If you’re like us, you love crawling through old photo collections online, searching for images of familiar landmarks in their earlier days. And it’s even more fun when the landmarks are local.
Recently, we read that a large collection of high-resolution “roadside America” photos (11,710 images in all!) by a photographer and architecture critic named John Margolies, have been released by the Library of Congress into the public domain (which means they’re now completely free to download, share, reproduce and use as you’d like).
According to a story about the collection on the Lifehacker website, Margolies “spent forty years documenting his travels along U.S. highways, photographing billboards, drive-ins, diners, car washes, mini-golf, novelty buildings, and other roadside constructions.” The collection, taken over several decades during the mid-20th century, contains some great images of things like wigwam motels, other “vernacular” architecture such as hot dog stands that look like hot dogs and gas stations that look like teapots, and many other kinds of commercial buildings and fabulous signs…including a giant Texas shrimp in cowboy bandit gear.
You can view the full collection, with photos from all over the U.S., here…or the just images from the Los Angeles area here. But what we immediately dug into, of course, were the most local images from mid-town L.A…which we couldn’t resist sharing in a “then and now” comparison with the help of some current street view photos from Google Images. Here’s what we found:
7229 W. Melrose THEN…
…and NOW.
945 N. Fairfax Ave. THEN…
…and NOW.
7290 Beverly Blvd. THEN…
…and NOW
6101 Wilshire Blvd. THEN…
…and NOW.
8053 W. Beverly Blvd. THEN…
…and NOW.
3377 Wilshire Blvd. THEN…
…and NOW.
7225 W. Beverly Blvd. THEN…
…and NOW.
And finally…
…we’d be remisss in this sequence if we didn’t add the “now” version of the 718 S. La Brea image at the top of this story, so here it is.
On second thought, maybe it would be better to leave you with the huge cowboy bandit shrimp, from Texas, while we go back for a deeper dive into this great collection. Enjoy!
