Sunset Strip 1964

[The Wiser Hatter]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/sLv4g_A1JP8?rel=0

 

[hatophile]

The cars, the music, Wow! Brings back childhood memories of the 60's.

 

[3fingers]

OK, so maybe I don't have to have a '49 Ford.

 

[TomS]

great, thanks...

 

[HadleyH]

Nice!!! Thank you

 

[Dixon Cannon]

I remember this one! I looked for 77 Sunsert Strip when I first moved to Los Angles - it doesn't exist!

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrrcSieqMH8[/video]

-dixon 'Kookie' cannon

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Sunset and Doheny: Then and Now

 

[Mr. White]

Super neat! Love the old signs.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Calling Stu Bailey and Jeff Spencer . . .

The 1964 street surface didn't look any better kept than Loozyana's streets today. But the air does seem cleaner in the modern shots V.C. Brunswick posted.

 

[MikeKardec]

Wow! I can't remember that far back but that was my old neighborhood. By '68 or '70 the street was wall to wall flower children sleeping on the sidewalks and camped in the brush on the hill sides just above and below Sunset. I can remember stepping over their legs as I walked home from school.

West Hollywood had been a nice neighborhood (still was really) but it was in decline or something. Sometime in the '50s maybe the locals had stopped caring for it all that well and many of the houses were deteriorating and yards were overgrown with ivy and more exotic tropical plants. The Strip was clogged with cruisers on Friday and Saturday nights, all sorts of wild custom cars, and it was a mess because you really couldn't easily get off Sunset or turn around from Hollywood to Beverly Hills.

Ben Franks Coffee Shop was at the base of our street Open 24 hours, it was the place you ended up no matter what was going on. Today it is Mel's Diner, a fake 1950s themed restaurant based, I believe, on the coffee shop in American Graffiti. It's decorated in all sorts of faux '50s Americana ... REALLY IRONIC because Ben Franks was the real deal. Marlon Brando hung out there as did Aldous Huxley, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. The local guy who deliver the papers to the vending machines was very nice but had CP or something. He rode a small motorcycle with training wheels that had two baskets for the papers in the back. I ran into him many years later and he was still doing the same thing but much older. Damn near moved me to tears.

Much of the property around Sunset Plaza was owned by the Montgomery family, relatives of Elizabeth Montgomery of Bewitched.