Among our many and varied interests is the history of the city some call Los Angeles. We especially like to track how certain areas evolve and how one building can morph from a restaurant to a church and then become a hardware store and then a florist shop, all before becoming — as every structure eventually has or will — a Starbucks.
I can't embed it here but you might enjoy this video of around eight minutes of footage shot on the Sunset Strip in the sixties. Near the beginning, they give you a quick pan of a strip joint called the Classic Cat. That was located at the corner of Sunset and Larrabee, and before it was a strip joint, it was a restaurant owned by Jerry Lewis (bearing his name and caricature on the outside) and then it was an eatery fronted by L.A. radio personality Dick Whittinghill. Today, it's Tower Video. I also like that in the video, they show the rioting that occurred on the Strip around 1967 and in the midst of it, they have some brief shots of the Bullwinkle statue outside Jay Ward's office.
I can, however, embed this. A website called 1947project is attempting to document the city's history, amassing whatever info and pics they can find. They've assembled a 23 (!) minute video of still shots of old Los Angeles set to music. They also, on this page of their site, have a high-resolution version of the video below but they caution it'll only play on the latest versions of Windows. If you can play the high-res version, do. Some of the photos are quite wonderful.
