Those Were The Days, My Friend


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Next in my occasional trippings down memory lane through the Los Angeles Public Library’s digital archives, I share with you this blast from the past. Undated, but if the visible vehicles are any indication probably taken somewhere around the late 1920s to early ’30s, we find Carpenter’s Drive-In that once stood at 6285  Sunset Boulevard between Vine Street and Argyle in Hollywood.

As one carhop serves a customer at the right of the image, a pair waits for arrivals at this prime example of a city catering to the automobile where one could order up  “A Real Hamburger Sandwich” for 15 cents and wash it down from behind the wheel with a few draught beers (see the sign above the heads of the two carhops) before hitting the [*hic*] road.

Can you imagine?

Both the then-acceptable behavior of drinking and driving and Carpenter’s were long gone by the time I came around. But I’m old enough not only to have childhood memories of the eating at the similarly circular Delores’ drive-In that stood on Wilshire, just west of La Cienega, but also to have teenage recollections of  when it was torn down in the early 1980s to make way for the office building that occupies the real estate now.