from the neighborhood

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — One of the things I've been meaning to do since I moved downtown is to put some effort into looking around for cool historic pictures from my neighborhood that I could get prints of to hang in the apartment. Today I noticed that USC has a Digital Archives that includes a bunch of pictures taken by AAA (or the Auto Club of Southern California, if you prefer to be technical). The collection includes some good candidates for making it to the wall.

This 1930 image was taken from almost directly in front of my building facing north. Of course my building was built until a year or two after that, so I'm not sure what was there at the time. The intersection in the image is 6th and Spring. The Hotel Hayward still has that same neon. It's amazing to note the pedestrian traffic in the area. The 1932 guide film I saw at the Natural History Museum named either Broadway and 7th or Spring and 7th (can't remember which) as the busiest pedestrian intersection in the country.