Here's an interesting nugget of TV history — a ticket to sit in the audience of the Steve Allen Tonight Show. The year on this would be 1955 and the location is a building that's no longer at the northeast corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. It was an NBC studio building that had been built for radio and converted — not very well, some said — for television. In the late fifties, NBC broke ground on the complex they now have in Burbank. For a time, they did shows from both locations until they finally finished the new place in 1962.
Above is an old postcard of the NBC building at Sunset and Vine. You can guess the age of this shot based on the cars passing by. On the left, you can see just a smidgen of Wallach's Music City, which was the biggest record shop in Hollywood. Up the street, you can see an ABC facility which later became TAV, the video studio that Merv Griffin later owned. All of these are now gone. The NBC complex later became a fancy bank building with a large fountain out front.
In the seventies, Steve Allen was doing one of his many talk shows from the TAV building (I think it had another name then) and for one stunt, Steve put on swim trunks, ran across the street and took a bath in the bank building's fountain, which they had graciously filled with suds for the occasion. This just demonstrates how much talk shows have changed. Today, if you worked for Dave or Jay or even Jimmy Kimmel and suggested they do something like that, you'd probably be fired on the spot. The bank building now at Sunset and Vine is reportedly about to be replaced with something new. There is also talk that NBC may soon abandon Burbank for a new facility to be built elsewhere.
A couple of other observations about that ticket: Even though the show was live to the East Coast, they apparently weren't too worried about filling the house. They didn't tell people to get there an hour early, as most shows do these days. They also weren't concerned about kids in the audience as long as they were over six. I'm not sure why anyone would bring a ten-year-old to a TV show they'd probably never seen, but it was permitted. Today, you have to be at least sixteen to see Jay, eighteen to see Dave, and they tape in the late afternoon.
Also, note that the show was not called The Tonight Show. On the ticket, it's just Tonight, and Mr. Allen's name is not part of the title. His successors all had their monikers appended to the name of the program but not Steverino.