Vintage Los Angeles Postcards, Part 3
Here it is... PART 3 in a series of posts featuring Steve DeGaetano's vintage Los Angeles postcards, purchased in the "One of a Kind Shop" in New Orleans Square. I'll bet Lillian Disney herself had put the cards in the shop! She was lurking in a corner to see if anybody would buy them. As before, the card captions are in orange, and Steve's additional comments are in blue. We've got five more scans today, so let's get to them:
LA-11: This card has no caption other than ”Spring Street, Los Angeles, California.”
Note the streetcar tracks in the middle of the street.
LA-12: This card has no caption other than “Plaza and Old Mission Church, Los Angeles, California.”
My comments: This card is postmarked December 1907. The writer says, “We are nicely settled for the winter. It is lonely here. 75 degrees in the shade.”
LA-14: “Typically Californian in its spacious and beautiful Spanish architecture, the new Los Angeles Union Station, built at a cost of $11,000,000 provides a setting which typifies to visitors the charm and hospitality of Los Angels and Southern California. The buildings and tracks cover 40 acres of ground; the station, which extends 850 feet along Alameda Street, is the gateway to Los Angeles’ Civic Center. Its lavish appointments and ultra-modern facilities make it the most attractive railroad station in America.” (See Union Station HERE).
LA-15: This card has no caption other than “Cahuenga Freeway, Gateway to Hollywood, California.”
“Cahuenga Freeway?” Most people today would know it as the Hollywood Freeway. It’s hard to see in this image, but in the median between the traffic lanes are tracks of the Pacific Electric “Red Cars.” The San Fernando Valley is just visible on the horizon. Universal Studios would be in the hills to the right.
THANK YOU, Steve DeGaetano! We'll have one more installment for you, coming up soon.
9 comments:
Major-
“Cahuenga Freeway, Gateway to Hollywood, California.”
I imagine that's the same as Fresno - Gateway to Yosemite.
(I wonder when it was changed simply to Cahuenga Pass).
Thanks to Steve and The Major.
I like the Spring Street card. Late 1920s/early 1930s? It almost looks like a 1950s photo, until you see the vintage cars. We can see Tinker Bell on her zip-line gliding across Spring Street.
Ooh, the 2nd image is even nicer than the first! I love that huge agave(?) plant in the (right) foreground.
L.A. City Hall hasn't changed much since the time of this postcard. I thought that black thing in the sky might be an airplane with an advertising banner. But I guess it's just some random dots from the printing process.
Well, we know precisely when this photo of Union Station was taken- 12:28 in the afternoon (as shown by the tower clock). Judging by the cars, this was taken sometime in the late 1930s? $11 million dollars was a huge sum back then!
The last card: Brush-covered hills and freeways- a perfect representation of the greater L.A. area.
Thanks, Steve. Nice images. Thanks, Major. Nice blog. :-)
We can see Tinker Bell on her zip-line gliding across Spring Street.
JB, that's Harry Houdini! ;-)
As for the last postcard, I've only ever known that area as the Cahuenga Pass part of the Hollywood Freeway. According to Wikipedia, this segment of the freeway through the Cahuenga Pass was only a mile and a half long, and was the first segment of the freeway to open (in 1940). It was not extended to Downtown L.A. until 1954.
Wikipedia also mentions that there were two different battles fought in the Cahuenga Pass, in the 1800s. And apparently, cannon balls are still found on occasion, during excavations. Who knew?
I have really enjoyed this series of vintage postcard posts! Thank you, Steve and Major!
I forgot to mention that segment of the freeway was indeed called the Cahuenga Pass Freeway when it first opened. I couldn't find an exact date for when the name was changed, but it seems like it might have been when the freeway was expanded beyond Hollywood, to Downtown L.A.
Thanks Major and everyone for the comments. Interestingly, embedded in the concrete overpasses in the Cahuenga Pass, you can still see metal attachment points for the overhead power lines of the Pacific Electric. Both City Hall and Union Station don't look much different today.
I don't call myself an expert re: the Caheunga Pass...for those not from LA: CAH-HUENG-GA....not "CAH-HUNG-GA"...but I certainly have driven on it perhaps thousands of times. For us "East Side" boys, this was our only route to the Valley...unless you wanted to go around through Glendale/Burbank....or over Coldwater/another canyon et al...the Canyons tend to be quicker when the Caheunga pass is a giant bottleneck, and if somethings going on at the Hollywood Bowl (like...every day during "the season") it's allll jacked up. That being said, this view is actually going TOWARDS Hollywood not away from it...the view in the distance is Hollywood, and you can see the giant cross over by the Ford theatre on the left. The lower street on the right takes you down to Highland, where you plonk right down in the Hollywood Bowls parking lot before getting into more extreme traffic. The road on the left now goes through down towards the more eastern streets in Hollywood: Vine, Gower, etc. As Bette Davis once said "Take Fountain"...(and that IS good advice), here, the Bu quote is "Take Caheunga to Barham"....which is going over that bridge to the left and head towards Universal...which gets you to Barham (going back over the freeway)...or Lankershim if you choose (more traffic) but takes you in a different direction: and Barham basically gets you to Burbank fairly quickly as it's going around the Universal Lot and into the Warners/NBC/Disney et al compounds. DON'T take the 101 to the Barham exit if going to Universal....take Caheunga "over the hill": you will thank me. If you are going to the West Valley: Sherman Oaks/Encino/et al....suffer through the 101: Major may have a more "secret" shortcut...every time I took Ventura it became an even worse nightmare. OK....that being said: that Cross on the hill has an interesting story, and it's actually owned by a church in Van Nuys....a philanthropist from PA was someone was involved in the infancy of the Hollywood Bowl...but she wanted more liturgical presentations...and the others wanted a broader spectrum of entertainment...so she bought and built the Ford Theatre on the other side of Cahuenga....it was called something else at that time....and that's why she put that cross up on the hill: which you can see sitting in the audience at the Bowl. For those of you who haven't seen a performance at the Hollywood Bowl...I highly recommend it as a lovely "picnic" night out...and even though there are tens of thousands of people it is a rather zen and quiet place. The last thing I saw there was the first "Sing a long Sound of Music"...which was (surprisingly to the promoters) a sell out....Charmian Carr (Liesel) did some MC work...and when the crowd was shrieking to have her sing "I am sixteen going on seventeen"...she DID: acapella...the crowd grew quiet, where we were all transported back in time...she sounded amazing...and when she stopped there was thunderous applause/screaming/and the crowd went WILD. It was like Sting or the Beatles had just performed. RIP Liesel. Julie was not there...however many celebs were...and Debbie Reynolds brought her grandkids and dressed them in the ACTUAL costumes from the draperies the kids in the movie wore....she was there like everyone else in the audience. What a fun night that was. Thanks Steve for taking me back to my "childhood" in Hollywood: three chapters after Disney. Thanks Major. Stay cool again today: another blistering heatwave!
Thanks for the very detailed and informative correction, Bu!
Thank you Major and Steve, and by extension, Mrs. Disney too.
These are all familiar views, made fresh in the flat coloring and laconic captions.
I can’t help hearing the these to Dragnet every time I see City Hall.
JG
*theme*
Re pronounciation, my LA native Dad always pronounced the middle syllable “Ca-Hu-en-ga. Also I noticed that there is a local pronunciation of “Los Angeles” where part of the middle is skipped and a hard “g” is kind of swallowed, “Los Ang-Les”. I had forgotten he said it this way until I rewatched Perry Mason and every character used it too. No idea if that is academically correct or not, but it was a real thing that I don’t hear any more.
JG
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