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Forgotten Los Angeles A deep dive into the history of Los Angeles. Join me as I travel through time. Started on Instagram. Never colorized. Never AI.

10/20/2026

Two minutes from a wartime travelogue called “California, Here We Are,” made by Warner Bros. in 1944.

I’ve split this into two halves and have put them in reverse order here to be able to start with its busy street scenes.

The first two shots are looking west on Wilshire, first from Commonwealth toward Bullocks Wilshire, and then from Serrano toward the Wiltern & the Wilshire Professional Building.

Then we’re on Sunset Blvd, looking west from Gower towards CBS. Both ABC and NBC were down the road at Vine, hence “Radio Row.”

For Hollywood, we’re looking west from Argyle toward the Pantages (and the Equitable & Taft Buildings, and Broadway Hollywood).

After that, we see a quick glimpse of Chinatown which is then followed footage from China City, the long-forgotten tourist attraction from Olvera Street developer Christine Sterling, which was objected to by many of the city’s Chinese residents and which burned down several times. This is followed by thirty great seconds of Olvera Street.

Then we jump back to the beginning of the film, looking out over the coast form Palisades Park over Pacific Coast Highway (back when it was called “Roosevelt Highway,” named after Teddy before FDR was president), and that’s followed by a small tour of Southern California landscapes.

The narration here is by actor and former KNX radio announcer Knox Manning, and was written by Roger Q. Denny, an up-and-coming Warner Bros screenwriter who died in a car accident the following year when his car veered into a tree on Topanga Canyon near Vanowen, killing him and three passengers. He was 32.

Before it was République, this beautiful villa was known as the “La Brea Arcade,” and was built in 1929 by actress Lita ...
10/18/2026

Before it was République, this beautiful villa was known as the “La Brea Arcade,” and was built in 1929 by actress Lita Grey shortly after her divorce from Charlie Chaplin.

The building was designed by famed Beverly Hills architect Roy Seldon Price, who’d just completed a house for Grey at 523 North Beverly Drive. As she was just 20-years-old at the time, trying to raise two children while being hounded by reporters eager to get the scoop on her split from the most famous man in the world, she was likely advised that it would be a smart way to supplement her income to invest in commercial property which she could rent out to tenants.

In these photos, snapped as the building was nearing completion, we can see that the building is already home to Bertha Claire’s Handcrafted Studio and Chadwick’s Permanent Wave Studio, and Ms. Grey’s lawyer Frank C. Curry is listed as having his office in the building as well.

In 1940, the building was acquired by two representatives of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. for $68,500 (which adjusts to $1.6M in 2026). At that time, it was reported to have nine stores on the ground floor and fourteen offices upstairs, which included realtors, architects, a corset salon and a photography agency that specialized in head shots.

Decades later, the building was home to the much-beloved L.A. bakery Campanile for 23 years, from 1989 to 2012. One year later, the building would become home to République Cafe, Bakery & Restaurant , which has been a local favorite ever since.

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I’ve posted one of these shots before, back in 2023, but only found the larger photoset within the past year. Putting them up today because we stopped in for dinner on Friday and had a wonderful time catching up with friends visiting from overseas. As we placed our order, my lunatic friend called after the waiter asking to add “one mystery dish - whatever the chef is excited to make,” and what they brought back was a lobster pasta called the campanelle, which he explained was “an homage to the restaurant that was in the space before us.” Love them for that.

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Photos by Mott Studios, via CA State Library.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Dep6CVrGVMc/?srtk=MXNuM3IzejRhNnplYQ==

Downtown Los Angeles, circa 1900All photos by early L.A. historian George Washington Hazard, who moved here as a boy in ...
10/16/2026

Downtown Los Angeles, circa 1900

All photos by early L.A. historian George Washington Hazard, who moved here as a boy in the 1850s, back when Los Angeles was a town of a few thousand people, and who died in 1914, when it was a bustling city of nearly half a million. He lived here 60 years, but died before we’d ever constructed an Art Deco Building or shot more than a handful of feature-length films. This was an L.A. that existed long before the one we know today.

All images are individually captioned, or they can be viewed on Instagram as a slide-show:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DekqTBjjzlQ/?img_index=1

All photos from the Ernest Marquez collection, via The Huntington

10/16/2026

How fun is this? Sure that one guy can only play one note, but he’s killing it.

This clip comes from the 1959 AIP horror comedy “Ghost of Dragstrip Hollpw,” which is the same film as the drag racing clip that I posted a week ago. Nothing specific to add to this, other than that I just really love this glimpse at what is intended to be a 1950s costume party somewhere in LA.

As the original clip holds way too long on a medium shot of the band playing, I’ve spliced in three cutaway reactions from people who appear in costume in a later scene, and I’ve marked these edits with an asterisk (*) in the upper left.

Now, get to work on recreating this party, thanks!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Deig1HwSbog/?dlrf=dWp3ZDBmbWJtZGVl

Roger Corman’s black cat auditions, held in Hollywood at Bronson & Melrose, Nov 27th, 1961.You’ve probably seen some of ...
10/16/2026

Roger Corman’s black cat auditions, held in Hollywood at Bronson & Melrose, Nov 27th, 1961.

You’ve probably seen some of these before as they’ve been going around for years, and they’ve even appeared here on this account way back in May of 2020. I must not have been as curious back then (…obsessive?), as I didn’t make the effort to pin down the location on the earlier post. Happy now to confirm that these were taken at Producers Studio Inc. at 650 Bronson Avenue, which had previously been known as Enterprise Studio and has since become Raleigh Studios. These hopeful cat owners are therefore lined up along Bronson Avenue, just outside of the entrance. In Slide 15, with the man packing up to go, you can also just barely make out signage for “the Inn Between Cafe” in the distance, which was at 5414 Melrose Avenue.

The casting call was for Corman’s 1962 anthology film “Tales of Terror,” which was comprised of three segments each adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. All three were adapted by Richard Matheson, and this particular segment, “The Black Cat,” starred Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Joyce Jameson.

In total, 152 cats were auditioned, and were narrowed down to just twenty by the end of the first day. No word on which one was finally selected, or how many rewrites it demanded.

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All photos by Ralph Crane for LIFE, except for the shot used for the then & now comparison which comes from the LA Times collection at UCLA Library

https://www.instagram.com/p/DeiNZwDGBaR/?exln=MWdhNHRvcnc5bm1xMw==

The Columbia space shuttle lands Edwards Air Force Base, on January 19th, 1986.The California landing was made after the...
10/15/2026

The Columbia space shuttle lands Edwards Air Force Base, on January 19th, 1986.

The California landing was made after the mission was made to abort three consecutive landing attempts in Florida due to weather. NASA had wanted the shuttle to land in Florida because they had a tight launch schedule ahead of the arrival of Halley’s Comet and they didn’t want to lose the five days of prep time that it would take to transport Columbia back across the country, but they were starting to burn through those days anyway while waiting for the rain to stop.

In the early hours of the 19th, after nixing a third attempt for Florida, the shuttle diverted to the Mojave Desert where floodlights were used to paint the runway and the Columbia made its descent, gliding “phantomlike across the California coastline, generating twin sonic booms” as it approached.

The landing was perfect, which led to a day of celebratory press coverage, with papers running heartwarming photos of the astronauts reuniting with their families.

Nine days later, the world would change.

On January 28th, 1986, NASA would carry out their next launch with their Challenger shuttle, which tragically exploded 73 seconds into its flight, due to what was later determined to be a seal failure of a rubber O-ring which did not properly expand as intended because the launch had occurred at record low temperatures.

The disaster killed all seven astronauts aboard, and NASA grounded its shuttle fleet for nearly three years as a result.

When Halley’s Comet approached a few weeks later, we watched it pass from the ground, as astronomers had done for centuries past. Never had we been so close to the stars, and never had they felt more out of reach.

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Photo by George Fry for the Los Angeles Times

https://www.instagram.com/p/DegH-1Hmw1l/?srtk=b3M1NGhpd2QxemY1

10/15/2026

This scene comes from Jack Sholder’s horror/sci-fi classic “The Hidden” from 1987, which I absolutely love, but this shot always makes me laugh.

In the film, a law enforcement duo is racing to stop a seemingly-unexplainable pandemic of violence that’s spreading from person-to-person through the streets of L.A., causing regular people to suddenly go berserk and break every law that gets in their way. Michael Nouri is the LAPD detective desperately trying to wrap his head around it, while Kyle MacLachlan is the FBI agent who clearly knows more than he’s letting on.

There’s absolutely no story reason that it needs to be an Echo Park station (at least not that I can recall), especially since they mostly aren’t in the area in the film, but I do appreciate the art department making the sign as big and loud as they did.

The film also features one of Danny Trejo’s earliest onscreen appearances (as an inmate, blink and you’ll miss him), and it was written by Jim Kouf, who is best known as the showrunner of “Grimm” and for writing “National Treasure.”

The Goodwill is at 342 N. San Fernando Rd., and it has been a Goodwill since at least 1966.

Portraits of indigenous peoples in California, taken by the C.C. Pierce company, 1890-1905I've added individual captions...
10/12/2026

Portraits of indigenous peoples in California, taken by the C.C. Pierce company, 1890-1905

I've added individual captions to each of the images. Most of which have been pulled directly from the CA Historical Society filed with the photos in the archives at USC Libraries.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DeaaXhhj7OM/?img_index=1

Mystery triple wedding at the opening of the Hollywood Colonial Motel in 1946. The Colonial was located at 1730 N. Weste...
10/10/2026

Mystery triple wedding at the opening of the Hollywood Colonial Motel in 1946.

The Colonial was located at 1730 N. Western Avenue, just above Hollywood, in the same building that is home to Cara Hotel today (the facade was changed in 2019, but the rest of the layout looks to be the same). The shots of the altar and the dancing are in the courtyard where the pool was added in 1954.

I don’t know who these folks were, or why their unions and this relatively small reception would have warranted a visit from LIFE photographer Martha Holmes. Perhaps it was just that the motel was trying to get some press and was maybe offering some kind of ‘newlywed special’ to celebrate their grand opening.

If you recognize anyone, let me know. Yes, the kid looking at the camera in Slide 7 looks A LOT like a young Stanley Kubrick, but he doesn’t in any of the other slides he’s in. And, as always, don’t bother with AI answers, as Google has incorrectly identified that same person as Ray Milland.

Only other clue that I can offer is that the Marriage certificate in Slide 4 appears to have been issued in September 19th of that year, but I cannot read the names.

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Photos 1-12 by Martha Holmes for LIFE Magazine

Slide 13 is a 1967 postcard view, pulled from eBay.
Slide 14 shows two Google street views from 2019 & 2021.
Slide 15 is from the Cara Hotel IG page

https://www.instagram.com/p/DeS-oyvG-0f/?dlrf=ZG9oMnlsc2x5M2hr

10/09/2026

The Fast & the Fabulous, from a time when every Valley Girl had a hot rod and always left a little room in her busy schedule for an impromptu race through the river channels.

That’s what the 1959 horror comedy “Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow” would have us believe, anyway, made by American International Pictures as a sequel to their teen drama “Hot Rod Gang,” which was released the previous year.

‘Hollow’ was directed by William J. Hole Jr., who later had a lot of success in television, directing dozens of episodes of “Peyton Place.” Seen here are Jody Flair with the sun hat and Elaine DuPont with the helmet, who is still with us at 93.

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