This is the cover of the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album, from 1969.
I found out today that it was taken at 812 Palm Ave., the site of which I knew as the Video West parking lot.
Video West, which opened in 1983, was through the alleyway you see here on the left that leads to Larrabee
Street, to the west. I worked there for a few years. Hancock Ave. is the next street before Palm Ave., to the east.
(Did you ever go to Video West when you lived there,
E_R?)
(In the last month or two this parking lot has become a West Hollywood City parking lot, repaved, surrounded by a small
green fence and electronic toll machines installed.)
How the album cover came about came about, info from
HERE:
Atlantic Records asked the team of Henry Diltz, photographer, and Gary Burden, art director, to create the cover.
On the day before the shoot Gary and Graham Nash drove through Hollywood and West Hollywood looking for a suitable
location: the group wanted a site that was "downhome and comfortable" like their music. They settled on a little
abandoned house with a couch outside. It was on a small street called Palm Avenue near a well-known Orange
Julius refreshment stand on the larger thoroughfare of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.
At the time of the shoot, the band did not have a name yet, so they didn't consider their seating positions, which were,
from left to right: Nash, Stills, and Crosby. A few days after the shoot, they officially decided on a group name of Crosby,
Stills & Nash, but when they went back to reshoot the photo in that order, to avoid record buyer's confusion -- the
building had been demolished and was just a pile of timber.
A photoshop putting the house into the parking lot and the album cover on the house.
The site indicates that this place was originally housing that was built for the railway workers, employed at the
large Pacific Electric terminus across Santa Monica Blvd. (On Palm Avenue only two or three of these small
houses still exist. Apartment buildings are now the norm. One of these small houses on Palm Ave. collapsed
during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It looked like a giant hand just pushed it down.)
There are more interesting photos (and photoshops) of this album cover shoot and such on this website
HERE.
(Be advised that some of the detail information is not correct, though, like where exactly the Orange Julius
stand and the PDC are located in separate photographs, and the date of one of the aerials, for example.)