City 18 Ed Ruscha’s Street-Level View and the Postwar Redevelopment Vernacular

In photographing and rephotographing Sunset Boulevard—and other iconic Los Angeles streets—Ed Ruscha was both documenting and making an argument about the transformation of urban space. “It . . . has changed quite a bit in the last five years,” he told an interviewer about the Sunset Strip in 1979.¹ Indeed, the built environment of the Strip, like the entire boulevard as well as twentieth-century American cities writ large, was highly dynamic. And the changing facades in Ruscha’s photographs indexed the deeper social, political, and cultural forces that swirled behind and around them, driving urban change on Sunset and well beyond.

Ruscha’s street-level photographs tell a story of late twentieth-century urban development that has been surprisingly elusive to historians. Accounts have focused on the large-scale state-funded projects that transformed dense urban fabric into housing developments, office buildings, civic and commercial centers, and stadia in the midcentury era. Observers have likewise directed their attention to the big projects, now private-sector led, that followed in the wake of urban renewal after the policy’s decline in the late 1960s.² L.A. has played a central role across such narratives, with studies focusing on the redevelopment of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine as well as on the construction of interstate highways and, later, the Staples Center.³ Yet while megaprojects and the prominent individuals who led them rightly attract interest, large-scale redevelopment only accounted for a fraction of the physical changes that took place in late twentieth-century American cities. As we argue in this essay, far more ubiquitous and transformative were the thousands of small alterations that remade L.A.’s urban fabric through modest demolition, new construction, rehabilitation, modification, and reuse at the property level.⁴

Scholars have overlooked such changes in part because there are only scattered traces of them in formal archives, in contrast to the extensive plans, correspondence, hearing transcripts, and newspaper coverage describing big projects. Vernacular interventions—such as the change of a restaurant’s sign from English to Spanish or the temporary vacancy of a site between uses—offer important historical evidence about larger stories unfolding beyond the buildings’ facades. Ruscha’s photographs, in fact, offer a route into these fine-grained stories, making them visible. They tell a more expansive history of redevelopment that was reliant less on top-down visions of officials and developers and more on the many modest choices of grassroots actors like shopkeepers, restaurateurs, property owners, and gardeners—in other words, a “redevelopment vernacular.” We ask what alternative histories of the American city, and of the late twentieth century more broadly, can be told by prioritizing the street-level view captured in Ruscha’s photos over the dominant bird’s-eye view of postwar modernism, with its emphasis on vast maps and abstract plans.

One way of answering this question is to focus on the iconic street Ruscha photographed most frequently. From 1966 to 2007, he visited Sunset Boulevard a dozen times, driving its length from the Pacific Ocean to downtown L.A. with a motorized camera mounted first in a car and then on the bed of his pickup truck. While this represented an aesthetic project of unusual duration, our interest is in what the resulting photographs reveal as documentary evidence of urban history unfolding. Across these decades, massive forces shook the American metropolis: the private market became the dominant driver of urban change; suburbanization emptied cities of residents, businesses, and tax dollars; immigration transformed populations; and climate collapse became a growing threat. Meanwhile, Ruscha kept photographing. “Mainly the idea is to get them down on film,” Ruscha said in 2003. “I do the comparing later when I have got more time.”⁵ Though “do[ing] the comparing later” offers a prospect with infinite bounds, a beginning of such comparisons here proves revelatory on small and large scales.

This essay explores five of Ruscha’s Sunset Boulevard shoots—1966, 1973, 1985, 1995, and 2007—focusing on the ten continuous miles of primarily commercial blocks from West Hollywood to downtown L.A.⁶ In comparing them critically using the website we built, Sunset Over Sunset, we reveal the causes of urban change through microhistories that illuminate broader stories.⁷ We focus on four typologies—gas stations, banks, restaurants, and palm trees—each of whose local history helps explain US urban transformation in this era. While others, including Ruscha himself, have plumbed these same iconic features of L.A.’s landscape, we explore them as windows into the history of urban development.⁸ The tale of Sunset they tell does not match that of every L.A. street, nor of every L.A. community. Similarly, L.A. is not Anytown, USA. Yet Sunset saw the kinds of incremental alterations that many streets share, and the diversity along its expansive length offers an exemplary urban cross section. Comparing its panoramas through juxtaposition, close reading, and historical contextualization offers an often-surprising history.

The results of this analysis turn expectations about the late twentieth-century city on their head. Massive structural forces with far-reaching consequences—like immigration, oil dependency, economic globalization, and climate change—would seemingly suggest immense, rapid changes in the built environment as well. Instead, we find that these changes often unfolded slowly and the historical agents behind them extended well beyond boldface names to include everyday, often-unknown builders, business owners, landlords, laborers, and tenants. In other words, we argue that the effects of overwhelming global transformation were physically marked on the city’s built environment in deceptively gradual and often subtle ways. Still, the changes—and even moments of stasis—revealed in Ruscha’s photos tell significant, unexpected, and largely untold stories about the grassroots nature of much redevelopment in these decades.

Gas Stations and the Changing Geography of Energy

One microhistory that Ruscha’s photos reveal is the changing geography of everyday energy landscapes, both along and off Sunset Boulevard. Specifically, the photos show the gradual disappearance of gas stations as they shifted away from the postwar commercial boulevard to more suburban and highway-oriented locations over the late twentieth century. The images also document how former gas-station sites were gradually repurposed for alternative uses, unveiling the many life cycles of commercial land. Rather than offering a strict before-and-after story, they record a frequently multistage redevelopment process that unfolded slowly amid continuing and rapid metropolitan growth.

In 1969, the United States had 236,000 filling stations; today, about 60 percent of that number exists.⁹ Sunset saw an intensification of that same trajectory, but on a smaller scale. In 1973, along the ten-mile study area, Ruscha photographed approximately forty-five gas stations; by contrast, his drive from 2007 would find that number diminished by more than two thirds.¹⁰ In terms of location, most postwar gas stations were located on corner parcels, affording drivers multiple means of entry and exit. In fact, of all the gas stations Ruscha photographed on this ten-mile stretch, only one—8543 Sunset—was located midblock. Gas stations also commonly clustered near one another, even on adjacent properties. At 5007 and 5025 Sunset, for example, two stations occupied the entire northern stretch of the boulevard between North Mariposa and North Alexandria Avenues. Although Ruscha had not photographed this area during his drive in 1966, city directories identify gas stations at these sites since at least 1965; those uses continued through his photo shoot in 2007.¹¹

When a gas station survived for an extended period at the same site, it tended to remain consistently in corporate hands, even if an individual franchise owner changed over time.¹² Chevron, successor to the Standard Oil Company of California, dominated the late twentieth-century Sunset Boulevard petroleum landscape. Texaco was close behind, and the two companies eventually merged in 2000. Other prevalent companies included ARCO, Shell, Gulf Oil, Mobil, and Union 76. Ruscha’s photographs demonstrate how the gas-station sites that endured experienced changes in signage and architecture, if not ownership. At 8101 Sunset, for example, Chevron dropped “Standard” from its signage sometime between Ruscha’s drives in 1966 and 1973. Additionally, the shape of the building’s canopy extending out from its oblong garage morphed from flat to gabled, and this form continues through today. Despite these physical changes, however, the Chevron name has remained constant.

More typical than the endurance of individual gas stations was their replacement with other buildings that had different uses entirely. All along Sunset Boulevard, Ruscha’s photographs reveal the processes of demolition and new construction that remade numerous parcels. Common reuses of gas-station sites included fast-food restaurants or parking lots for strip malls. For example, 6750 Sunset illustrates the constancy of change as a Union 76 gave way to a Rally’s drive-in and then a Carl’s Jr. (fig. 18.1). The typical corner location of most gas stations suited these alternative uses that likewise prioritized automobile access. Paving over such sites was also an economical means to attract development to land containing toxic soil.

a. 1973

b. 1995

c. 2007

Former gas-station sites stand out for the periods of vacancy that they frequently experienced before construction began to transform the lots for new uses. Ruscha’s photographs are uniquely valuable for capturing these interim moments of delay and absence. The images expose the often-slow pace and process of redevelopment, rather than just the outcomes. In 1973, for example, 7980 Sunset was the site of a Shell station; by 1985, the pumps were gone and only the station’s auto repair service remained; and by 1995, Gaucho Grill operated at the site. Similarly, at 8873 Sunset, property owners demolished the entire Shell station while awaiting a new occupant. The gas station had appeared in photographs from 1966 through 1985, but Ruscha’s image from 1995 captures an empty lot. His photograph from 2007 shows a reawakened property, with construction in progress. Shortly after, a Japanese restaurant opened on the site. In another instance, 6407 Sunset was home to a Texaco when Ruscha first photographed it in 1973. By 1985, the lot had been cleared but remained vacant. A Jack in the Box was in operation there by 1995 (fig. 18.2).

a. 1973

b. 1985

c. 1995

While the contamination of land on gas-station sites partially explains patterns of interim vacancy, many of the demolitions came as a result of the changing gasoline economy. In October 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an embargo on the United States, yielding gasoline shortages, limits on consumer fuel purchases, and a dramatic increase in gas prices where the product was still available. In response to this evolving global market, US gasoline companies shifted their strategies from dominating market share to profitability.¹³ They closed many former retail outlets as a result. One owner of an ARCO on Sunset attributed the gas station closures and rent increases to greed, but the company’s regional manager described it as “simple economics.” He explained, “If a station does a minimal volume of gas, its best use is not as a gas station.”¹⁴ At such moments, those sites sat vacant, awaiting remediation and future occupants.

Changing gasoline retail trends further hastened the closure of postwar gas stations along landscapes like Sunset Boulevard. Many stations depicted in these photographs adjoined automobile garages. But improvements in automobile technology gradually reduced demand for these garages’ services. Meanwhile, after having banned self-service gas stations in 1948, Los Angeles legalized them in 1973. Self-service stations tended to have more pumps and paired well with convenience stores rather than auto repair shops, as occupants of the sites’ secondary buildings. Economics favored these revised uses as well.¹⁵ Thus, by the 1980s, the space needs of gas stations were expanding, and earlier properties were becoming outdated.¹⁶ While drivers in the early 2000s could still refuel their tanks along Sunset, Ruscha’s photographs depict an era in which the bulk of gas stations were located in higher-trafficked areas outside the dense city that were more profitable.

This geographic move was indicative of a larger urban shift that included highway construction and the suburbanization of housing, shopping, and industry. Gas stations, therefore, weren’t the only establishments moving away from the postwar city to outlying metropolitan areas. Southern California experienced these processes acutely following wartime growth.¹⁷ The population of Los Angeles nearly doubled between 1950 and 2000; during that same period, however, the number of suburbanites in Southern California more than quadrupled.¹⁸ Moreover, L.A. had the nation’s highest rate of automobile ownership.¹⁹ With drivers increasingly located on and around L.A.’s expanding suburban highway network, gas stations followed their market, leaving Sunset Boulevard behind.

Banking on Sunset

Retail banking represented another ubiquitous and essential type of commercial land use on Sunset. As with gas stations, the landscape of bank branches changed dramatically in this period. Where twenty-six branches stood along these ten miles in 1973, only fourteen remained by 2007. The number of corporate choices thinned out too. By 2007, just seven different banks remained, a dramatic drop from the seventeen that were available three decades earlier. Sunset’s bank buildings recorded larger trends in US capitalism and corporate organization. The 1980s and 1990s saw the consolidation of financial institutions, both nationally and internationally, at a pace and scale exceeding that of any previous era. With a disruptive banking crisis and statutory changes enabling banks to freely expand across state and regional lines, big banks got even bigger. Others disappeared amid a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. The inequality of banking grew, too, as the fewer branches that remained gravitated toward more affluent customers.²⁰

The built landscape of banking on Sunset broadly reflects such changes, but a closer look suggests a range of more nuanced development stories within this transformative period in the history of capitalism. Banks occupied a variety of building types on Sunset, from modernist jewel boxes to adapted storefronts. When companies departed, they left behind physical traces, such as unused deposit boxes or customized structures requiring adaptation; in some cases, they left behind nothing at all. Some bank buildings—those of the consolidators, not the consolidated—endured and went effectively unchanged for four decades. Considering the redevelopment vernacular along Sunset through banks reveals a story of consistency amid underlying churn, persistent presence, and telling absence. Capitalism’s roiling waves wrought surprisingly subtle changes on this boulevard.

Indeed, what Ruscha’s photos don’t depict tells as important a story as what they do. The images evince a notable disparity in banking access on Sunset between the five miles west and five miles east of Vermont Avenue. The former included twenty banks in 1973, while the latter held just six; in 2007, those numbers dropped to ten and four. Residents across this extent were broadly similar according to the census measure of family income, but the westernmost miles were closer to the affluent Beverly Hills and Hollywood Hills. Census data regarding the miles east of Vermont between 1970 and 2000 shows a population less likely to self-identify as white and more likely to be born outside the United States.²¹ Access to banking has long correlated directly with race and income in the US, and Ruscha’s photographs record the local version of this national inequity.²²

Where banks were present, the midcentury era saw a dramatic change in their architectural forms, with the rise of modernist pavilions and skyscrapers. Pavilions shed the architectural revival styles of their predecessors, conveying forward-looking financial stability and an updated customer experience across Sunset. As with earlier banks, such architectural statements proved more aspirational than realistic amid broader corporate turnover. Four structures in particular (2134, 7014, 7700, and 7919 Sunset) saw tenants constantly in flux, yet their symmetrical, austere exteriors changed little. New signage registered frequent tenant changes most prominently. Take 7919 Sunset, for example (fig. 18.3), with an extensive glass facade, window lettering, and a sign at the corner that denoted the presence of State Mutual Savings and Loan (1973), followed by Far West Savings and Loan (1985), and then, by 1995, American Savings Bank, which gained facade signage too. Washington Mutual purchased American Savings Bank in 1996 and closed this branch, ending the building’s run as a bank. As its new signage showcased, the building’s subdivided interior became home to a restaurant (Baja Fresh) and coffee shop (Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf) by 2007, its surrounding platform ideal for outdoor seating.

a, b. 1973

c, d. 2007

Nearby, yet another site, 8150 Sunset Boulevard, offered an especially creative example of the pavilion form. Constructed in 1960, its transparent base supported a visually massive second level, surmounted by a thin roof resembling folded paper. Designed by Hagman & Meyer for Lytton Savings, it emblematized the modernism that would arrive across Sunset and symbolized the values that midcentury banks espoused: honesty, innovation, and optimism (see fig. 10.1). The building remained largely intact despite frequent tenant changes that culminated in the occupancy by Washington Mutual in 2007 and later Chase Bank, following Washington Mutual’s collapse during the financial crisis of 2008.²³ Developers soon eyed the site for a new mixed-use project designed by Frank Gehry. Despite determined preservationists, the building succumbed to demolition in 2021, though the site’s fate remained undecided. Two years later, the cleared lot was again on the market.

The modernist form of the Lytton Savings building carried over to the skyscraper towers that rose as examples of a new building type on Sunset shortly before Ruscha’s arrival. Often taller than anything previously built on the boulevard—with glass curtain walls, thin supporting columns, and retail bases—they offered prime office space to commercial tenants. Banks, eager for modern locations and new customers, were a natural fit. They occupied spaces that were less tailor-made than the functionalist pavilions elsewhere on the street, and their presence proved more fleeting. The buildings at 1910, 6430, 6565, 8490, 8730, and 9000 Sunset all had a ground-floor bank tenant by the time Ruscha first photographed them, and each lost that initial tenant in succeeding years. Only two of these locations had bank branches by 2007.

Most of these structures experienced similar physical transformation, with relatively modest alterations driven by a competitive market and changing fashions, not corporate directives from the banks themselves. The building at 9000 Sunset typified this pattern. Security First National Bank (later Security Pacific Bank) maintained tenancy in the eastern storefront at this address throughout Ruscha’s shoots in 1966, 1973, and 1985, departing after its 1992 acquisition by Bank of America—then the largest merger in US banking history.²⁴ The tower remained bankless until Wells Fargo occupied the western storefront in the 2000s. Bank signs in a variety of forms and fonts surfaced around the building over the decades. By the time one landed on the tower itself, the property owner had added a slim decorative strip with the building’s address. Such changes to a building’s facade proved a common strategy on Sunset for towers and the few shopping strips where banks were located. These subtle alterations belied frequent tenant transition amid mergers and acquisitions.

Where the “winners” of the bank-consolidation era were present on Sunset, a different story unfolded at their branches. Banks that were robust enough to acquire rivals exhibited remarkable continuity; a stable, built environment indexed their growing corporate strength. This could be seen vividly at the crossroads of Sunset and Vine Street, where multiple redevelopment vernaculars unfolded simultaneously. Around this intersection stood the following: two skyscrapers, 6255 and 6290 Sunset (the latter was L.A.’s tallest upon its completion in 1964), with constantly changing bank tenants; two modernist pavilions, 6320 and 6300 Sunset, each housing a single bank; and another single-occupant structure, originally built for Home Savings and Loan (1500 Vine Street).²⁵ This last one, completed in 1968, is perhaps Sunset’s most renowned bank building, featuring Millard Sheets-designed exterior mosaic murals that depict movie stars. The exceptional facade remained largely untouched as it transitioned from Home Savings to Washington Mutual in the 1990s, and then, in 2009, to Chase Bank.

The two modernist pavilions that anchored this intersection’s southwest corner were less architecturally engaging but nevertheless powerfully symbolic of the consolidators’ economic might. In 1973, Wells Fargo was located at 6320 Sunset while, next door, 6300 Sunset housed its competitor, Bank of America. Remarkably, amid the many changes along Sunset, Wells Fargo and Bank of America were still the tenants of these buildings in 2007. Though both banks were founded in California, they had gained increasingly national profiles during the intervening decades. The stability of occupancy at each site translated to minimal changes in each building’s appearance, with ATMs and updated corporate signage representing the only variations. They stood steadfast while the banking industry experienced great turbulence on the street, in the state, and across the nation.

Only two other banks, both branches of Bank of America, endured similarly, remaining unchanged in both form and occupancy during this period. The older of the two, 1572 Sunset—originally built in 1908—has been home to Bank of America since 1930.²⁶ Its later counterpart, a modest and modern building at 9021 Sunset, rose in the 1950s (fig. 18.4). This West Hollywood building was a Bank of America branch when Ruscha published Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 1966, and it remained so into 2021.²⁷ Its two stone walls and thin columns supported an overhanging concrete roof that spanned the facade and continued sloping down toward North Wetherly Drive until meeting the street, allowing for rooftop parking. Despite the passage of time, little of this car-friendly form changed over multiple decades, except for the varying fonts and logos that recorded Bank of America’s gradual evolution in branding.

a, b. 1966

c, d. 1985

e, f. 2007

Since Bank of America was on the winning side of corporate consolidation, 9021 Sunset stood relatively unmarred by the most torrid period of bank mergers and acquisitions in US history. At the broader scale, however, banking on Sunset had changed dramatically for consumers, with less than half of the choices available in 2007 as in 1973. Banking on Sunset became more like banking on any major street in any major city, where one could visit Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, or Chase and little else.

Viewing Sunset Boulevard through its banks suggests a built environment whose churn was not nearly as dramatic as that of the banking corporations themselves. The street saw new signage on lasting structures, modest ground-floor renovations, reskinned facades, and, rarely, demolition. Yet even as banks competed and merged on national and global scales, with their headquarters located increasingly far from L.A., many of these visible changes derived from local contexts and choices. Physical alterations were rarely the result of sweeping directives mandated by distant corporations. Instead, they represented the sum total of many incremental decisions: the modification of buildings by property owners to appeal to new tenants, the reoccupation by new banks of spaces that had previously housed their predecessors, and small adjustments to the exteriors of existing banks to meet new design trends. Some banks—and many buildings—endured, while others left little behind.

Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Restaurant Redevelopers

When Ruscha first photographed 1525 Sunset in 1973, the small storefront—modern, with a gridded-tile and stacked-brick facade—beckoned its neighbors with a broad sign advertising “Cuban Mexican Puerto Rican Foods” (fig. 18.5). Then called Toñita’s, the restaurant served an Echo Park population that included all those diasporic groups. As new residents arrived, the restaurant’s name, cuisines, and facade changed too. By 1995, its hand-lettered sign advertised Kuko’s Restaurante Mexicano, with a recently stuccoed front to welcome a nearby population that, while no longer the center of L.A.’s Mexican community, had maintained a Sunset Boulevard foothold. By 2007, Kuko’s had become La Fe Restaurante & Pupuseria, and that stuccoed front became the perfect surface for brightly colored hand-painted letters that promised menudo, mariscos, pupusas, and sopa de pata.

a. 1973

b. 2007

The selling of pupusas and sopa de pata indicated that, from the 1980s on, immigrants from El Salvador had made their way to L.A. and, specifically, Echo Park. They were one of the many growing immigrant communities that transformed Sunset as Ruscha photographed it. So did immigrants from Thailand, Armenia, Guatemala, and Colombia, among others, who joined existing and new communities from Mexico, Cuba, China, and Japan. Ruscha’s transits along Sunset coincided with one of the most dynamic periods in US immigration history, which came as a result of foreign wars, US entanglements abroad, and the loosened restrictions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Los Angeles, long defined by its numerous racial, ethnic, and religious communities, became home to many more.²⁸

Examining one commercial building use—restaurants—reveals how long-standing residents and newly arrived immigrants, like the changing restaurateurs at 1525 Sunset, both asserted and solidified their presence in an increasingly cosmopolitan city. While one could search through phone books, newspapers, and business directories to identify the restaurants along Sunset, Ruscha’s photographs unveil a larger story. In addition to occupancy, they also show how owners changed the outward appearance of their businesses through the fonts and language they painted as ephemeral signage, the materials and ornament by which they renovated existing buildings, and their expansion into neighboring spaces over time. These efforts were not just a means to attract customers but also a form of accretive redevelopment that over decades reshaped one of Los Angeles’ most dynamic boulevards.

While the uneven distribution of banks recorded economic and racial inequality that structured Sunset’s landscape, restaurants dotted the street more evenly—though still in revealing concentrations—offering evidence of their crucial role as a longtime vehicle for immigrant entrepreneurship.²⁹ This becomes visible in a close look at a limited but important portion of Sunset’s restaurants: those that served cuisines from Latin America (including Mexico and Colombia) or Asia (especially China, Thailand, and Japan). In 1973, a total of about thirty Latin American and Asian restaurants were spread across the ten miles from downtown to Beverly Hills, one-third of those from the latter group. In contrast to the decline of both gas stations and banks, restaurants proliferated over time. By 2007, the combined number of Asian and Latin American restaurants had more than doubled to about seventy, with a relatively even split between these two cuisines. Gradually, most, but certainly not all, Latin American restaurants were concentrated east of Vermont (sixteen in 1973 and twenty-four in 2007), while a majority of Asian restaurants were located west of Vermont (nine in 1973 and twenty-six in 2007).³⁰

These divergences mapped onto enclaves that the restaurants helped define: Latin American restaurants in Echo Park and Silver Lake; Thai and Armenian restaurants in Thai Town and Little Armenia; and restaurants from all of these cuisines in Hollywood and West Hollywood. Across these communities, restaurant owners transformed the everyday urban landscape through three common Sunset Boulevard building types: freestanding structures, strip malls and mini-malls, and storefronts along sidewalks (like 1525 Sunset). Each recorded a variety of forms of grassroots redevelopment, from signage to wholesale reconstruction.

As Sunset’s characteristic and long-standing commercial building type, storefronts were already present, relatively affordable, and easy to modify when new immigrants arrived. They were also ready-made locations for existing groups seeking to assert their presence on Sunset, as was the case for some Mexican residents of Echo Park.³¹ Through restaurants, Mexican Angelenos could secure a foothold in the city and grow it with their success. For instance, Barragan’s Cafe (1536–38 Sunset) was a Mexican restaurant started in 1961 by Ramón Barragan, who had worked as a cook at the nearby El Nayarit (1822 Sunset), and his wife, Grace Barragan. Over time, their venture expanded from a modest storefront to encompass several neighboring buildings (fig. 18.6). In 1973 the restaurant had a simple brick and wood-paneled facade, but by 1985 the Barragans had transformed adjacent shop fronts into a Spanish colonial revival addition, with a tile roof and prominent second story. By 1995 (not pictured), the original facade had gained a matching tan paint job and awnings with a stylized logo, a unified presence made vivid in Ruscha’s color photographs from 2007. Like the owners of El Rodeo down the street (1721 Sunset), who remodeled a neighboring storefront to expand their space, the Barragans concretized their permanence in built form.³²

a. 1973

b, c. 1985

d–f. 2007

Storefronts also recorded shorter business tenures that nonetheless evinced larger histories of the arrival and reception of immigrant groups. Significantly, signage and facade alterations spoke to the cultural context many Chinese and Thai restaurateurs faced as they navigated both customers unfamiliar with their cuisines and exoticizing stereotypes that greeted them (and which they sought to turn on their heads). Ah Fong’s Cantonese Foods at 8005 Sunset predated Ruscha’s photographs from 1966 and stood immediately east of his first Sunset Strip view. Images from 1973 and 1985 show an unchanging facade with stylized lettering—sometimes called the “chop suey font,” also visible in 1973 at 6530 Sunset (Mouling, a Chinese restaurant) and in 1995 at 5050 Sunset (Little Ongpin, a Filipino restaurant)—and similarly cartoonish architectural decorations. If ethnically reductive, such tropes also illustrated owners’ efforts to draw the dollars of Hollywood-area customers who sought a stereotypical idea of “Chineseness” as they dined.³³ Many Thai restaurant owners, who were part of a wave of immigrants from Thailand that began in the 1970s, also sought to make their cuisine legible through signage. By 1985, Chamchun Restaurant’s storefront (5936 Sunset) bore an awning promising “Thai-Chinese.” This was a common strategy among its peers as well, who joined one less-familiar Asian cuisine with a very different but more familiar one to appeal to prospective diners.³⁴

L.A. saw Thai restaurants reshape its dining and urban landscapes in the 1970s and 1980s; by 1987, there were at least two hundred.³⁵ Older storefronts housed many of these restaurants, but later strip malls and mini-malls became especially ideal locations for immigrant entrepreneurs. In these structures, Thai—as well as Central American and Armenian—immigrants found affordable rents and low overhead. Ruscha’s photographs reveal low-slung strip malls where both long-lasting and short-lived restaurants tried their luck, a story typically told through changing signs and few other exterior alterations. At the shopping plaza at Sunset and North Benton Way in Silver Lake, for instance, which first appears in Ruscha’s shoot from 1985, one could find fleeting signage for El Cochinito, a Mexican restaurant, and Restaurante Los Arrieros, a Colombian eatery. They were replaced a decade later by Tini Thai and a Colombian restaurant called Chibcha. By 2007, the strip mall had received a new awning, but Chibcha’s sign remained, faded by the sun but testifying to the restaurant’s endurance where others had failed.

The architecture and economics of such shopping centers made frequent changes relatively easy, but Ruscha’s panoramas also depict strip-mall locations becoming durable beachheads for community formation. In the overlapping blocks of Thai Town and Little Armenia, retail plazas attained the role of neighborhood institutions. In 1973 the Thai restaurant Jitlada and a neighboring Thai market were located at 5233 Sunset, with brick shop fronts and a raked-metal mansard roof fronted by oval signs. As Ruscha revisited Sunset, Jitlada kept its place. By 1985, it had taken over the market to expand its dining room, and its Thai and English signs would remain the same thereafter. Its painted red-and-gray roof and green awning were the only things to draw the attention of passersby to what would become one of the most renowned Thai restaurants in the US.³⁶ A block east of Jitlada, a newer strip mall became home to Sahag’s Basturma by 1995, its tiny, red block letters barely visible in Ruscha’s photographs. Yet it, too, gained iconic prominence, as its Armenian sandwiches became nationally known.³⁷ Such efforts, shop by shop, strip by strip, helped put communities on the map. This was a grassroots redevelopment no planner could claim as their own. Thai Town officially gained its name in 1999, even as many Thai Angelenos had moved to the suburbs. Little Armenia attained its moniker the following year.³⁸

On dense Sunset blocks, freestanding restaurants were relatively rare, yet they told equally important tales of the diverse communities that reshaped the city’s built environment. At 4929 Sunset, a candy and ice cream store in 1973 had become Los Burritos by 1985 (the restaurant still stands in 2024) (fig. 18.7). Over time, paintbrushes transformed the sweets shop’s metal-paneled facade into a billboard for Mexican cuisine. “Mexican Restaurant,” proclaimed the painted front in prominent letters that only became bigger by 1995 (not pictured). Huge red type—still brightly visible in 2007—filled half of the storefront, stating the same message far larger than even the restaurant’s name. By the mid-2000s, Mexican cuisine was no longer seen as unusual or limited to certain neighborhoods. At Los Burritos and dozens of other restaurants along the boulevard through Hollywood, it had become part of the everyday landscape.

a, b. 1973

c, d. 1985

e, f. 2007

A West Hollywood site charted the rise of another cuisine that became part of L.A.’s daily life. When Ruscha photographed the Sunset Strip in 1966, 8225 Sunset, once the home of Preston Sturges’s Players Club, stood as Imperial Gardens Sukiyaki (fig. 18.8). Transformed by the Japanese American architect Kazumi Adachi, the restaurant’s elegant Japanese-modernist design matched its menu, both appealing to celebrities and affluent neighbors on Sunset’s western reaches.³⁹ Sushi and sashimi were among the restaurant’s offerings starting in 1966, making it the first sushi bar in L.A. outside Little Tokyo and one of the first in the nation.⁴⁰ Ruscha’s repeated visits depicted Imperial Gardens’s persistence into the late 1980s, when it became the famous Roxbury nightclub. In 2007, the structure housed Miyagi’s, a Japanese-themed club that combined the building’s previous lives. By then, the facade’s minimalism had given way to a caricatured version of traditional Japanese architecture, and the sushi sold inside, once rare, had become commonplace.

a, b. 1966

c, d. 1985

e, f. 2007

By the end of these four decades, Asian and Latin American restaurants had become less tied to immigrant enclaves and more a part of the daily life of dining across Los Angeles. That sushi, burritos, pad thai, and pupusas grew increasingly common, however, did not indicate their seamless absorption into the streetscape. Rather, the restaurateurs and proprietors who ran such businesses communicated and secured their presence in both modest and more extensive actions at the building scale. Taken together, their grassroots redevelopment efforts added up on Sunset—an index of the growing size and influence of the many diasporic communities who had come to make L.A. their home.

Constructing Urban Nature with Palm Trees

Ruscha’s lens did not focus exclusively on the built environment; his artistic work contains voluminous records of the “natural” world as well. Trees, hedges, lawns, and flowerbeds left little written trace, unlike the evolution of structures documented in building permits or the social histories of building ownership and occupancy logged in census records and city directories. But photographs capture the evolution of planted landscapes, marking the particular significance of Ruscha’s photographic archive. They reveal nature as constructed, often planted to accompany new development—but only in certain places and times. Exploring the changing visual transcript of palm trees along Sunset Boulevard illuminates the often gradual ways in which public and private forces, in conjunction with climate itself, redeveloped the city through its natural landscape. In turn, that natural landscape continuously effected its own streetside transformations.

While palm trees are not native to California, they have populated the missions and estates of the state’s southern reaches since the nineteenth century. It was only in the twentieth century that the tree became a regional icon. Depression-era labor and the anticipation of the Olympic Games of 1932 spurred Los Angeles to plant roughly forty thousand Mexican fan palms along its boulevards.⁴¹ A generation or so later, some of those same trees appear in Ruscha’s images. An occasional glance down side streets intersecting perpendicularly with Sunset captures the trees’ scale, rhythm, and street-facing position; more common in Ruscha’s photographs, however, is the full or partial depiction of one or two trees in a single frame.

Even as much of the built environment held relatively constant over time, the natural landscape continued to grow and evolve, and Ruscha’s photos reveal this otherwise undocumented facet of urban change. The structure at 5751 Sunset is typical of this story unfolding (fig. 18.9). By 1985, palm trees were planted in front of a Denny’s after the restaurant replaced a Chevron gas station on the site. The trees subsequently grew dramatically, their presence shifting from framing and fronting the diner to ultimately towering over the structure. By 2007, they were utility pole-like stalks that extended beyond the photographic frame.

a, b. 1973

c, d. 1985

e, f. 1995

g, h. 2007

That fate told a representative tale of the Mexican fan palm. A common Sunset Boulevard varietal, the trees grow up to six feet per year, with mature trees reaching over one hundred feet in total height.⁴² The palm tree’s limited lateral footprint, however, is both a virtue and a vice. Palm trees have relatively narrow, dense root balls that project straight down. This makes them apt for planting in strips and keeps their roots from buckling concrete or breaking pipes.⁴³ Their narrow trunks also barely impede a driver’s view when passing by. But palm trees do little to cleanse or cool the air or to block traffic noise. Additionally, their compact plumage provides limited shade—as color photographs in particular reveal—diminishing their beneficial effects on the urban heat island.⁴⁴ As historian Jared Farmer notes, “Palms have been planted here for what they mean, not what they do. Or rather, what they mean is what they do.”⁴⁵ And so, their impact is often more aesthetic than environmental, even as their visual real estate in Ruscha’s photographs diminishes as they age.

While palm trees have come to symbolize the entire city and region, their presence is geographically uneven, including along this one boulevard. California’s Street Tree Planting Act of 1915 provided that special assessments could fund municipal tree planting or removal. Over a decade later, Los Angeles took up this policy.⁴⁶ In 1927, the actor Mary Pickford was one of several citizens who advocated to the city council’s Public Works Committee in favor of widening Sunset Boulevard and planting streetside palm trees between Normandie and Fairfax Avenues, comprising most of Hollywood. Replacing dispersed clumps of pepper trees with more evenly distributed palms would help create what Pickford called “Los Angeles Beautiful.”⁴⁷ The paired planting effort and expansion of Sunset Boulevard’s width—despite causing the loss of four hundred trees—could promote both new growth and environmental repair.⁴⁸ While some criticized a disconnect between the business functions of the boulevard and the ambience of the proposed trees, the eventual plantings would associate the area and its burgeoning film industry with a distinct brand of L.A. glamour.

Ruscha’s images track the enduring concentration of palm trees in Hollywood and West Hollywood during the postwar decades, as well as a broader story of urban inequity.⁴⁹ The trees’ numbers on this western stretch increased over time, from an average of one hundred trees per mile in 1966 to one hundred and fifty trees per mile by 2007. Put differently, one palm tree sprouted every twelve to seventeen yards between Vermont Avenue and the start of the Sunset Strip. In contrast, the five miles to the east of Vermont featured a much sparser collection of trees, averaging one tree every one hundred yards in 1973 and increasing to one tree every fifty yards by 2007. Thus, palm trees grew across the boulevard, but it was in Hollywood and its surroundings where they most densely took root. The presence or absence of the trees in particular neighborhoods in part reflects broader historical patterns of uneven resource distribution that extended well beyond investments in natural landscapes alone.

After the mass public planting campaign of the 1930s, subsequent private plantings tended to accompany shifts in the built environment, from the construction or alteration of structures to changes in their occupancy or use.⁵⁰ Across the four decades in which Ruscha captured this ten-mile expanse of Sunset, the greatest increase in palms can be seen in the photos from 1985. New trees sprouted in front of buildings like 6525 Sunset, which, by 1995, housed the Hollywood Athletic Club. No palm trees existed there in 1973, when the property was home to the University of Judaism. By 1985, however, a new owner had restored the facade and planted a lengthy row of trees in front, likely as an attempt to attract commercial tenants.⁵¹ Additionally, two younger plantings replaced the one palm tree to the building’s east. Like the paint job that transformed 4929 Sunset from a candy and ice cream shop to Los Burritos, the new landscaping at 6525 Sunset registered the existing structure’s new function, in this case as an athletic club. Another example can be seen in the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) at 4661 Sunset, which Ruscha first photographed in 1973 (fig. 18.10). By 1985, new construction was in progress there. Photos from 2007 show the Saban Research Institute, CHLA’s research wing that was built following a gift by the Saban family in 2003, with numerous palm trees sprouting beside it. In the cases of 6525 and 4661 Sunset, new building usage or construction inspired new palms to appear, revealing the direct relationship between the development of the city’s natural and built environments.⁵²

a–d. 1985

e–h. 2007

The portions of Sunset located east of Vermont have their own tree canopies, of which the palm is a contributing, but not typically dominant, part. Instead, sophoras, acacias, and other species abound. This is a vestige of pre–palm vegetation on Sunset Boulevard as well as a function of less direct municipal investment, varying topography, and physical distance from the glamorous image of Hollywood. In general, where development is older and largely unchanged, new and more recent plantings of palm trees are also less common. Where trees other than palms grow, they often stand closer to buildings, or to the sides and backs of structures, rather than distinctively abutting the street. At 2201–15 Sunset, for example, a couple of palm trees consistently peeked out from behind the relatively unchanging buildings between 1973 and 2007, while surrounding flora of a range of types increased in number and variety over time (fig. 18.11).

a–d. 1973

e–g. 2007

There are exceptions to this east/west dichotomy, such as the large outcropping of palm trees in front of the modern building complex at 1111–1115 Sunset in Echo Park. Designed by architect William Pereira in 1961 and constructed between 1963 and 1973,⁵³ the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which featured a low-rise component and an eight-story high-rise, was accompanied from the outset by dozens of new Canary Island date palms and Mexican fan palms. In the complex’s more recent incarnations as the Holy Hill Community Church (1994–2015) and Elysian apartment building (2014–), palm trees remain. The unusual appearance of so many palm trees in this eastern locale attests to both the building’s more recent construction and its original municipal use. Another property highly populated with palms along Sunset Boulevard is Hollywood High School (located at the intersection with Highland Avenue and closest to 6767 Sunset), another public site.

In their arrival and disappearance, palms demonstrate the fragility and ongoing maintenance that urban nature requires. Most palm trees last only one hundred years, but threats like fungus and weevils can fell them even sooner. Consequently, the number of palm trees in Los Angeles today has likely decreased since the last citywide census in 1990, which counted roughly seventy-five thousand. While Article 6 of the city’s municipal code identifies four tree and two shrub species for protection, palm trees are not among them.⁵⁴ Palms are only protected in six specific locations due to their historic significance; one of those locations is along Sunset, at Hollywood High School. Aside from these few spots, the city does not plan to replace palm trees as they die. Climate change has prompted public investment in trees that need less water and provide greater shade. Any palm replacement will fall to individual homeowners and developers.⁵⁵ Although Ruscha’s photographs show only diminishing growth rates among Sunset’s palm trees rather than an absolute decline, any future surveys should register the loss. The artist’s lasting documentation of otherwise ephemeral growth shows how forces of nature helped transform and redevelop the city, only becoming visible when we examine its landscape at a fine grain.

Tree planting on Sunset represented a different sort of redevelopment from the construction and reconstruction of its buildings. Yet, as a close examination of the boulevard’s palms reveals, the tale of its treescape is no less a history of gradual, additive, and subtractive changes that unfolded slowly enough to elude the eye but not Ruscha’s camera. The photographs remind us that much of Sunset lacks the iconic trees, evincing variations in development patterns and socioeconomic geographies alike. Where palm trees do appear, their planting, growth, and decline tell a broader story of Sunset hidden in plain sight: its form ever-changing, reshaped inexorably by the persistent, transformative, and constructed nature of landscape.

Redevelopment at the Street Level

Looking at postwar urban history through the small, subtle changes happening at the street level is more than just a metaphorical shift in perspective. Crucially, Ruscha’s photographic project records social and material aspects of the urban landscape that few, if any, other sources have documented. What historical traces have palm trees and hand-painted restaurant signs, for example, left in the archive? Even where relevant records do exist—like those that document the built form, ownership, and occupancy of banks and gas stations—photographs add new texture. They illuminate moments of absence, stasis, and incremental change—the very opposite of more traditional recordkeeping practices. In these ways, Ruscha’s photographs capture a more complete and nuanced record of the urban landscape as well as of the actors and actions that changed it over time.

Not just any photographic perspective would enable such views. The more schematic and prevalent bird’s-eye view of the midcentury era obscures as much as it reveals, erasing the agency and impact of individual property owners, proprietors, residents, and municipal workers on the ground. By contrast, privileging these actors and their typically more modest urban interventions paints the late twentieth-century city as one that was shaped, but not controlled, by sweeping structural forces such as oil dependency, economic globalization, immigration, and climate change. A street-view perspective shows how individual actors contended with such forces by remaking the built environment.

In the process, they became redevelopers too, but not in the typical sense. They did not lead the often-disruptive large-scale projects that have attracted much attention yet constituted only a minority of urban change. Instead, they defined a redevelopment vernacular through their myriad alterations of individual properties. Those gradual, small-scale actions contrasted notably with the scale of transformation that caused them; however, over space and time, they added up. They reveal the history of the late twentieth-century city not as the work of invisible hands but of real ones that planted trees, repainted buildings, tore them down, and built them up.

A few geographically comprehensive collections of street-level photographs exist for other cities, including New York City’s tax photographs of the 1940s and 1980s. But the fact that one of the most important artistic commentators on twentieth-century urban America created—and frequently recreated—Sunset makes them particularly provocative for considering the charged relationship between evidence and narrative. Paradoxically, the impossible totality promised by Ruscha’s photography—“every building,” as his famous title reads—makes the case for both slowing down and scaling down in the effort to track the history of urban change in all its specificity and fine detail.

Ruscha seemingly had that very prospect in mind. Why else return to Sunset over and over so that each incremental change could be etched in film and stored away for future comparison? Sunset Boulevard’s stories are limited by the path the roadway carved through the city, which encompasses only certain racial, ethnic, and class bounds. But its miles contain a multitude of varied layers and people behind its facades. Ruscha offered a path for seeing them and the revelatory traces they left behind, not just here but along any route. One need only slow down and look, property by property, year over year, just as Ruscha’s camera did.

1. Trina Mitchum, “A Conversation with Ed Ruscha,” in Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 85 (originally published in Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal, no. 21 [Jan.–Feb. 1979]: 21–24). ↩︎

2. Accounts emphasizing large-scale mid-to-late-twentieth-century urban redevelopment projects include Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974); Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980–2000, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Alan A. Altshuler and David E. Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004); Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Sean Dinces, Bulls Markets: Chicago’s Basketball Business and the New Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019). ↩︎

3. See Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Bunker Hill Refrain, https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/arutkows/bunker-hill-refrain/. ↩︎

4. Efforts to chronicle such small, street-level changes include works by Ruscha’s contemporaries: Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). They also include studies by more recent scholars: Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Brian D. Goldstein, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). ↩︎

5. Doris Berger, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip: Interview with Ed Ruscha by Doris Berger,” in Within, Alongside, and Between Spaces (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2003), 45. ↩︎

6. These ten miles span Doheny Road to the west and Alameda Street to the east, where Ruscha stopped photographing. Ruscha’s photographs from 1966 include only the Sunset Strip. ↩︎

7. For Sunset Over Sunset, see http://www.sunsetoversunset.org/. ↩︎

8. Banks appear in “Tanks, Banks, Ranks, Thanks,” Ruscha’s photo essay in “Camera,” Rags, no. 12 (May 1971): 37–40. Gas stations are featured in his artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and in prints and paintings that followed. Restaurants are the subject of paintings like Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire (1964) and his film L.A. Restaurants (2019). Palm trees can be found in his artist book A Few Palm Trees (1971). See also Kate Palmer Albers, “From Banks to Blanks: The Poetic Spaces of Automated Vision,” this volume. ↩︎

9. Estimates of numbers of gas stations vary, but all sources point to a dramatic decline during this period. John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 131; and “Service Station FAQs,” American Petroleum Institute, https://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas/consumer-information/consumer-resources/service-station-faqs. ↩︎

10. Throughout this chapter, we derive counts of building and landscape features from the manual study of Ruscha’s photographs alongside city directories and other secondary sources; in particular, we utilize our digital project Sunset Over Sunset. We thank research assistants Dorothy-Rui Corrigan, Anna Fruman, Juliette Morfin, Calvin Nguyen, and Julian Valgora for their painstaking attention in completing this work and their thoughtful analytical contributions. ↩︎

11. Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, Los Angeles Street Address Directory, July 1965. ↩︎

12. John A. Jakle, “The American Gasoline Station, 1920 to 1970,” Journal of American Culture 1, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 521. ↩︎

13. Jakle and Sculle, The Gas Station in America, 79–80. ↩︎

14. Rick Kushman, “Government, Costs, Oil Firms Hurt,” Los Angeles Times, 10 August 1980, WS1. ↩︎

15. Robert L. Bradley Jr., Oil, Gas and Government: The U.S. Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). ↩︎

16. Jakle and Sculle, The Gas Station in America, 79–81. ↩︎

17. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). ↩︎

18. The combined statistical area includes Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and Ventura County. Wendell Cox, “The Evolving Urban Form: Los Angeles,” New Geography, 8 August 2011, https://www.newgeography.com/content/002372-the-evolving-urban-form-los-angeles. ↩︎

19. California Department of Transportation, “Tract Housing in California, 1945–1973: A Context for National Register Evaluation,” 2011, 18, https://planning.lacity.org/odocument/7b3709a9–42d8–44ad-ac78–0bcf7fd70312/TractHousinginCalifornia_1945–1973.pdf. ↩︎

20. Stephen A. Rhoades, Bank Mergers and Industrywide Structure, 1980–94 (Washington, DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 1996), 1–4. ↩︎

21. This data is based on an analysis of the following categories from census tract numbers 1908, 1913, and 1958 (for the year 1970) and census tract numbers 1908, 1913, and 1958.01 (for the year 2000) for Los Angeles County, California: race, foreign born, and average family income. Social Explorer (based on data from US Census Bureau), https://www.socialexplorer.com/us-census-data. ↩︎

22. See Mehrsa Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Mathieu Despard and Terri Friedline, Do Metropolitan Areas Have Equal Access to Banking? A Geographic Investigation of Financial Services Availability (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, Center on Assets, Education, & Inclusion, 2017). ↩︎

23. On Lytton Savings, see City of Los Angeles, “Section 4.C.2.: Historical Resources,” in 8150 Sunset Boulevard Mixed Use: Draft Environmental Impact Report, November 2014, 4.C.2–1 to 4.C.2–30, https://planning.lacity.org/eir/8150Sunset/deir/DEIR/4.C.2_Historical_Resources.pdf. ↩︎

24. Combined, the two banks represented 6.4 percent of total US banking assets. Rhoades, Bank Mergers and Industrywide Structure, 5–8. ↩︎

25. See “Historical Data” note on “Sunset Vine Tower,” TESSA: Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library, https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/ref/collection/photos/id/124247. ↩︎

26. Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Recommendation Report: Historic-Cultural Monument Application for the Bank of America-Echo Park Branch, 28 August 2008, https://planning.lacity.gov/StaffRpt/CHC/1-15-09/CHC-2008-4394.pdf. ↩︎

27. Paulo Murillo, “Bank of America Sunset-Wetherly Is Second Branch to Close in WeHo,” WeHo Times, 9 September 2021, https://wehotimes.com/bank-of-america-sunset-wetherly-is-second-branch-to-close-in-weho/. ↩︎

28. East Los Angeles was a popular destination for Mexican immigrants in the mid- to late twentieth century, yet many settled along Sunset—especially its eastern portion, in and around Echo Park—during this time as well. In the neighborhoods between Hollywood and downtown, populations of Cubans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans were notably larger compared to other L.A. areas by the century’s end; Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and other Central American communities concentrated in Hollywood north of Beverly Boulevard. By the 1990s, Sunset’s eastern extent included notable populations of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants (both near Chinatown) as well as Japanese and Filipino immigrants. Thai immigrants, concentrated in East Hollywood, represented the boulevard’s most significant population from East Asia. See James Paul Allen and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California (Northridge: California State University, Northridge, Center for Geographical Studies, 1997), 34–40, 92–166; and Mark Padoongpatt, Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 58–64. ↩︎

29. On immigrant restaurant entrepreneurs, see Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). ↩︎

30. Inevitably, our manual counts may have missed some of the few restaurants with obscured signage or those with remaining signage that have gone out of business. ↩︎

31. Natalia Molina, “The Importance of Place and Place-Makers in the Life of a Los Angeles Community: What Gentrification Erases from Echo Park,” Southern California Quarterly 97, no. 1 (2015): 74–83. ↩︎

32. Molina, “Importance,” 95–97. On El Nayarit, see Natalia Molina, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022). ↩︎

33. These observations benefited from the research assistance and insight of Dorothy-Rui Corrigan. ↩︎

34. Padoongpatt, Flavors of Empire, 97–101. ↩︎

35. Padoongpatt, Flavors of Empire, 92. ↩︎

36. ​​As Bon Appetit declared, Jitlada was “definitely the best Thai food in L.A., and likely the whole country.” “Jitlada,” Bon Appetit, https://www.bonappetit.com/city-guides/los-angeles/venue/jitlada. ↩︎

37. See the interview from 2018 with Sahag’s Basturma owner Harout Tashjian: “Sahag’s Basturma in Little Armenia,” Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, 17 July 2018, YouTube video, 4:46, https://www.si.edu/es/object/yt_CigNV2J3RDg. ↩︎

38. Padoongpatt, Flavors of Empire, 147. ↩︎

39. See “Imperial Gardens Sukiyaki, Menu,” menu #41–440, Bruce P. Jeffer Menu Collection, Conrad N. Hilton Library, Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, NY, http://ciadigitalcollections.culinary.edu/digital/collection/p16940coll1/id/13322; and “Vintage Postcards Then & Now,” Adsausage, https://www.adsausage.com/vintage-los-angeles-postcards-saharan-winona. ↩︎

40. Jonas House, “Sushi in the United States,” Food and Foodways 26, no. 1 (2018): 40–62. ↩︎

41. Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 382–83; and Nathan Masters, “A Brief History of Palm Trees in Southern California,” KCET, 7 December 2011, https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/a-brief-history-of-palm-trees-in-southern-california. ↩︎

42. Dave Gardetta, “Architect of Paradise,” Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1995, SM20. ↩︎

43. Farmer, Trees in Paradise, 382. ↩︎

44. David Larsen, “Costly Care: L.A. Palms—A Frond in Need,” Los Angeles Times, 13 February 1975, A1. ↩︎

45. Farmer, Trees in Paradise, 337. ↩︎

46. Farmer, Trees in Paradise, 374–75. ↩︎

47. “O Council, Plant Those Trees,” Los Angeles Times, 2 November 1927. ↩︎

48. “Chamber Fights for Trees,” Los Angeles Times, 18 November 1927. ↩︎

49. This concentrated area of palm trees is located roughly between 4500 and 8200 Sunset Boulevard. ↩︎

50. By the early twentieth century, Los Angeles managed about one fifth of the city’s roughly ten million trees, of which 700,000 were street trees. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Urban Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 197. ↩︎

51. Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, Los Angeles Street Address Directory, July 1965, 1973, and 1987. ↩︎

52. These observations, and others related to palm tree growth, benefited from the insights and research assistance of Julian Valgora. ↩︎

53. The low-rise portion of the complex was completed in 1963, while the eight-story high-rise was built in 1973. ↩︎

54. Municipal Code of the City of Los Angeles, Article 6: Preservation of Protected Trees, section 46.01, 2023, https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/los_angeles/latest/lamc/0–0-0–132254. ↩︎

55. Ally J. Levine, “L.A.’s Palm Trees are Dying and It’s Changing the City’s Famous Skyline,” Los Angeles Times, 22 September 2017, https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-palm-trees-dying-skyline-los-angeles/; and Rory Carroll, “Los Angeles’ Legendary Palm Trees are Dying—and Few Will Be Replaced,” The Guardian, 29 September 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/29/los-angeles-palm-trees-dying. ↩︎