Then and Now: Hollywood & Vine
An exploration into how and what things changed over the past half-century
This is a long Easter weekend, or Holy Week, ‘special’ posting today.
Among the picture postcards from the USA, there is one that I find particularly striking. It shows the quite pop-culturally famous intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles, California.
Known as Hollywood & Vine, back in the 1960s, it looked like this:
I was talking to a friend of mine, Georg Michels, a professor of history at the University of California at Riverside (check out his wonderful inquest into Upper Hungary during the seventeenth century, The Habsburg Empire Under Siege, which came out with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2021; if you’re unsure, read my meta review on the topic first).
“It looks like this today”
Among other things, we talked about the picture postcard collection, and I showed him the above image. Professor Michels remarked: “It looks like this today”, adding that, as a resident of Southern California who frequently (has to) drive to Los Angeles, the above postcard also shows I-5.
And then I went to Wikipedia and found out that this particular intersection has its own dedicated entry (which lacks an image like the above picture postcard) that includes the below photograph from 1997:
Curiously, when I went to Google Maps earlier today, I found the following image:
I do think cars looked way better in the 1960s than they did in the 1990s or today.
Have a blessed Holy Friday!
It's too bad the newer pix don't show what happened to the building with the Rexall drugs sign.