Driving into the San Fernando Valley through the Cahuenga Pass in 1942, Los Angeles


If you've ever driven from Hollywood to the Valley, you've gone through the Cahuenga Pass. Of course, if you're like most people you took the 101, which is the Hollywood Freeway, and never really give a thought to the fact that you're actually going through a mountain pass. And that's a good thing, because you really should be paying attention to your driving, not looking at the scenery.

When I lived there, in the 1980s, I would often wonder what Los Angeles was like "back in the day". I would often take Cahuenga, which runs parallel to the Hollywood Freeway, and noodle through, looking at the scenery. It's really not that difficult to do that on surface streets, the going is very slow, and you have to stop at red lights. And from what I've read about Los Angeles in the 1940s, the traffic was already jammed, and the going was miserably slow. Everyone was looking forward to the freeways, which meant smooth flowing traffic, no cross-traffic, no stop lights. It really is true, you are much better off taking the freeways in Los Angeles than the surface streets, even if the freeway is crawling - at least it's moving.

I was browsing through the Duke University site, which I like to do, looking mostly for pictures of old-time Phoenix, when I stumbled into some photos that made me stop and say, "Wow! That's LA!" Keep in mind that the Duke site is for archiving of advertising images, not an historical record of locations, so sometimes I can figure out where things are, and sometimes I can't. On this one I got lucky because the location (although misspelled) was transcribed from the writing on the back of the original photo, and I jumped on Google Street View to confirm it. Like Phoenix, Los Angeles has some very distinctive mountains - and while everything else changes, the mountains don't change.




This is Cahuenga Boulevard and Broadlawn Drive, looking east. Nowadays you have to look around the buildings to see the mountains, but there they are. Looks like there's a church there nowadays.



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