I don't remember seeing this interesting tunnel photograph on the thread (I could be wrong)
I'm amused by all the men watching on the right. http://imageshack.us/a/img132/5691/aabtunnel2.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img542/2585/aabtunnel2alapl.jpg http://www.lapl.org/ The photograph is dated 1921. __ |
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Such style. And we get Gangster Squad. btw, that's Patricia Knight, the first Mrs. Cornel Wilde. |
"Shockproof"....boilerplate LA noir
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The story: Cornel Wilde plays Griff Marat, a parole officer who falls in love with a parolee, Jenny Marsh (Knight). Marsh had gone to prison in order to protect a gambler with whom she was having an affair. Out of concern for her welfare, Marat hires Marsh as a caretaker for his blind mother. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...ps442cbfd1.jpg "Shockproof". Columbia Pictures 1949 http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...psea1c0d42.jpg |
there is this one as well...2nd St. tunnel 1920
http://imageshack.us/a/img28/6822/aa...entranceto.jpg found on an old cd of mine/probably LAPL __ |
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https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Z...2520PM.bmp.jpgcredit Her life chronologically: http://www.glamourgirlsofthesilversc...ght/index.html I forgot about the first Mrs. Wilde--we've seen a lot about Shockproof here, and Wilde going on to marry Franchot Tone's ex Jean Wallace (and Tone then stepping into it big time with Barbara Payton)... anyway, coverage of the movie goes way back. Among the prior posts: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...of#post5105609 http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=3753 |
Old Hollywood Station
[IMG]http://i597.photobucket.com/albums/t...lywoodSign.jpg[/IMG]
LAPL Old Hollywood Station, Sign at the door is an Automobile Club of So. Cal. traffic sign of the 1920's style. Badges on the Coppers would suggest 1923 or later. |
Old Hollywood Station Noir
[IMG]http://i597.photobucket.com/albums/t...PoliceSign.jpg[/IMG]
LAPL Noir 1940's Hollywood Station, same sign in 1920's photo. I had to have that sign so I had it reproed as I knew chances are it is long gone. I don't like repros but I had to have it. [IMG]http://i597.photobucket.com/albums/t...m/IMG_6563.jpg[/IMG] Sam Flowers Collection |
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8096/8...211f848d_o.jpg
Aerial view of Los Angeles showing the Los Angeles River, 1939 Interesting aerial I don't think we've seen before showing the east side of the river and including the massive S&P shops and piggyback yard (and the S&P roundhouse but you've got to really look hard) and Prospect Park. The awnings at the railhead at Union Station can be seen at the left edge but not any of the station buildings. California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960 |
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http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8380/8...4ce02e78_o.jpg Hollywood Police Station, 1928 A Hollywood police officer poses with fashionable women outside of the Hollywood police station, Division 6, located at 1629 Cahuenga Avenue. These women have arrived into town via a Pickwick Stages bus, partially visible on the right, and are promoting Pickwick Stages as a travel option. LAPL |
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I guess if you own the place you can call it what ever you damn well please! http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f9...advert1929.gif via BURBANKIA |
photograph and comment from
http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/ http://imageshack.us/a/img546/2096/a...istonrings.jpg __ |
1949 photograph of an unnamed drive-in in the Los Angeles area by Loomis Dean. Anyone recognize it?
http://imageshack.us/a/img199/7028/aaloomisdean1.jpg ebay detail http://imageshack.us/a/img580/2139/aaloomisdeancar.jpg detail http://imageshack.us/a/img692/8199/a...ebayslantb.jpg detail. http://imageshack.us/a/img823/6742/a...bayladrive.jpg looks like there was a florist shop attached. info: http://imageshack.us/a/img593/1910/aaloomisdean.jpg __ |
As I 'drove' the googlemobile up Van Buren Place in Culver City I spotted the back of an archaic rooftop sign..my weakness ;)
(that's the iconic Culver Hotel in the distance) http://imageshack.us/a/img831/8758/a...hotelvanbu.jpg gsv noirish looking place..I can visualize a murder or two happening here. http://imageshack.us/a/img443/7637/a...stendhotel.jpg gsv as I turned the corner I got a good view of the sign. -Hotel West End- never heard of it. http://imageshack.us/a/img809/1630/a...hotelnowho.jpg gsv The old Hotel West End looks much larger from the air. (upper left is the Culver Hotel...upper right is the old 'plantation-like' Selznick International building. http://imageshack.us/a/img841/7071/a...hotelaeria.jpg google aerial below: The Hotel West End (then known as the Washington Hotel) is visible in this aerial from the 1920s. http://imageshack.us/a/img442/8900/a...laeriallap.jpg http://photos.lapl.org/carlweb/jsp/F...olNumber=38972 As you can see, Van Buren Place once continued to Washington Blvd. It doesn't any longer (now there's an abrupt turn that leads it over to Irving Place) __ |
ACSC Signs
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You have a great collection of old ACSC signs and call boxes. We need more photos of old signs and street fixtures on the blog. Brian |
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McEldowney's Florist is referred to in places as being the first "drive-in" florist in SoCal. I'm not sure if the drive-in restaurant was his as well. The marquee and its lettering looks familiar, but on a cursory search I couldn't find a drive-in on Pico with a more familiar name. McEldowney's Florist had several locations--one was at 7013 Hollywood Blvd, his innovative drive-in at 9449 W Pico (ne corner of Beverly Drive). According to his obit, he supplied the flowers for the first Academy Awards and for Harlow, Thalberg, and Jolson's funerals. After the war, Kenneth McEldowney gave up flowers to make movies... well, a movie. His only production--apparently well-received--seems to have been The River: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-x...2520PM.bmp.jpgthemoviepostershop.com PS VOTE FOR GARCETTI |
Earlier this week, I walked past the construction site for the 32 story tower at 9th/Olive and noticed a red brick wall which was revealed via excavation on the Hill street side of the lot.
http://i.imgur.com/NjRM3na.jpg?1 http://la.curbed.com/uploads/2009.04.sitea.jpg The location is in the top right corner of the yellow outlined area. I was wondering if anyone knows what was on this parcel before it became a parking lot? Figured you guys are probably my best shot at an answer. Based on the picture from Historic Aerials, this has been a surface parking lot since at least 1948. |
Theres some mistake because I remember that building when I used to go shopping with my grandmother to Bullocks Wilshire (which had a black doorman valet in a velvet coat and top hat) and that was in the 80's 84-88 in there sometime. I loved that building also MacArthur park had two lakes one on each side and next to I Magnin there was another dept store Im pretty sure. I thought it was Saks. But there were a lot of those buildings down Wilshire back then that got torn down but only one with those statues in the ovals and that stuck out for me. It was Wedgwood colored either blue and white or green and white. There was another Huge one like it down western that was unbelievably ornate and spanish rococo I think it was an earthy red color.There were also grand mansions in the Wilshire center area that were torn down including a humongous french Le Petit Trianon Styled on the corner of Lafayette I think and the kids wrote graffiti all over it begging the city to save it. Just like that old Motel Hell on hollywood blvd with the lions out front that the punks used to crash in. They tore that one down in the night.
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So I decided to go ahead and post up those articles on the Broadway Tunnel. Several screen captures and much stitching later here they are!
The first one is from the Municipal Journal, Feb. 17, 1916. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_...adwayT1916.jpg Google Books The second article is two pages, owing mainly to the large photo at the beginning. Municipal Engineering, March 1917: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-P...dwayT1917a.jpg https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-o...dwayT1917b.jpg Google Books |
Hollywood Western Building
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Designed by S Charles Lee. Financed by Louis B Mayer and Irving Thalberg: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Z...431%2520AM.jpg http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6p3022jd/ Night-time Grand Opening 8 December 1928, complete with search-lights and bunting: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-k...001%2520AM.jpg http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt009nc28p/ Norma Shearer unlocks the door with a golden key at the "premiere", 8 December 1928. With her from left, a smiling Irving Thalberg, the exquisite Leila Hyams, co-star with Billy Haines of MGM's first (partial) talkie, "Alias Jimmy Valentine" (1928), Shearer, S Charles Lee looking like he'd just swallowed a very large canary, Owen Lee(?), the delightful Raquel Torres, star of MGM's silent "White Shadow in the South Seas (1928) and Sidney Weisman, Building Manager. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Y...724%2520AM.jpg http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt3v19q2vb/ A second shot for coverage (Irving doffs his hat, Norma holds her pose): https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-K...954%2520PM.jpg Botticino marble lined the lobby. The elevator cab interiors were of mahogany with gold-leaf accents. Elevator doors were of bronze as were the lighting fixtures. Only the ground floor covers the full site. The upper floors form an ell along the Hollywood and Western frontages. The Hollywood Western was purpose built for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), including the Hays Office. (Irving Thalberg was particularly interested in proving Hollywood could police itself, he even helped write the Hays Office "Don'ts and Be Carefuls"). The building also housed Central Casting, the Ben Hecht Company, other producers and various Industry-support businesses. In the basement, with stairs leading directly from the sidewalk on the Western Avenue side of the building, was Hollywood Billiards and Bowling. The pool hall, "Hollywood's oldest" had been founded at a previous location in 1916. The pool hall lasted until the 1990s when the basement entrance was boarded over. My kindly, elderly, Hollywood neighbor, Mr. Dexter, owned the business for many years. He had great stories about the place: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Lk...Q=w236-h301-no Hollywood Billiards and Bowling (detail from from first photo above): https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-i...206%2520PM.jpg It's interesting that the Hays Office was in the building as S Charles Lee jokingly claimed that the panels decorating the fire escapes introduced porn to Hollywood: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-E...907%2520PM.jpg http://books.google.com/books/about/...d=ZZ3UNjXdYvoC A classically-inspired (AKA nude) depiction of film-making, although the folks behind the camera are clothed (there's six of these panels in total): https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-T...949%2520PM.jpg http://www.justabovesunset.com/photo...l_casting.html Mercury, the god of commerce, with a movie camera (a dozen Mercurys adorn the building): https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-p...541%2520PM.jpg http://www.justabovesunset.com/photo...l_casting.html Cast-stone figures representing the Arts (Drama, Literature, Music, Architecture and Film) repeat along the pediment and others, representing Film Directors and Producers, are grouped to support the now-vanished central tower. A head representing Business forms the keystone of the arched entry. The decorations were supposed to celebrate film as the union of art and commerce. The building has tuned up as a location in a few films. Here's Byron Barr in "Double Indemnity" (1944): https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-0...956%2520PM.jpg Paramount Studios/netflix This is a picture of the old Rector Hotel, diagonally across the intersection from the Hollywood Western Building. I like it because I'm a sucker for '49 Fords and Red Cars (especially together): https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-t...019%2520PM.jpg http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/hbline.htm By the 60s Hollywood and Western had become the most notorious intersection in Hollywood. Bukowski country. The Pioneer Chicken with its big red, white and baby blue arches (which figured in several Bukowski stories), was marooned in its parking lot on the site of the old Rector Hotel. In the 70s, a neighbor of mine, new to LA, naively stopped here on his way home late one night and was attacked by a gang of men and women who slit his throat, stole his wallet and boots and left him for dead between two parked cars. It took 144 stitches to close his neck. Bukowski glides through his fave intersection while he reminisces about the clientele of Pioneer Chicken (in the background) and the bad old days: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-C...840%2520PM.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xey8sffnFvk The Hollywood Western Building's tenants were then producing actual porn of the sketchiest variety in studios on the upper floors. Ground-floor space was given over to cheap music rehearsal studios (Studio 9, Hollywood Rehearsal Studios). Guns n Roses used to practice here trying to soak up some cred. Strange, strung-out individuals lived rent-free in forgotten crevices of the building. Mayhem ruled the halls. Hookers, junkies, porn workers, groupies and thieves used to spill out on the sidewalk to drag themselves across to Pioneer Chicken, which was open 24/7. It did a roaring business (not just in chicken). The cops took their cut of various enterprises and shrugged. The building stumbled along in this vein until the Northridge quake in '94. Then the building got red-tagged and squatters moved in: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-h...359%2520PM.jpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhO6bvnLZQ Los Angeles Times COVER STORY : Red-Tagged Relics : Battered, Blighted Hollywood Landmarks Teeter on Edge of Extinction October 09, 1994|SCOTT COLLINS When the Hollywood-Western building was completed in 1928, movie star Norma Shearer opened it with a golden key. Today, the young vagrants who live there don't need any keys--the back door is wide open and admits anyone brave enough to enter. In these offices, early movie moguls made big decisions on censorship, antitrust laws and trade unions. Now squatters use the rooms as crash pads, slumbering amid ripped sofas, crumbled plaster and dried puddles of blood. The 66-year-old building--Los Angeles historic-cultural monument No. 336--is rotting inside and out, a victim of the January earthquake and years of apathy and neglect. Preservationists worry that the red-tagged architectural jewel, an Art Deco landmark on the southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, will soon fall through the bureaucratic cracks and face the wrecking ball--if one of its illegal inhabitants doesn't set fire to the place first.... More: http://articles.latimes.com/1994-10-...wood-boulevard The turnaround: Los Angeles Times: Hollywood Face Lift Hopes to Reclaim a Building and an Era Private passion and public money are rescuing the building. January 23, 1999|BETTINA BOXALL ...The nudes have been cleaned up, the ground-floor bargain store will be gone by the end of the month and the garbage has been shoveled off the floors. Private passion and public money are rescuing the building--or at least attempting to, since ultimately only a revived neighborhood and appreciative tenants will keep it alive. The 1994 earthquake that nearly destroyed the building shook loose the government funds to fix it: a $2.3-million earthquake rehabilitation loan from the Community Redevelopment Agency, along with a $1-million city housing loan to renovate an adjacent apartment building that in its early days reputedly housed the mistresses of studio executives. The quake "was a mixed blessing in a sense," said Mirta Ocana, a deputy for City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. "We just didn't have the funds to do it, and now we got the money." The private push has been supplied by Matthew Lesniak, an architecture buff and former mime who made the building's salvation something of a personal crusade after learning of the landmark's bleak post-earthquake state... More: http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jan/23/local/me-829 https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-h...353%2520AM.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywo...stern_Building The discreet and convenient little apartment building to the left of the Hollywood Western building at 1167 Western Ave (also visible in the quoted shot at the top of the post), said to be the former home for producers' mistresses back in the MPAA days, was also rehabbed as part of the deal: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-M...913%2520AM.jpg gsv Not exactly what it was. The neon and the tower are gone. The street entrance to the basement is still blocked. The whole place has been given a trivializing pastel paint-job. The building was "renovated", not "restored", but it's better than the bulldozer. Someone can always do a proper job later. City Council member Eric Garcetti, scion of one of our less savory crime families (son of Gil Garcetti, former DA) has his Hollywood offices there now. He's smugly confident he'll be LA's next Mayor. One more look back: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...6%252520PM.jpg islandora UCLA S Charles Lee archive And a current (9/12/15) shot from Matt Maxwell which displays the new, deeper-toned paint job. Much more handsome: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...5%252520PM.jpg mattmaxwell P.S. Upcoming development at Hollywood and Western: "LGBT Oldsters Getting Hollywood & Western Apartment Complex" http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/0...nt_complex.php "High Line West Bringing Apartments, Retail, Elevated Park to Hollywood and Western" http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/1...nd_western.php |
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http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8094/8...bb38d0dc_o.png View of Hill Street looking north from 9th Street, ca.1924 Photograph of a view of Hill Street looking north from 9th Street, ca.1924. The intersection ahead appears to be a bit congested with cars and cable car traffic. Legible signs include: "Hotel Percival and apartments, weekly rates", "Hill Street Theatre, [...]eum Circuit, [...] feature photoplays, [...] continuous 11:30 A.M., [...] value shows", "all [...], sewing machine, rented and repaired", "fruit and ice cream", "9th and Hill auto park driveway", "concerning this property, see exclusive agents, Joe Toplitery Co., telephone 878-451, 205 Herman W. Hellman Bldg.", "25¢, 35¢", "cars washed, polished, expert mechanical work done, parking, open all [...], "Los Angeles Desk [...], 7 floors of service, office furniture headquarters", "Hotel Alpine", "Matheson". USC digital archive/California Historical Society Collection, 1860-1960/Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, 1860-1960 And, by the way, don't you just love all the Five-Globe Llewellyns in this shot? great. |
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