The first Carpenter’s drive-in restaurant on Sunset Boulevard was located at the northeast corner of Sunset and Vine. This drive-in was demolished in 1937 so that NBC’s radio studio could be built on the site. NBC is covered in Part II. A new Carpenters opened across the street to the southeast corner at 6290 Sunset and has its own post.
The Earl Carroll Theater and Restaurant opened at 6230 Sunset Boulevard, on the south side of Sunset between Vine St. and El Centro on December 26, 1938.
Located at the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and El Centro Avenue, the Hollywood Palladium ballroom and restaurant opened on October 31, 1940.
Martin “Marty” Fiedler, the “Zeigfeld of softball” operated Fielder’s Field ballpark, located at the southeast corner of Sunset Bouevard and El Centro Avenue (addressed as 6134 Sunset Boulevard) from 1935 to 1938.
Until the latter half of the 1930s, commercial radio was primarily based in New York and Chicago because the technology that made radio programming possible was oriented for east-to-west transmission making it prohibitively more expensive to broadcast a show in the opposite direction. The regulations changed in 1935, sending radio rushing to Hollywood just as moving pictures had done in the 1910s.
5939 Sunset Boulevard, located at the northeast corner of Sunset and Gordon Avenue, was designed by architect McNeal Swasey in 1924 for Stanley W. Smith as his Hollywood showroom of Peerless motor cars. The star-studded grand opening took place in the evening of June 25, 1924.
6000 Sunset Boulevard, on the corner of Gordon Street, was designed in the art moderne style in April 1933 by architect Harry L. Pierce. It opened that summer as the Sunset Cashis King Market.
5539 Sunset Boulevard, between Western Avenue and St. Andrews Place, was designed by Shelby R. Coon in 1925 as an auto showroom, part of a cluster of automotive-related businesses built from 5533 to 5565 Sunset for E.F. Bogardus. Auburn dealer Wilshire Motors opened here in May 1926 amid a cluster of other auto-related businesses.
The parcel that includes 5600 Sunset Boulevard is located between Wilton Place and St. Andrews Place.
In 1925, a 1-story brick automobile showroom and garage was built at the southwest corner of St. Andrews Place (addressed variously as 5600-5606 and 5600-5620 depending on the number of interior partitions). It’s function remained automobile-related through early 1931.
In February 1919, Niles. California-based F.S. Reed announced that his new company, the Bonnie-Reed Film Manufacturing Company, was relocating to Hollywood and was to begin construction at once on a $3 million studio on a parcel front Sunset Boulevard between Bronson Avenue and Wilton Place, in the Beesemyer Tract. Citizens living in the vicinity lobbied the Public Welfare Committee to protest the inclusion of the property in the “Motion Picture Zone.”
J. H. Graham 