Santa Monica, California.
Garden Grove, California.
Mojave, California.
Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Vintage Postcards: Images Of Main Street
– Posted on November 7, 2023
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Curbside Classics Archives
Santa Monica, California.
Garden Grove, California.
Mojave, California.
Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Great collection of Americana! Thanks. Can one of our members identify the sports car in the street scene of Mojave, CA? Cool wheels, but I am at a loss as to the marque.
The car parked on the left behind the Mercury ooks like a Studebaker Hawk to me.
I think it’s an Aston Martin, which would make it quite an uncommon sight….
Yes, Aston Martin DB2.
About a `55 model too!
Perhaps belonging to an Air Force officer (or astronaut?) at nearby Edward’s AFB.
These postcard pictures have always delighted me (an elder photographer friend taught me that skies were usually plumped up with blue or more clouds in retouching), and I still delight at how the automobiles immediately help give a non-local a notion of the date.
The last (Idaho Falls) photo, with the Mercury close to us, seems to be as recent as any?
Burns, Oregon… Front left, a DKW Auto Union 1000. Rare.
Late 50’s to early 60’s.
I notice a Rexall Drugs in several of the pictures. Studebaker, Mercury, Pontiac, DKW aren’t the only visible brand names here that have gone away. For that matter, I haven’t thought about GallenKamp shoes for oh, at least 50-60 years. Interesting too that shoe stores, often more than one, were Main Street fixtures then.
My favorite of the businesses here is the Palace Cafe / Cocktails / Sporting Goods in Burns, Oregon. Looks like the Palace remained in business until just a few years ago (though without the sporting goods).
Another long-gone fixture of Main Streets were car dealers, and it’s interesting to see a Ford dealer there in downtown Salmon, Idaho.
The ‘Rexall’ brand name is still big in Canada. According to Wikipedia, there are 400 Rexall drugstores across the country, with 8,000 employees. The second most popular drug store here in Ontario, to Shoppers Drug Mart.
There were still a few left in the US as well; some older stores that were independently owned were allowed to keep the Rexall name. I shopped in one somewhere in northern Virginia – can’t remember exactly where – about a half year ago.
Isn’t that a Renault Dauphine in the first postcard? There must not have been very many in Tucson in the late 50’s.
Good eye on the Renault Dauphine, Yes.
The Dauphine sold quite well for a few years in the late fifties. Tucson is a college town which increased its likely acceptance there.
Tucson’s also an Air Force town, think a lot of the early import dealers here were down along 22nd St. near the AFB.
I’m amazed, thinking back, at the variety of cars I saw in Tucson when I was growing up in the ’60s. I definitely saw a number of Dauphines, even the occasional Caravelle. There was even a dealer that sold Amphicars. O’Rielly was the Chevy dealer, Paulin sold Olds and Cadillac, there was Young Buick, a Pontiac dealer, Holmes Tuttle Ford, Selby Lincoln-Mercury (they also sold Edsels), Beaudry Chrysler-Plymouth, Rollings Chrysler-Plymouth, Bill Breck Dodge, various dealers who sold imports. Not bad for a city of 213,000 in 1960.
I’m familiar with Santa Monica, Burns and Grants Pass. Not surprisingly SM has changed drastically while the other two still look quite similar except for the names on the businesses.
Loved the photos.
Loved the cars.
I see a 1958 Chevy Impala coupe with its silly roof vent over the back window. I see a Renault on its way to the junk yard, I even see off on a distant cross street, the lumbering profile of a 1949-1951 Nash.
Rexall Drug stores, Woolworth stores, JC Penny at its hey day, all in what seems to be an increasingly cookie-cutter downtown appearance. All hail the rolling automobiles! Widen those streets, expand that parking, damn the pedestrians!
I also see a driver at a crownded intersection with his arm out the driver’s window signalling with this hand that he is turning left. Do that today and you’ll lose your arm. Imagine an unairconditioned car, windows rolled down, and signally with your arm! Wow.
If you weren’t white, you had your Green Book to tell you where you are permitted to go for auto service, food, lodging, water or a toilet. Some towns had signs that told you that you weren’t permitted in town at all, or had to leave by sundown. But If you were white – WELCOME!
Love the post cards. To think that there was a time when folks traveled, bought these cards, WROTE ON THEM and then MAIL these cards back to folks back home. Honestly, my teens would be stumped why anyone would want a post card when anyone could see with their own cell phones where they were any time of the day.
I also see a driver at a crowded intersection with his arm out the driver’s window signalling with this hand that he is turning left. Do that today and you’ll lose your arm. Imagine an unairconditioned car, windows rolled down, and signally with your arm! Wow.
I did just that a couple of years ago for a while in my ’66 F100 because the turn signals weren’t working. I did rather wonder any of the other drivers had a clue as to what I was doing.
They still taught all the hand signals in the driver-ed class in my high school in 1980, even though I all but never saw anyone use them even back then.
Woolworth’s isn’t completely gone; they launched several specialty store brands in the US but had long-term success with only one of them, the Foot Locker athletic shoe chain. That’s all that’s left of their American operations, but several of Woolworth’s international subsidiaries split off from the U.S. group. Most of those (including Mexico and UK) are gone too, but the German Woolworth chain (split off from the US company in 1998) remains 500+ stores strong.
I suspect the younger people would likely wonder what that crazy old man was doing with his arm sticking out the window like that. I’ll have to ask my kids if they were taught hand signals in their driver’s ed classes.
My first car had no turn signals and no air conditioning, so I used hand signals (which I had to know for my driving test!). That was in 1970. My next car had turn signals and an air conditioner, but I learned quickly that using the A/C would push the engine toward overheating. I didn’t have good air conditioning till 1978, when I got what seemed like luxury to me, a 1970 Torino Brougham with V8, auto, power steering and (touchy) power brakes, and factory air that never made the car overheat!
Thanks for the info that the sports car is an Aston Martin. I have also read the other remarks of what you all have seen in the photos. I also saw the Nash bathtub crossing the main drag.
Great photos! I recall as a little kid, when city streets and highways used to be this regularly inconsistent for uneven surfaces, pot holes, and patches. Especially the smaller towns, with limited budgets for this.
In the Tucson view, I notice another “extinct artifact” of a bygone age – the American Airlines City Ticket Office in the Pioneer Hotel. These airline ticket offices were once a ubiquitous part of the US streetscape (for example, Michigan Avenue here in Chicago once had many; as a one – time collector of airline ephemera, they were a great source of timetables, etc… Lufthansa and British Airways ISTR had especially lavish ticket offices; American and United had about a dozen between them in downtown Chicago, more in the suburbs…). With the digital age, these ticket offices have disappeared…
If this is 1958 (per the Impala), American Airlines served Tucson with primarily DC – 6 airliners, and DC – 7 “Mercury” service (“Fly The Mercury… America’s Fastest Airliner… Radar Equipped… Spacious Lounge… Superb Cuisine… American’s Famous Stewardess Service”); below is a link to a PDF of the June 1st, 1958, AA timetable:
https://www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/complete/aa58.htm
The Pioneer Hotel, built in 1929 as the city’s elite hotel, still stands (now as offices), but the façade was greatly altered in the 70’s, after a tragic December 1970 blaze (originally thought to be arson) that took 29 lives:
https://arizonahistoricalsociety.org/2020/12/18/the-pioneer-hotel-fire-of-1970/
Also,on the right I assume is what was the Steinfeld Department Store; the Steinfelds died in the fire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Hotel_(Tucson,_Arizona)
“In the mid-20th century Harold and Margaret Steinfeld, owners of a large downtown department store, lived in the penthouse. A disastrous fire severely damaged the building in December 1970, and among the 29 victims were the Steinfelds…”
Another convenience that was downtown were travel agencies. I remember several in the downtown business district of NOLA with large photos of Hawaiian beaches or the guards of Buckingham Palace. The last time I used a travel agency was 1986.
As for a city airline ticket office, I bought a set of Eastern Airline tickets at a Continental Airlines office in 1990. Lorenzo was squeezing Eastern out of its last dime via Texas Holding. I had vacation time that I had to use or lose. Went to Disney World between Thanksgiving and Xmas. We had the entire park to ourselves. The following year, Eastern went belly up.
That Tucson view was one familiar to me as I was growing up. Yep, the Pioneer Hotel fire in 1970 was a horrible event, and the young man who was framed as the one who started the fire had his life ruined. Afterwards, Tucson’s building codes were amended to require sprinklers in hotels and other types of commercial buildings.
The Steinfeld’s store closed when the business moved east to the El Con shopping mall. In fact, all the department stores in downtown Tucson moved east to malls. Levy’s was the first, moving to El Con, and when they built a new, bigger store there in the late ’60s, that’s when Steinfeld’s moved. Sears moved east in the mid ’60s to a mall site that didn’t even have a name yet. (My parents groused incessantly about that move!) Jacome’s closed in the late ’70s. The Steinfeld’s and Jacome’s buildings were torn down so other things could be built: a Bank of America tower, and a new main public library. The Walgreen’s in the photo closed some years ago, and the building’s mid-century modern façade was removed, revealing much more interesting architecture. The University of Arizona is in there now. The Lerner Shops building has been through several metamorphoses. The Valley National Bank building is still there, but belongs to another bank now.
Imports, sticking out like a sore thumb – Renault Dauphine, Nash Metropolitan, DKW 1000 and the red Aston Martin DB2.
Great images .
Up to about 1972 Mojave, Ca. was still a bustling town with a Ford dealer right on main street, it’s a ghost town full of tweakers now, makes me feel sad for the folks who live there in the clean dry air .
Salmon, Oh.’s power company office has Ready Kilowatt, I remember him all over America back when electricity was cheap .
I hope more postcards like this will be featured here soon .
IIRC that DKW was a two smoker engine, non ? .
-Nate