Something that I had never seen which I always wanted to was what my grandparent’s neighborhoods looked like in the 1940s and 1950s. Time marches on, and when you’re in a developing area things get torn down, rebuilt, and all kinds of changes happen. Thanks to some footage taken of a Los Angeles neighborhood being restored, we can pretend we’re passengers in the car that filmed it.
One of the coolest things is you see is people walking around in clothes from that era. The cars parked are classics, but were just the standard back then. You can see what I think are the San Gabriel Mountains in the background. The houses are so pretty, I just imagine families living in them, listening to radio programming and eating dinner at the table together.
The footage is originally black and white 35mm. Thanks to the work of archivists, it’s available and stored in an Internet Archive.
The video runs a little over 8 minutes long and it’s worth watching the whole thing. NASS has a ton of cool restored video footage and I definitely recommend giving their library a looksee.
