Visiting Figueroa and 2nd Street in 1942, Los Angeles, California


I found the picture at the top of this post on the Duke University website. It's a collection of advertising, specifically billboards, so I find it fun to just page through the images and look at the locations. The billboard, obviously, is for War Bonds, and the year would be during World War II, between 1942 and 1945.

I showed this to a friend of mine to figure out the exact location, which he did. There are a lot of Los Angeles images on the Duke site, and my best guess is that this was LA. It was. It is indeed Figueroa and 2nd Street, looking northeast towards 1st Street. That bridge is still there, although everything else has changed.

To be fair to Duke University, the image did have a description: On back: "Dec. 3, 1942. Location: Figrueroa & W. 2nd St., Los Angeles", but I've become skeptical about that kind of stuff over the years (this one is correct, in spite of the misspelling, but I've often seen things on the internet that aren't even close). The collection, just to be clear, is about the billboards, and the locations aren't really all that important.

I'm doing this for fun, and personal life enrichment, and even though it takes a LOT of work to figure out exact locations, which I do with a friend of mine, it's a labor of love, and we get a big kick out of it.


I've read a lot about how much downtown LA was changed, and the hills were leveled, so I was surprised to see that this stretch of road, and that bridge back there, is still intact. I went on Google Street View, and here it is zoomed in:



How about that? Like I say, I really get a big kick out of this. Hope you like it, too. Thank you for visiting downtown LA in the 1940s with me!
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