeah. The building itself opened in 1904, with Cole's having opened in 1908. So, you guys be the judge. My guess is 1908-1910, judging by the modes of transportation. I can't imagine having to get used to the smell of horses. If only there were ladies in the photo, I could probably date it by their fashions-- even in the 1910s, women's fashions were constantly changing, the beginning of that decade was considerably different than the middle and end of the decade in terms of what women wore, looking at stills of silent films from that decade.


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