Obviously the 35mm professional movie camera that was shooting this footage was clearly visible, since the guy at 3:42 waves at it, and other pedestrians can be seen staring at it as well. This undoubtedly was filmed to use for back-projection in Hollywood film scenes with characters in what were supposed to be moving cars. Such backgrounds were particularly useful in this period of the late 1940s as film noir stories were especially popular - murder investigations, double-crossing gangsters, etc. in gritty urban settings.
Yes, I believe this was shot for rear projection "process" shots, which is why there are two angles; one for a two-shot of people sitting in the front seat and then a side shot for the CUs of the driver. I'm guessing they would have also done an angle for the passenger, but that's not included here. Bunker Hill was essentially the back lot for dozens of classic (and not so classic) noirs.
This footage is close to 70 years old and it is the next best thing to stepping into a time machine. It was shot by Columbia Movie Studio in 1948 for the 1949 film "Shockproof" starring Cornell Wilde. Jim Dawson's "Bunker Hill" book goes into some of the specifics of this film clip. The book also discusses all of the films shot on and around Bunker Hill.
This is the closest we are ever going to get to time travel (at least, to the past...) so if anyone else has old footage please get it digitized ASAP before it rots away. I'm thanking you on behalf of future humankind. Yes, I have that authority.
Absolutely wonderful to see this! Cannot thank you enough for posting this. It is just criminal that the real Bunker Hill is gone -- and our light rail, too! I think so often about this period, here, and it such a joy to see some little bit of it brought to life like this. Wow!
The film starts on Second st. going north makes a left on Grand, going south (MOCA) makes a right on 5th where The Los Angeles Public Library is, and makes another right on Flower going north. Such an amazing piece of Los Angeles Lost.
My mother moved to Rampart St near Downtown LA and actually worked in Downtown LA in about 1947. She probably road around these same streets during that era. Nice video.
This is a completely different city and downtown than LA now.. All those Victorians and about 99% of those buildings are gone. Its all high rise office buildings now.. There is nothing recognizable in this video except city hall and the Biltmore... This video looks more like San Francisco..
This is the closest we're going to get to time travel, at least for now. Saw the area my grandparents lived when we were kids in the late 60's. Nice to see again.
Prior to 3:30, every single thing visible was torn down except for the Second Street tunnel portal, seen directly ahead at the very beginning, and the Kawada Hotel at Hill and Second. I would say 95% of the visible buildings in this video were torn down.
Closest thing to time travel. You can almost feel the suns warmth from nearly 70 years ago. All those people, never knew they were captured for posterity.
This is unbelievable, I'm awed by the sights, the architecture, the people, and the ambiance in this video. It's a miracle that the individuals who knowingly (or unknowingly) made this, had the foresight and sense to document what LA was like 70yrs ago for those of us who came after. We owe these and other preservationists a debt a gratitude for giving us a window into what life looked like in the greatest city in the world in the early part of the 20th century.
Great video! My father lived in a rooming house in an old Bunker Hill home in the mid-1940's. In one part of this video I noticed a place I used to work at in the 1970's, so that was nice to see!
My gawd! For all us LA history buffs this is like stepping into a time machine! It's incomprehensible to see that all of those beautiful Victorian and Craftsman buildings were reduced to dust. As if a nuke bomb obliterated EVERYTHING that's seen in this footage! Many MANY thanks to the person who uploaded this!
i just love this video y'all. I've lived in L.A for 22 years, came here for college but this city's grown on me. Love everything bout it. This old footage proves to me, that just as them folk we see goin' about their business right here 70 years ago...we too, we just passing thru. Just passing thru son
***** He must have had a great job! If this is 1948 a dollar was worth about $12.50 today so it was $30 to rent a car in today's money, don't know if they had the Under 25 surcharge back then, probably not. There is another longer film where you can see gas for .25 a gallon and people were writing about how cheap things were but that was 1946 and the dollar was $12.80 in today's money so it works out at $3.20 a gallon..
There's a great old Dick Powell movie 'Cry Danger' from 1951. A lot of it was filmed on Bunker Hill. He actually lives in a trailer with sweeping views of LA. Unusual combination, today it would be a zillion dollar house. Lost LA?
FABULOUS! I watched this with another RUclips window open, playing "Hit Parade USA 1942 - Top 10 - DanntaS". Perfect. Thank you SO MUCH for uploading this treasure.
Reliable my left nut! If a 2017 car blew a head gasket, it would be to expensive to fix because of all of the pointless computers & sensors would have to be reset. If a 1940s car blew a gasket, it would be an easy fix. And there was no charging ports, built in touch screen or any modern-day bullshit distracting the driver, not to mention no smart phones for texting & driving.
This is fantastic. Amazing. Wonderful. My parents were young adults at this time and it's moving to see what the world looked like for them. Thank you!
Most likely, this is 1947 to 1949. I don't see any 1949 Fords which are distinctive. The license plates are light in this B/W film. California's License plates were black background in 1945, and went to school bus yellow in 1947 were yellow background with black print. The 1940/41 Ford we see directly in back after the turn at 0:55 has this plate and the top right corner has what looks to be the silver and black year validation tab on the license plate. California switched to the black background with yellow letters in 1950. Like NY State and their plates from 1927 or so through to the mid-1980's with the red, white and blue "Liberty Plate", California, New York, and Pennsylvania basically had this color pattern on their plates back when states made and changed them every year. My guess is this footage is 1947, and definitely Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles. Tragic so many of those Victorians were gone by the early 1960's for the ugly corporate towers and building the Harbor Freeway which was probably sometime in the late 1940's, early 1950's.
MrSting17 Appreciate your reply MrSting. Boston is an amazing city. It's probably the most European of American cities and small enough to not be too big. The Universities and various colleges are quite amazing offering a vast array of studies. It certainly isn't the Red Light district by that forty-five year old Boston City Hall. I remember that ugly Central Artery.
Love this; the ladies at 2:18 remind me of my mom as a young adult making her way in the world away from Minnesota for the first time. Those 2 look like her and her friend and they were that age and in LA/Hollywood right at that moment. Amazing footage all, thanks for posting.
Oh wow! This is awesome and amazing. I remember all of this before most of it was demolished for buildings that sit empty. I used to go downtown with my mother every Saturday and shop at Grand Central Market, Ted's and Giant Penny Store. It seems as if nostalgia has gotten the best of everyone on this site and sounds as it everybody prefers it the way it was. Just give me back Bullock's, May Co. and the Broadway and i'll be happy.
This is so darn fascinating, like I've just gone through the looking glass and found this wonderful place I had never seen before - just snips of background in period movies about private eyes and bad guys and hot dames, but who notices that at the time of viewing. Its the action out front that holds our focus and attention. Bunker Hill - once the choice location for the well-to-do, but by the time this film was shot, long inhabited by folks who had no choice at all. And then they tore it down. Fortunately for posterity we have access to wonderful film clips such as this one to look at and allow us to think of a time of long ago - I time we sometimes wish we could go back to or re-create for ourselves, but we can't.
I drove the exact route while this video was playing. Grand Ave from 2nd to 5th seemed much longer back then. I drove pretty slow but I always reached 5th much sooner than the video. I wonder why? Great video. Kind of haunting too since most of the buildings are gone.
As info, that's because this was filmed to be used as a rear-projected backdrop for car scenes in the 1948 movie, "Shockproof". They needed coverage of the same areas for two different angles, in the rear and the side, depending on where the camera was placed while Cornel Wilde was "driving" a mock-up car in the studio.
Raymond Chandler's The High Window (1943): "Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets … On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles."
I remember a lot of L.A. as a little kid, like the paddle traffic signals (3:39). This was a comparatively "clear" smog day in ' 40s L.A. For decades after, the smog got so bad on a "Stage one smog alert" that you couldn't see a half-mile. Back then, folks were allowed to burn their trash in back yard incinerators, and the leaded gasoline filled the air of L.A. with noxious vapors. Called the "Valley of the Smokes" by the indigenous peoples who lived in the L.A. "basin" centuries before the Spanish, the whole place is surrounded by what is known as a "temperature inversion layer," which trapped the smoke from early campfires to "modern" day pollution from factories and cars made prior to unleaded gas and catalytic converters. Just looking at this film, I can feel the intense, mind-numbing L.A. heat and the lung-searing smog.
+mikerossscuba Anyone watching this film the day after this was taken would think "so what, what is the big deal". To see this film today, I was just fascinated and thanks for the history narrative. It is so cool to look back in history. On another youtube video it is showing the last few low rider cruises at the 6th street bridge. That is going to look wild 70 years from now.
Worked at City Hall 1964-1974 and Pacific Telephone/Pac Bell Hi-Rise crew from 1975-1994. Best video on You Tube for my enjoyment. Thanks a whole lot, really appreciated.
I grew up in Los Angeles from the time I was born til I was 38 and I don't recognize any of those streets. Man, I wish I could go back in time and check it out. thanks for posting.
Four 1947+ Studebakers, two 1947+ Chevy trucks, and one rumble seat hot rod. Charming old LA on the cusp of some really bad decisions about transportation systems. Coulda been a contender if they upgraded the municipal railway system instead of trashing it.
hard to believe that virtually everything you see in this film is gone, an entire massive section of downtown wiped off the face of the Earth in the name of redevelopment. A truly gone-forever era of DTLA.
Those buildings and streetscapes were beautiful back then in Los Angeles! Those were the best times to visit and to live and that wonderful city in California!
Yeah, the old Warner Bros. cartoons made LA smog jokes in the '40s, so it was definitely an issue by then. I read somewhere the first smog alert in LA was issued in 1943. It seems better now, though. I moved to LA in the late '70s and it wasn't uncommon for the smog on the worst inversion days to literally make your eyes burn and water.
All of those apartment buildings and homes were razed. That's a big reason why we have the homeless problem today. Cities used to have an abundance of cheap residential hotel rooms for rent, you could arrive in a city on a train, and have a cheap room to stay in that night. No applications, no credit check. The next day, you could find a job, start right away. And the room you were in was totally affordable. People ate at the many inexpensive cafeterias downtown. All of that affordable stuff is gone.
As a car buff for nearly 60 years (with particular interest in North American autos of the 1940 thru 1960s), I can state that this drive was clearly filmed in the latter half of 1947. 3 or 4 of the new 'coming or going' Studebakers, introduced in May '47; plus an all-new Kaiser, released a few weeks later. Hudson, the next all-new post-war car, was only intro'd in December '47. Not one of THOSE big babies visible on the LA streets in this fascinating vintage drive…Anyone who DOES see one in this clip, I'll happily admit I was wrong!
Grand Ave. used to look a bit like Van Ness Street in San Francisco had it not been razed. The only thing I recognize about this Bunker Hill is how wide the road is. I wonder if anyone could have imagined that building rows of lifeless and insular office cubes would have obliterated a neighborhood and the sense that it is on top of a hill. Such a botched plastic surgery! At least this is one of the few places in LA that has no traffic now thanks to that wide road.
Wow 5th and Flower, across from the library, looks unrecognizable. The city national plaza is there now. Unreal how beautiful this city was. No wonder this place got overcrowded.
This is awesome footage. What I'd like to know is who made these videos? Was it a city organization? Because I have seen videos like these documenting L.A. from the 50s, 60s, 70s and even 80s and they all follow the same format.
I wondered what that was as I thought aside from city hall, LA had no tall buildings to speak of back then. But, that looked like a pretty imposing building.
Really enjoyed this video. Way way before my time, but I like looking at what was going on before I was born. I am fascinated by it all. Thank you for sharing this.
Yes. A lot on Main Street were the bars they visited. Some still standing!! I think the couple lived in the Sunshine Apartments on Bunker Hill. She went to the Roxie movie theatre on Broaday, also still standing.
LOVE Los Angeles City Hall. Cannot get enough of seeing that building. It's simple in many ways, yet so majestic. Is the Lindbergh Beacon still operable? I think it's the most beautiful building in the entire city.
I remember riding through this area, going up by using Angel's Flight which was on 3rd Street back then. At the top there was a boxing gym. My Mom told me that at one time her parents lived on Bunker Hill, but I'm not sure exactly where that was. This video brings back many memories of when I was young.
4:05 - 5:36 that building in the background on the right, that's the Richfield Oil office building. It was one of the most unique art deco skyscrapers in history - and it was even painted black and gold, as a symbol for the oil industry. Now it's replaced with corporate boxes and the company is long absorbed.
That's right, I was guessing the newest cars were about '48. The newest one of which I'm sure is at least one Kaiser or Frazer that's going in the opposite direction. How cool to "be followed" by the sleek Lincoln and the Packard cab.
Wow! This is a fantastic archive. It also makes me think I'm in a fabulous film noir and at any moment Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart is gonna make an appearance. Thank you so much for posting this.
AlanHemenway is correct about that being the still extant library on the south side of 5th Street, but the street they turn right on after that (at 4:06) has to be Flower St. and not Figueroa. Unbelievably sharp footage from 35mm silver nitrate.
@packjim56 ....We're looking east towards 2nd & Olive. This part of 2nd is directly over the 2nd Street Tunnel. If you are standing where the autos are parked you can look down over the tunnel portal and see the intersection of 2nd & Hill. Just as our auto starts moving a northbound streetcar is seen on Broadway. Our vehicle turns south on Grand then west on 5th. While making the right turn onto 5th we see Pacific Telephone Bldg, the Biltmore Hotel, and a bit later, the library.
THANK YOU for posting this video! Amazing! Also, I saw a movie (but unfortunately I cannot remember it's title) from the 1950's where they filmed it in the doorway at 2:05 and the two adjacent buildings. Cool!
I swear the building at 2:05 was used in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film, The Killing. Same entrance, same slanted street. I probably wouldn't have recognized it if it wasn't in black and white. It looks just like the film.
You are correct. You can see the 2nd st. tunnel crossing and city hall here and in the movie also. It's 2nd Street and Olive intersection not 504 Olive as in the movie.
Wonderful footage; what a different world! I wish the vehicle had been going slower when the camera was aiming out the side window; it started to make me slightly dizzy.
Flawless. Absolutely Flawless. This proves it, film is indeed a time machine. What it must have been like to stroll down the streets of LA in the 1940s. Incredibly crisp and well preserved!
My dad was born around 1921 0r 22 and he use to have one of those old chryslar cars from the 50's or 60's and he drove it around in the 70's when I was a small child child he never let go of the old days...
Who might still be alive in this footage? Maybe the young girl walking with her mum @ 2.32 mins or the young boy walking up to Angels Flight Pharmacy @ 2.48 mins, I guess they would be both in their early 70's if still alive.
Fascinating. A great piece of archive. Notice the camera is at the back of the car and not the front. No sound, no color. Just visual. So interesting to see our cities and society way back then (before some of us were born). War was waging in Europe at that time. But things look pretty peaceful here.
when he first comes off this side street, I notice a V 12 Lincoln Zephyr right behind him, then later it restarts I think in the same spot, but shows it from the side, . Great fun, (not) driving those old standard shift cars up and down those hills
Развлечения
![Los Angeles early 40s,50s in color [60fps, Remastered] w/sound design added](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1PJD-PbENvg/mqdefault.jpg)
Obviously the 35mm professional movie camera that was shooting this footage was clearly visible, since the guy at 3:42 waves at it, and other pedestrians can be seen staring at it as well. This undoubtedly was filmed to use for back-projection in Hollywood film scenes with characters in what were supposed to be moving cars. Such backgrounds were particularly useful in this period of the late 1940s as film noir stories were especially popular - murder investigations, double-crossing gangsters, etc. in gritty urban settings.
Yes, I believe this was shot for rear projection "process" shots, which is why there are two angles; one for a two-shot of people sitting in the front seat and then a side shot for the CUs of the driver. I'm guessing they would have also done an angle for the passenger, but that's not included here. Bunker Hill was essentially the back lot for dozens of classic (and not so classic) noirs.
This footage is close to 70 years old and it is the next best thing to stepping into a time machine. It was shot by Columbia Movie Studio in 1948 for the 1949 film "Shockproof" starring Cornell Wilde. Jim Dawson's "Bunker Hill" book goes into some of the specifics of this film clip. The book also discusses all of the films shot on and around Bunker Hill.
This is the closest we are ever going to get to time travel (at least, to the past...) so if anyone else has old footage please get it digitized ASAP before it rots away.
I'm thanking you on behalf of future humankind. Yes, I have that authority.
+andiroidYT hahaha you must be new here on earth
śmierć matki I sense mental problems.
I very much agree with you, the closest thing we will have to time travel! I hope we can see more vintage videos soon
andiroidYT well said im so thankful
I'm responding to a comment that you made 4 years ago...now that's time travel. :)
Absolutely wonderful to see this! Cannot thank you enough for posting this. It is just criminal that the real Bunker Hill is gone -- and our light rail, too! I think so often about this period, here, and it such a joy to see some little bit of it brought to life like this. Wow!
The film starts on Second st. going north makes a left on Grand, going south (MOCA) makes a right on 5th where The Los Angeles Public Library is, and makes another right on Flower going north. Such an amazing piece of Los Angeles Lost.
My mother moved to Rampart St near Downtown LA and actually worked in Downtown LA in about 1947. She probably road around these same streets during that era. Nice video.
I wish some one would go back and make that trip again. I was mesmerized the whole time. I loved it.
They did. Here:
ruclips.net/video/WIHfmisMLOY/видео.html
Wow the quality is amazing!
This is a completely different city and downtown than LA now.. All those Victorians and about 99% of those buildings are gone. Its all high rise office buildings now.. There is nothing recognizable in this video except city hall and the Biltmore... This video looks more like San Francisco..
Los Angeles Public Library . It does look like San Francisco almost a twin city.
It's too bad...these buildings are so beautiful.
@@rhiannonrhiannon6285 so was the time, beyond words
This is the closest we're going to get to time travel, at least for now. Saw the area my grandparents lived when we were kids in the late 60's. Nice to see again.
Prior to 3:30, every single thing visible was torn down except for the Second Street tunnel portal, seen directly ahead at the very beginning, and the Kawada Hotel at Hill and Second. I would say 95% of the visible buildings in this video were torn down.
Closest thing to time travel. You can almost feel the suns warmth from nearly 70 years ago. All those people, never knew they were captured for posterity.
This is unbelievable, I'm awed by the sights, the architecture, the people, and the ambiance in this video. It's a miracle that the individuals who knowingly (or unknowingly) made this, had the foresight and sense to document what LA was like 70yrs ago for those of us who came after. We owe these and other preservationists a debt a gratitude for giving us a window into what life looked like in the greatest city in the world in the early part of the 20th century.
Great video! My father lived in a rooming house in an old Bunker Hill home in the mid-1940's. In one part of this video I noticed a place I used to work at in the 1970's, so that was nice to see!
calady11 ur lucky u grew up in a good era unlike my era the social network era self entitled idiots
This is both wonderful and heartbreaking.
good choice of words....
My gawd! For all us LA history buffs this is like stepping into a time machine! It's incomprehensible to see that all of those beautiful Victorian and Craftsman buildings were reduced to dust. As if a nuke bomb obliterated EVERYTHING that's seen in this footage!
Many MANY thanks to the person who uploaded this!
i just love this video y'all. I've lived in L.A for 22 years, came here for college but this city's grown on me. Love everything bout it. This old footage proves to me, that just as them folk we see goin' about their business right here 70 years ago...we too, we just passing thru. Just passing thru son
I saw a sign that said, "paint any car for $32.50" Wow. You cant even fill up your tank with that anymore.
No you didn't you saw rent a car $2.50 a day and a few blocks down you saw paint a car 32 paints
true but 32 bucks back then could buy you a lot. Tricky thing we call inflation
Things get more expensive with time but you also earn more. It's called inflation. Not even a company's CEO could reach a $100,000/year salary
*****
Yes indeed. Now if you make $135 per week you are among the poorest in the US
*****
He must have had a great job! If this is 1948 a dollar was worth about $12.50 today so it was $30 to rent a car in today's money, don't know if they had the Under 25 surcharge back then, probably not. There is another longer film where you can see gas for .25 a gallon and people were writing about how cheap things were but that was 1946 and the dollar was $12.80 in today's money so it works out at $3.20 a gallon..
There's a great old Dick Powell movie 'Cry Danger' from 1951. A lot of it was filmed on Bunker Hill. He actually lives in a trailer with sweeping views of LA. Unusual combination, today it would be a zillion dollar house. Lost LA?
Love that movie
FABULOUS! I watched this with another RUclips window open, playing "Hit Parade USA 1942 - Top 10 - DanntaS". Perfect. Thank you SO MUCH for uploading this treasure.
Where are all those wonderful classic cars now?... :(
Yes! Cars from the 1910s and 1940s Needs to come back cause cars these days are ugly
Most likely in junk yards or crushed or in collectors hands.
Right, they're ugly....not to mention 1,000 times more safe, reliable, comfortable, and efficient....
Reliable my left nut! If a 2017 car blew a head gasket, it would be to expensive to fix because of all of the pointless computers & sensors would have to be reset. If a 1940s car blew a gasket, it would be an easy fix. And there was no charging ports, built in touch screen or any modern-day bullshit distracting the driver, not to mention no smart phones for texting & driving.
Mojo Risin in japan!!!
This is fantastic. Amazing. Wonderful. My parents were young adults at this time and it's moving to see what the world looked like for them. Thank you!
Most likely, this is 1947 to 1949. I don't see any 1949 Fords which are distinctive. The license plates are light in this B/W film. California's License plates were black background in 1945, and went to school bus yellow in 1947 were yellow background with black print. The 1940/41 Ford we see directly in back after the turn at 0:55 has this plate and the top right corner has what looks to be the silver and black year validation tab on the license plate. California switched to the black background with yellow letters in 1950. Like NY State and their plates from 1927 or so through to the mid-1980's with the red, white and blue "Liberty Plate", California, New York, and Pennsylvania basically had this color pattern on their plates back when states made and changed them every year. My guess is this footage is 1947, and definitely Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles. Tragic so many of those Victorians were gone by the early 1960's for the ugly corporate towers and building the Harbor Freeway which was probably sometime in the late 1940's, early 1950's.
MrSting17 Appreciate your reply MrSting. Boston is an amazing city. It's probably the most European of American cities and small enough to not be too big. The Universities and various colleges are quite amazing offering a vast array of studies. It certainly isn't the Red Light district by that forty-five year old Boston City Hall. I remember that ugly Central Artery.
The funicular car is "Angel's Flight".
Olvera St. isn't hard to find, it's walking distance from Union Station.
Makes me wish time travel were possible.
Yes I would like to go back in the 1910s and 1940s
AssassiNinjaPlays I would like to go back to the 60's or 70's.
I would like to go back into the 1500
Feel the Spheal Goodbye.
Lester Frothinger let’s make time travel possible
Love this; the ladies at 2:18 remind me of my mom as a young adult making her way in the world away from Minnesota for the first time. Those 2 look like her and her friend and they were that age and in LA/Hollywood right at that moment. Amazing footage all, thanks for posting.
Oh wow! This is awesome and amazing. I remember all of this before most of it was demolished for buildings that sit empty. I used to go downtown with my mother every Saturday and shop at Grand Central Market, Ted's and Giant Penny Store. It seems as if nostalgia has gotten the best of everyone on this site and sounds as it everybody prefers it the way it was. Just give me back Bullock's, May Co. and the Broadway and i'll be happy.
This is so darn fascinating, like I've just gone through the looking glass and found this wonderful place I had never seen before - just snips of background in period movies about private eyes and bad guys and hot dames, but who notices that at the time of viewing. Its the action out front that holds our focus and attention.
Bunker Hill - once the choice location for the well-to-do, but by the time this film was shot, long inhabited by folks who had no choice at all. And then they tore it down.
Fortunately for posterity we have access to wonderful film clips such as this one to look at and allow us to think of a time of long ago - I time we sometimes wish we could go back to or re-create for ourselves, but we can't.
Amazing footage of the past, thank you for sharing it.
Indeed and Europe was torn by war at that time but here so calm.
It's calm because the United states had entered the war in 1941
I drove the exact route while this video was playing. Grand Ave from 2nd to 5th seemed much longer back then. I drove pretty slow but I always reached 5th much sooner than the video. I wonder why? Great video. Kind of haunting too since most of the buildings are gone.
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA .
GREAT PLACE TO LIVE SINCE THE 1920 'S TO 1960 "S. 40 YEARS AND AFTER THAT DOWN THE HILL .
DOWN THE TUBE.
As info, that's because this was filmed to be used as a rear-projected backdrop for car scenes in the 1948 movie, "Shockproof". They needed coverage of the same areas for two different angles, in the rear and the side, depending on where the camera was placed while Cornel Wilde was "driving" a mock-up car in the studio.
omg its true i found it on youtube
amazing the clarity of the footage
Raymond Chandler's The High Window (1943): "Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets … On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles."
Thank you for posting this ... Wow! ... Great old cars and scenery, indeed.
Thank´s for uploading!
This turning of the camera from going uphill to going downhill is quite amazing!
I remember a lot of L.A. as a little kid, like the paddle traffic signals (3:39). This was a comparatively "clear" smog day in ' 40s L.A. For decades after, the smog got so bad on a "Stage one smog alert" that you couldn't see a half-mile. Back then, folks were allowed to burn their trash in back yard incinerators, and the leaded gasoline filled the air of L.A. with noxious vapors. Called the "Valley of the Smokes" by the indigenous peoples who lived in the L.A. "basin" centuries before the Spanish, the whole place is surrounded by what is known as a "temperature inversion layer," which trapped the smoke from early campfires to "modern" day pollution from factories and cars made prior to unleaded gas and catalytic converters. Just looking at this film, I can feel the intense, mind-numbing L.A. heat and the lung-searing smog.
+mikerossscuba Anyone watching this film the day after this was taken would think "so what, what is the big deal". To see this film today, I was just fascinated and thanks for the history narrative. It is so cool to look back in history. On another youtube video it is showing the last few low rider cruises at the 6th street bridge. That is going to look wild 70 years from now.
+mikerossscuba now it's just CHEMTRAILING 24/7.
mind-numbing and lung-searing. lol
Yeah, but L.A. was no bigger than modern day Tucson, in the 40s. Late 70s L.A. was truly pre-EPA, lung-searing. lol
Go away useless brain.
Actually, those traffic signals were called Acme's.
Fantastic. Being an L.A. native, these have great meaning to me. Thank you.
Theres a 1947 Mercury car in it travelling behind the POV...and a ad for "Symphony Under the Stars" at the Hollywood Bowl (5.43).
Starts on second...turns left onto Grand.
Worked at City Hall 1964-1974 and Pacific Telephone/Pac Bell Hi-Rise crew from 1975-1994. Best video on You Tube for my enjoyment. Thanks a whole lot, really appreciated.
I grew up in Los Angeles from the time I was born til I was 38 and I don't recognize any of those streets. Man, I wish I could go back in time and check it out. thanks for posting.
Four 1947+ Studebakers, two 1947+ Chevy trucks, and one rumble seat hot rod.
Charming old LA on the cusp of some really bad decisions about transportation systems. Coulda been a contender if they upgraded the municipal railway system instead of trashing it.
The first two cars are the dark Lincoln on the right, and the yellow Packard Clipper Taxi on the left. Imagine, a Packard as a cab?
hard to believe that virtually everything you see in this film is gone, an entire massive section of downtown wiped off the face of the Earth in the name of redevelopment. A truly gone-forever era of DTLA.
I recognized Grand as it passes the AT&T building and makes a right on 5th Street.
Those buildings and streetscapes were beautiful back then in Los Angeles! Those were the best times to visit and to live and that wonderful city in California!
So many memories. Love the cars. i saw a rumble seat. Those foggy days spooked me as a child and this was fun. thanks.
Clear film shows clean streets, but smog already there.
Thanks for putting it up!
Yeah, the old Warner Bros. cartoons made LA smog jokes in the '40s, so it was definitely an issue by then. I read somewhere the first smog alert in LA was issued in 1943. It seems better now, though. I moved to LA in the late '70s and it wasn't uncommon for the smog on the worst inversion days to literally make your eyes burn and water.
All of those apartment buildings and homes were razed. That's a big reason why we have the homeless problem today. Cities used to have an abundance of cheap residential hotel rooms for rent, you could arrive in a city on a train, and have a cheap room to stay in that night. No applications, no credit check. The next day, you could find a job, start right away. And the room you were in was totally affordable. People ate at the many inexpensive cafeterias downtown. All of that affordable stuff is gone.
I always wave back to the guy at 3:42...
Same
Amazing piece.
RAH ! Lol
So great to see this video. My mother moved to LA after WWII. She worked in downtown LA and lived on Third and Rampart during this time period.
As a car buff for nearly 60 years (with particular interest in North American autos of the 1940 thru 1960s), I can state that this drive was clearly filmed in the latter half of 1947.
3 or 4 of the new 'coming or going' Studebakers, introduced in May '47; plus an all-new Kaiser, released a few weeks later. Hudson, the next all-new post-war car, was only intro'd in December '47. Not one of THOSE big babies visible on the LA streets in this fascinating vintage drive…Anyone who DOES see one in this clip, I'll happily admit I was wrong!
You are correct. Rear-projected backdrop for car scenes in the 1948 movie, "Shockproof"
Grand Ave. used to look a bit like Van Ness Street in San Francisco had it not been razed. The only thing I recognize about this Bunker Hill is how wide the road is. I wonder if anyone could have imagined that building rows of lifeless and insular office cubes would have obliterated a neighborhood and the sense that it is on top of a hill. Such a botched plastic surgery! At least this is one of the few places in LA that has no traffic now thanks to that wide road.
Amazing footage! Thanks so much for providing it .
Wow 5th and Flower, across from the library, looks unrecognizable. The city national plaza is there now. Unreal how beautiful this city was. No wonder this place got overcrowded.
This is incredible! It's like a Shorpy photo come to life. :)
This is awesome footage. What I'd like to know is who made these videos? Was it a city organization? Because I have seen videos like these documenting L.A. from the 50s, 60s, 70s and even 80s and they all follow the same format.
I wondered what that was as I thought aside from city hall, LA had no tall buildings to speak of back then. But, that looked like a pretty imposing building.
Utterly mesmerizing
Really enjoyed this video. Way way before my time, but I like looking at what was going on before I was born. I am fascinated by it all. Thank you for sharing this.
Lots of Bunker Hill footage in the extras in the DVD of the 1950s film THE EXILES, which was shot in the neighborhood.
Yes. A lot on Main Street were the bars they visited. Some still standing!! I think the couple lived in the Sunshine Apartments on Bunker Hill. She went to the Roxie movie theatre on Broaday, also still standing.
@@annettezilinskas2384 What's inside the Roxy now? Can't recall what its marquee looks like.
LOVE Los Angeles City Hall. Cannot get enough of seeing that building. It's simple in many ways, yet so majestic. Is the Lindbergh Beacon still operable? I think it's the most beautiful building in the entire city.
Amazing footage and quality. Thanks for the upload
I remember riding through this area, going up by using Angel's Flight which was on 3rd Street back then. At the top there was a boxing gym. My Mom told me that at one time her parents lived on Bunker Hill, but I'm not sure exactly where that was. This video brings back many memories of when I was young.
Awesome quality
LA Noire
Fascinating time. So nice to see old videos like this. It is hard to believe things were so slow paced compares to today.
The classic film noir KISS ME DEADLY is set in Bunker Hill.
Holy fcking shit, never knew it was possible that a 1940s video looked so good. Wish they used these kind of camera's on the front line.
I wish I can go back in this time to visit this old part of LA, but then again, a person from the year 2018 will be huge in 1900.
[ Kɪʀɪᴛᴏ ] I wish that too I can only pray to god to make it happen
As we're going north, but looking south, on Flower Street, that's the Richfield Building (with the tower on top) on the right (west) side of Flower.
Awesome. Love how the stop sign pops out of the street signals
It would be interesting to re-shoot this film today, using the exact same route and camera angles, then run them side-by-side.
4:05 - 5:36 that building in the background on the right, that's the Richfield Oil office building. It was one of the most unique art deco skyscrapers in history - and it was even painted black and gold, as a symbol for the oil industry. Now it's replaced with corporate boxes and the company is long absorbed.
The L.A. of young Bukowski and Fante. Thanks!
Yes! Fante's Bandini (his alter ego) lived at Alta Vista Hotel on the other side of the 3rd street tunnel.
Wow, this is sooo cool!!! ... that guy that waves looks like he was a cool dude..
That's right, I was guessing the newest cars were about '48. The newest one of which I'm sure is at least one Kaiser or Frazer that's going in the opposite direction. How cool to "be followed" by the sleek Lincoln and the Packard cab.
I used to park in the garage at 3:33. It’s now the So Cal Gas building. Northeast corner of Fifth and Grand.
Wow! This is a fantastic archive. It also makes me think I'm in a fabulous film noir and at any moment Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart is gonna make an appearance. Thank you so much for posting this.
AlanHemenway is correct about that being the still extant library on the south side of 5th Street, but the street they turn right on after that (at 4:06) has to be Flower St. and not Figueroa. Unbelievably sharp footage from 35mm silver nitrate.
2:05 - Schloesser Apartments at 2nd & Olive featured in the Kubrick film "The Killing"
I'm always In downtown LA and I always wonder what it might have looked back then !!! Wow how times change. That was a great little film !! Thank you
@packjim56 ....We're looking east towards 2nd & Olive. This part of 2nd is directly over the 2nd Street Tunnel. If you are standing where the autos are parked you can look down over the tunnel portal and see the intersection of 2nd & Hill. Just as our auto starts moving a northbound streetcar is seen on Broadway. Our vehicle turns south on Grand then west on 5th. While making the right turn onto 5th we see Pacific Telephone Bldg, the Biltmore Hotel, and a bit later, the library.
its great how people filmed this how else could we go back in time its like im there big thanks.
interesting thing is downtown in the 80s was alot closer to this than it is today. It didnt change much until the 90s when it just boomed
I'm glad there's no audio. It would have been quite a bit distracting.
love the old gas stations
THANK YOU for posting this video! Amazing! Also, I saw a movie (but unfortunately I cannot remember it's title) from the 1950's where they filmed it in the doorway at 2:05 and the two adjacent buildings. Cool!
I swear the building at 2:05 was used in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film, The Killing. Same entrance, same slanted street. I probably wouldn't have recognized it if it wasn't in black and white. It looks just like the film.
You are correct. You can see the 2nd st. tunnel crossing and city hall here and in the movie also. It's 2nd Street and Olive intersection not 504 Olive as in the movie.
I love it! thanks again for sharing this vintage piece of film ! I like the guy waving at you 3:42. lol
No box stores or franchises, Epic. .
@hondo190
1080p transfers are indeed possible from 35mm film, if the print is in good condition.
Wonderful footage; what a different world! I wish the vehicle had been going slower when the camera was aiming out the side window; it started to make me slightly dizzy.
Flawless. Absolutely Flawless. This proves it, film is indeed a time machine. What it must have been like to stroll down the streets of LA in the 1940s. Incredibly crisp and well preserved!
This footage is insane. Thank you.
My dad was born around 1921 0r 22 and he use to have one of those old chryslar cars from the 50's or 60's and he drove it around in the 70's when I was a small child child he never let go of the old days...
This is our grandparents childhood and teenager hood
This appears to be stock footage intended to provide background for film production of scenes involving characters driving and riding in cars.
Who might still be alive in this footage?
Maybe the young girl walking with her mum @ 2.32 mins or the young boy walking up to Angels Flight Pharmacy @ 2.48 mins, I guess they would be both in their early 70's if still alive.
Christopher Brown my grandma would have been about 28 years old. She just died last March and was 99.
My grandmother would be in her late teens during this time but then again she's not living in LA.
She's alive at 93.
'
Absolutely the coolest video. I Love the 40's look and style. This is so cool.
Fascinating. A great piece of archive. Notice the camera is at the back of the car and not the front. No sound, no color. Just visual. So interesting to see our cities and society way back then (before some of us were born). War was waging in Europe at that time. But things look pretty peaceful here.
when he first comes off this side street, I notice a V 12 Lincoln Zephyr right behind him, then later it restarts I think in the same spot, but shows it from the side, . Great fun, (not) driving those old standard shift cars up and down those hills
That's is one of the greatest things I have ever seen on RUclips.
Amazing nostalgic footage.