noirish Los Angeles

[Flyingwedge]

I don't recall seeing this c. 1890s photo before. Does anyone recognize the house? It's supposed to be somewhere in LA.



486795 @ Huntington Digital Library, Ernest Marquez Collection

[ethereal_reality]

Oh my FW, what a find! I've never seen anything quite like it.

What would you call that....-jigsaw-gingerbread?

__

[BDiH]

Originally Posted by Martin Pal

The only reason I happened to do a search a bit ago was because of something HossC mentioned and then a photograph popped up that was surprising.




6413 Hollywood Blvd. was the address for ALDO'S, photos of which appear to be slim, and, as noted in the quote,
there was a COFFEE DAN'S at 6405 Hollywood Blvd. which has never been glimpsed on NLA before.

Neither of these names, addresses or locations were in the caption of this photo, so its appearance was serendipitous!




Northwest Corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards at night, 1961.
from the book The Story of Hollywood, page 321.


This angled photo shows that, indeed, there was another Coffee Dan's at this location. We can see the ALDO'S restaurant marquee
to the left and then above--the lighted KFWB sign on the building and also their blade sign. The Cinerama neon is probably for
something at the Warner Bros. Theater that's right at that location, too. The "M-A" above the time...?

The other sign might say Free Job...etc., and we know that it was 8:35 p.m.!

.

Coffee Dan's and Aldo's competed on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1950s and 1960s . Aldo's was popular with the disc jockeys from KFWB. It had a horseshoe counter and served food on cowboy themed china. In that era, before Coffee Bean and Starbucks, there were many popular coffee shops around town. Coffee, served in a cup and saucer cost a dime with all the refills you wanted. If you went to the the coffee shop at the Vine Street Derby or the Plaza Coffee Shop, prices were higher, but you saw more movie stars, and you stepped up in class.

The Cinerama sign shown above was at the Warner Theatre (later the Pacific) at Wilcox. It was the home of all the original Cinerama movies, which originally were travelogues introduced by Lowell Thomas. It wasn't until How the West Was Won opened at the Cinerama Theatre in 1962 that a full length Cinerama feature film was released. The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and other Cinerama movies followed. The theater was unique in Hollywood because it had two balconies, topping the other great first run houses, Grauman's Chinese, the Egyptian and the Pantages.

The Warner Theatre building housed not only the Cinerama Theatre, but the radio station KFWB- WB for Warner Brothers, and William Stromberg Jewelers (with the historic clock in front near the curb), Mitchell's Menswear and Ben's Smoke Shop.

The Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard was across the street from Norm's Restaurant and Wallich's Music City, which were separated by Morningside Court. The Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 and was the first major theater built in Hollywood in 33 years. The Hollywood Boulevard theater stopped featuring Cinerama productions after the Dome opened..

[BDiH]

Originally Posted by Martin Pal

Thanks for those memories BDiH! When I found a snapshot of this place on Flickr last February, at this post HERE, the person (Vicky Valentine) whose photo it was said:

"Coffee Dan's, my hangout before high school. 1966-68."
She indicated she and her friend's referred to it as "C.D.'s."

Since you used to frequent the place, do you remember if the waitresses had any particular "Coffee Dan's" uniforms they wore? Was there any particular color scheme for these restaurants?

Lee Drugs, that you mentioned, is now a souvenir store called Memories of Hollywood. The Coffee Dan's location is now a McDonald's.

Thank you for verifying the location!

Thank you. Yes, I keep up with all the changes, though they are mostly sad. I don't recall the waitresses uniforms, perhaps tan? Not sure. The interior was that Googie orange-red color with lots of plants between the booths for privacy. Hody's at Hollywood and Vine and Tiny Naylor's on Sunset and *Biff's on Yucca all had a similar theme. Norm's on La Cienega is similar, but Coffee Dan's and Carolina Pine Jr on La Brea were classier. Then there was Toff's the Gold Cup, the Snow White, all coffee shops, but a half step down.

The hotels, the Roosevelt, the Plaza and the Knickerbocker, all classy places back in the day, had coffee shops. The best, cheap places to eat were the cafeterias- the Ontra on Vine or Manning's near J. J. Newberry. Of course, Newberry's and Woolworth's had lunch counters where you could get a grilled cheese sandwich for fifty cents.

*Footnote: Biff is still around. He is Tiny Naylor's son and owns Du-Pars in Hollywood and in the San Fernando Valley.

[CityBoyDoug]

Originally Posted by BDiH

The Cinerama sign shown above was at the Warner Theatre (later the Pacific) at Wilcox. It was the home of all the original Cinerama movies, which originally were travelogues introduced by Lowell Thomas. It wasn't until How the West Was Won opened at the Cinerama Theatre in 1962 that a full length Cinerama feature film was released. The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and other Cinerama movies followed. The theater was unique in Hollywood because it had two balconies, topping the other great first run houses, Grauman's Chinese, the Egyptian and the Pantages.

The Warner Theatre building housed not only the Cinerama Theatre, but the radio station KFWB- WB for Warner Brothers, and William Stromberg Jewelers (with the historic clock in front near the curb), Mitchell's Menswear and Ben's Smoke Shop.

The Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard was across the street from Norm's Restaurant and Wallich's Music City, which were separated by Morningside Court. The Cinerama Dome opened in 1963 and was the first major theater built in Hollywood in 33 years. The Hollywood Boulevard theater stopped featuring Cinerama productions after the Dome opened..

Thanks BD..you inspired me to post these photos which may be new to NLA.

As little Cub Scout I saw Cinerama at the theater seen here. Everyone was so excited to see this new process and it's theatrical presentation.

It opened with just a small center screen. After the Intro the curtains opened up wide and the three screen show began ...it was spectacular is inadequate to describe the view.
The projection booth, stage, curtains and the screens had to be rebuilt to accommodate this new process.

Being premiered in Hollywood Movie City many people were wondering...'will this work or be a flop'.

The roller coaster ride scene was...unforgettable to put it mildly..


Of course a Cadillac...
...

How it worked [right].

Here's a Preview. The entire film can be seen on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/fOFIEtmc86w

[Martin Pal]

.

A picture or two edited from longer posts:

Originally Posted by lwize

soon to be shut down, torn down, and rebuilt over the next year:
The california incline in santa monica.


abc news

Originally Posted by tovangar2

descending the incline always made me feel absolutely carefree and exhilarated.

curbed la published a bunch of historic pix of the california incline, including this one from lapl:


demo starts in the morning.

Info from the city of santa monica about the project here

Originally Posted by tovangar2

Construction on the California Incline is expected to take a year+

A little twilight glamour:

LAT/marcus yam


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE INCLINE IS NOW OPEN!

KTLA

Check out this youtube of the
California Incline Replacement Time-Lapse made by The City of Santa Monica and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) partnered with Work Zone Cam.

• Video Link


...and notice there was NO RAIN during all that time!

.

[Martin Pal]

.

Los Angeles is having it's first ever official FLEET WEEK!

http://www.lafleetweek.com/

What is Fleet Week?
Sept. 2nd – 5th, 2016

LA Fleet Week™ 2016 is a celebration of our U.S. armed forces at our nation’s #1 port, the Port of Los Angeles. The four-day festival will host active military ships along the LA Waterfront and feature public ship tours, military equipment demos, live entertainment, educational activities and more.




This next photo is on the L.A. Fleet Week website. There is no caption or anything to note the historic background of when or why it was taken.

[HossC]

While looking for photos of the Herald-Express building yesterday, I came across this picture. The caption is "Powerhouse and main offices of the L.A. Traction Company building on the southwest corner of Twelfth and Georgia Bell Streets, 1897". I'm assuming that Georgia Bell Street became Georgia Street.


USC Digital Library

The 1897 CD lists the Los Angeles Traction Co at the northwest corner of Georgia and Girard. That must be the car barn. Here's the area on the 1910 Baist map. Note that the tracks ran vertically between Girard and Pico, whereas later photographs we've seen show them running horizontally.


www.historicmapworks.com

[HossC]

While we're on Georgia Street, I think this building is new to NLA. According to the description, it's "The Plan Room Library for Builders, 1417 Georgia St., Los Angeles, 1958".


USC Digital Library

The 1960 CD lists all of these businesses at 1417 Georgia Street.


LAPL

The new building permit is dated 1925. It shows that it was built as a store, office, residence and club rooms by the Musicians Club Inc. The building extended back to Delong Street. The second page mentions that the building was set back 20 feet to allow for a future traffic project.


Online Building Records

1417 Georgia Street only just survived the construction of the nearby freeway ramps (below), but couldn't hold out when the Convention Center was extended. The demo and grading permits were issued in 1989. The building with the conical roof detail on the right is the Otsego Apartments which I covered in post #18664.


Detail of picture in USC Digital Library

[Martin Pal]

Originally Posted by BDiH

The Cinerama sign shown above was at the Warner Theatre (later the Pacific) at Wilcox. It was the home of all the original Cinerama movies, which originally were travelogues introduced by Lowell Thomas.

The theater was unique in Hollywood because it had two balconies, topping the other great first run houses, Grauman's Chinese, the Egyptian and the Pantages.
________________________________________________________________________________________

By the time i visited the Pacific Theatre, those balconies had been transformed into Theatre 2 & Theatre 3. I never liked them because the seating was all angled to the left or right depending on the one you were in, but the screen was not. Was very strange.

And thanks for the other info!

Originally Posted by CityBoyDoug

As little Cub Scout I saw Cinerama at the theater seen here. Everyone was so excited to see this new process and it's theatrical presentation.

It opened with just a small center screen. After the Intro the curtains opened up wide and the three screen show began ...it was spectacular is inadequate to describe the view.
The projection booth, stage, curtains and the screens had to be rebuilt to accommodate this new process.
________________________________________________________________________________________

CBD, in the last few years, the Cinerama Dome has played several of the Cinerama films on occasion. I saw the THIS IS CINERAMA film there, that you wrote about, and it was still impressive by today's standards. I have a book that says THIS IS CINERAMA was the highest grossing film of 1952.

[Lwize]

I remember as a kid visiting Angelus Furniture somewhere in DTLA or East LA, in a big old spooky building.

Does anyone have pictures and the location of the old Angelus Furniture. It existed into the 1970's at least.

[HossC]

BifRayRock posted this image back in 2013, but it's showing up like a sliding block puzzle for me, so I went back to the original.

"Angelus Furniture Manufacturing Co., The May Company, Los Angeles, CA, 1931."


USC Digital Library

It originally had the address 3650 E 9th Street, but that's now 3650 E Olympic Boulevard.


GSV

[Blaster]

Originally Posted by Martin Pal

By the time i visited the Pacific Theatre, those balconies had been transformed into Theatre 2 & Theatre 3. I never liked them because the seating was all angled to the left or right depending on the one you were in, but the screen was not. Was very strange.

I remember that, too. Seems like there were several old theaters where they simply put a dividing wall down the middle of the theater and turned them into two screens (with angled seating).

[AlvaroLegido]

Originally Posted by HossC

To the north were the Circle Drive-In Theatre and Clock drive-in restaurant.



All from archive.org

I like very much the cars of that short period (the very early Fifties). They are not as much aerodynamic as later and, at the same time, they still have that roundness of their 1940s shape.

[HossC]

I posted Julius Shulman's 1959 photoset of Lawry's in post #35915. Still at the location on the west side of N La Cienega, here's how it looked 23 years later. This is "Job 6118: Lawry's Prime Rib (Beverly Hills, Calif.), 1982".



The 1959 pictures only showed us as far as the waiting area. This time we get to see the interior.



The color photos above are closely duplicated in two of the black & white images. Here are the other two. I wish these had been in color too.



I wonder how this differed from the 1959 décor. The exterior shows more modern signage, so the interior paintings and shields came as quite a surprise.



All from Getty Research Institute

[odinthor]

Originally Posted by HossC

While Googling the Golden Drumstick, I found an 8 minute film called "Home Movie: PA100018: Beany's Drive-In, Long Beach, Calif., ca. 1952" at archive.org. Here are some screengrabs.

To start, here's a color view of the Golden Drumstick, and across the road, Beany's.



The boy on the sign rotated, as did the propeller on his hat. They offered "Sublime Food at Ridiculous Prices".



Here's the drive-in window, complete with a price list.



There was no seating, but you could order your food at this window. They even had drinking fountains to hydrate the customers while they waited. The last shot of Beany's shows the neon at night.



To the north were the Circle Drive-In Theatre and Clock drive-in restaurant.



All from archive.org

As luck would have it, I found a 1952 aerial view showing the businesses discussed above.


Historic Aerials

Now there's a Pep Boys where the Golden Drumstick used to be, a strip mall where Beany's used to be, a housing development where the Circle Drive-In used to be, and a Carl's Jr where Clock used to be. The strip mall does include a Burger King on the corner, but it's not Beany's.


Google Maps

As it happens--and I hadn't checked out this on NLA at that time--I was at this precise location today: My gym is where the (well-remembered) Circle Drive-In was, so I pass the aforementioned Pep Boys, strip mall, and Burger King three times a week. For reasons unknown to me, a couple of miles of PCH, of which this was about the middle, had a vaguely and sparse Polynesian theme about the 1950s-1970s. There was a Trader Vic's farther on down (I was in it once, as a tyke; the building remains as what seems to be a South American sort of restaurant called Green Fields; but in GSV it's well-hidden by trees), across from the present Pep Boys site was and is a car wash which once upon a time also carried out the Polynesian theme, and up the street above the Traffic Circle was until quite recently a bowling alley with the same theme. Today, sort of continuing the Polynesian coincidence, having left the gym, I continued on down PCH to the Huntington Beach pier area and had a delicious lunch at the Hawaiian-themed Duke's! Cuz, you see, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxyF864X9jk I get around . . .

[CityBoyDoug]

Originally Posted by HossC

I posted Julius Shulman's 1959 photoset of Lawry's in post #35915. Still at the location on the west side of N La Cienega, here's how it looked 23 years later. This is "Job 6118: Lawry's Prime Rib (Beverly Hills, Calif.), 1982".




I wonder how this differed from the 1959 décor. The exterior shows more modern signage, so the interior paintings and shields came as quite a surprise.

All from Getty Research Institute

Never got around to going there. The food was of course top drawer. That was, except for the combination of delicious prime rib were the flavors of Camels, Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls. Nice tall backed chairs...comfy.

Today its Black Angus Steaks, etc.....I go there wearing t-shirt, shorts and my flip flops....times truly have changed.

...
Lawry's inc.

[unihikid]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

I thought it might be the Bekins building as well Hoss. (the lettering on the building looked the same)

Here's my view I was ready to post.

I hope someone 'saves' this building...I like it a lot.




It's also visible in the view below.

We're looking west (on C) toward the recently discussed intersection of Avalon Blvd. & C Street.

The large building in the distance is the Bekins bldg on Fries Ave.


http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics26/00032633.jpg


Here's the same view today. (if you look closely you can see the Bekins bldg)



__

So I work in Harbor City, and i got off early today and figured id try and find a few Thrift Shops is the area.. Im walking down the street and i come across this nice little shop, I walk back to my car and low and behold im in the area we were discussing earlier this week. Willmington is a nice little town that's trying to make a come back, but the bums we're looking at me strange because i was taking pictures of burned buildings and tracks





[URL=http://s292.photobucket.com/user/unihikid/media/7BC0CA2C-2C35-4554-947F-983E1DD3948B_zpsrxotwvfv.jpg.html][/URL








I tried to take this at the right angle..im standing on the old PE line


This would of been the station.

I also spent some time at Bekins...I dont want to post all of the photos but here is one. Im not sure if this was a PE spur but id love to think that it is.


Sorry for all of the photos i just thought it was funny that i was in the area.

[ProphetM]

Thanks for the pics, unihikid!

[Flyingwedge]

Originally Posted by Martin Pal

I do have some Bamboo Room info from the book The Brown Derby Restaurant: A Hollywood Legend, written by two authors, one of them being Sally Wright Cobb, the wife of the owner, Robert H. Cobb, and published in 1996.

THE BAMBOO ROOM

The Bamboo Room was the Hollywood Brown Derby's first cocktail lounge. When the Brown Derby opened in 1929, Prohibition was the law and was not repealed for four more years. In 1933 a service bar was installed at the back of the dining room; waiters also wheeled a cocktail cart from booth to booth and prepared drinks for customers at their tables.

February 6, 1936: Carole Lombard was the host of a glamorous evening that officially opened the room. Tropical palms, bamboo chairs covered with zebra prints, and a sandlike floor gave the Bamboo Room the exotic feeling of the South Seas. Hollywood's tropical fantasies began with the opening of the Coconut Grove (decorated with hundreds of prop palm trees from The Sheik) at the Ambassador Hotel in 1921, and was played out in numerous restaurants and nightclubs, including the Seven Seas, the Tropics, Don the Beachcomber, and the Hawaiian Paradise, through the 1930's.

The Hawaiian Paradise was at 7566 Melrose from 1937 to about 1940. Here it is in the 1939 LACD. Sopas ej posted this
photo of the interior of 7566 Melrose, then called the 7566 Club, over six years ago! The bamboo poles and matting
overhead are left over from the Hawaiian Paradise. Go to the LAPL photo collection and search for "7566" to see other
photos of people caught in the raid.

Originally Posted by sopas ej

From lapl.org:

Having a merry time at 3 o'clock in the morning, patrons of the 7566 Club at 7566 Melrose Avenue are shown at the bar when officers raided the place, one of four swank Hollywood night spots "pinched" by 50 police. In the four hot spots 17 men were nabbed, most accused of selling liquor without licenses. Photo dated: January 29, 1941.

The June 22, 1937, building permit for the interior remodel for the Hawaiian Paradise indicates bamboo will be used
to create a "Hawaiian Hut effect":


LADBS


The BP for the Hawaiian Paradise's roof sign had been secured on June 18, 1937 (there is a May 3, 1941, permit
for a new roof sign at 7566 Melrose):


LADBS


The Hawaiian Paradise nightclub, c. 1937. Over the three arched windows is a small neon sign with the address, I'm pretty
sure. But I don't know what that guy is reaching for on the sidewalk:



488909 @ Huntington Digital Library, Ernest Marquez Collection


Here's a closer view of the roof sign. That looks like a pretty generic volcano:



From what I could tell by going through building permits, 7566 Melrose was built in 1929 and torn down except for the
south exterior wall and rebuilt in 2011.