MAY CONTAIN NUTS
SHORPY

THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL PHOTO ARCHIVE • FRAMED PRINTS • STOCK IMAGES

HOME
 
JUMP TO PAGE   100  >  200  >  300  >  400  >  500  >  600
VINTAGRAPH • WPA • WWII • YOU MEAN A WOMAN CAN OPEN IT?

This Was the City: 1899

Circa 1899. "General view -- Los Angeles, California." At right, Bunker Hill and Broadway. Panorama made from two 8x10 glass negatives and one 8x10 transparency. View full size.

Circa 1899. "General view -- Los Angeles, California." At right, Bunker Hill and Broadway. Panorama made from two 8x10 glass negatives and one 8x10 transparency. View full size.

 

On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5

Victorian Downtown Los Angeles

It looks like Wikipedia contributors have been able to put names to some of these buildings.

Panorama Panorama!

I have no familiarity at all with LA, past or present, but I did an image search on Doug Floor Plan’s zoom and, after perusing some interesting alternatives, came up with a likely candidate: the Panorama Building.

What an expansive view of 1899 LA!

This photograph captures an enormous view of the City of Angeles! There are so many things you can see in the panoramic photo.

Thank you for sharing this amazing photograph of Los Angeles, CA at the end of the 19th century.

Spaceship?

That's the best guess I can come up with.

[The Jupiter I? - Dave]

Fenced In

Notcom, you're right about that. By 1928 the view would have been mostly blocked east, south, and north by the new City Hall and the Halls of Records and Justice. The courthouse itself bit the dust in 1936.

LA in 3D in 1909

High resolution 3D map of LA in 1909, from the Calif State Library. With buildings and street names, should be possible to compare with this panorama. Click on Download symbol in upper right corner to download 6980x4337 30.27MP scan.

https://delivery.library.ca.gov:8443/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps...

Pre-Perry

This was likely taken from the old LA County Courthouse, since it's of Bunker Hill, not from it, but don't bother looking for Angel's Flight (or its lesser known sibling "Court Flight"), that was still a few years in the future.

"A Modern Triumph of Home Architecture"

I'd guess this was taken from Bunker Hill, fifty-odd years after the United States seized the unimposing, adobe-brick Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, along with the rest of California.

On the far right is the Bradbury mansion, built at great expense in 1887 by the same mining magnate whose Bradbury Building still stands on Broadway and West Third Street (you can see it behind the pyramidal roof of the old City Hall).

Bradbury died in 1892 and mansion began its slide toward oblivion, with a stint as a film studio, a boarding house, and a lunch room for court judges. By 1929 it was gone and the site turned into a parking lot. After shaving the hill down, the LA Superior Court was built on top of it. Nearly every structure visible in this photo eventually suffered a similar fate.

Syndicate content  Shorpy.com is a vintage photography site featuring thousands of high-definition images. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago. Contact us | Privacy policy | Accessibility Statement | Site © 2026 Shorpy Inc.