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San Diego photologs from the 1970s
- alexjplant 5mo agoLes Girls is still there. I chuckle every time I pass it on the way to the rehearsal space my band uses. I always suspected that it had been a bigger deal in some bygone era; glad to see that confirmed via photographic evidence.
- jimt1234 5mo agoI keep hearing that whole area is gonna be razed as part of the Midway/Sports Arena redevelopment, but I feel like as long as MCRD stays put, Les Girls will always have a home. LOL
- cstone 5mo agoThe most recent draft of the Midway Rising Specific Plan (https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/dsd_appendix-c-specific-plan_1.pdf https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/dsd_app...) says Les Girls stays; the development doesn't go north of Kurtz St. By my reading of the map, it means that that Midway Rising will cover the Salvation Army store and everything west of it between Sports Arena and Kurtz St (including the current parking lots). Of course, if/when Midway Rising does happen, it'll probably spark future developments..
- alexjplant 5mo agoRock and Roll San Diego (the aforementioned rehearsal space) is slated to be part of the redevelopment :-( as is Soma. I only moved here 6 years ago and it already feels like the end of an era.
- alabut 5mo agoOh no, they're going to knock down Soma? Such an iconic all-ages venue.
- AntiRush 5mo agoYour color correction is incredible - the frames you selected look much better than the original video. The matrix of vehicles is my favorite part. If you drive down these same streets today it's a sea of black, white and grey. You'll be happy to know that Les Girls is still there today, advertising burlesque, go go dancers and "full nude". They finally replaced the sign earlier this year, but it still looks very much the same. Les Girls is the feature of a fascinating podcast, too: https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/stripper-energy https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/stripper-energy
- jimt1234 5mo agoEverything looks so green, but I'm not sure if it's the color correction or because there was water back then. :shrug:
- squeedles 5mo agoColor is magnificent and I can't believe we've lost so much joy on our relentless march to hyper-optimized profit. I recently read another article about how everything has gotten more monochrome, will try to find it again. In scanning some slides from the 1970s, I was struck by the colors of the pants! Bright! Stripes! Fun! I sew shirts and gravitate towards bright prints, and everything tends to stand out because clothing in general doesn't seem as varied today. EDIT - Found many articles along the same lines, some even with the same images. This isn't the original one that I was thinking about, but it is equivalent https://uxmag.com/articles/why-is-the-world-losing-color https://uxmag.com/articles/why-is-the-world-losing-color
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 5mo agoExcluding pantsuits, the 70's were a great time for clothes!
- latchkey 5mo agoAs someone born and raised in san diego since the 70s, this is really nice!
- ear7h 5mo agoThe Les Girls sign has stood at the same place basically unchanged until a few months ago, iconic. I remember when I first came across these videos I was living in an area of the city that was hardly developed and mostly dirt roads it was baffling. But aftwards I moved to the center of the city and it was baffling for the opposite reason, the storefronts and buildings were basically the same. Looking at the street view now and downtown also looks similar but a lot more trees. Edit: Looks like the author only has a reference to a subset of the originals on archive.org. There's tons more for more rural parts of SD you can find them on the city website: https://www.sandiego.gov/digitalarchives/film-audio/street-videos https://www.sandiego.gov/digitalarchives/film-audio/street-v...
- ashleyn 5mo ago>"Hypno-Sex-Ism" 50 years early to the "gooning" trend, I see...
- sllabres 5mo agoNice you could choose if you would like your gasoline with or without service :-) (4:00). Why was the chain called "Der Wienerschnitzel" and not "Das Wienerschnitzel". It is (was) a proper noun, but why the wrong article? (5:02) A small part appears twice (from 8:51--9:06). more cyclists than I see in current streetview footage Coca-Cola delivery vans where yellow?
- reaperducer 5mo agoNice you could choose if you would like your gasoline with or without service Still possible in some places. Especially cities with large numbers of retirees. I used a full-service optional Shell station in Las Vegas last year. Unlike when I was young, full-service didn't mean in increase in the price of gas.
- ghaff 5mo agoThere are a few full-service stations around where I live. But you really don't need your oil checked when you get gas so unless the objective is to have someone else pump your gas in crappy weather there's not a not of point.
- jonas21 5mo ago> Nice you could choose if you would like your gasoline with or without service :-) (4:00). Yeah. Too bad you weren't able to choose if you would like your gasoline with or without lead yet.
- rnxrx 5mo agoThe commentary on hand-created signage was especially fascinating. The observations about the use of computers "enshitifying" design sort of eerily echo a lot of the commentary about AI now, including the (not unfounded) fear of the loss of human inconsistency, and the beauty it can bring.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- markkat 5mo agoIMHO comparably, cars today look depressing. So soulless, so similar, so boring. White/grey/silver/black, maybe a few boring blue or burgundy.
- gonzalohm 5mo agoNowadays car brands charge you upwards of $1k to get a special color. And even then, you can only pick from at best 5 colors. It's sad
- mlsu 5mo agoAnd it's even worse because the colors now could be so good because of modern technology. The potential is so high
- littlexsparkee 5mo agoI don't drive but aesthetically the cars of the '60s - '80s (e.g. a vintage Oldsmobile or Cadillac coupe) are so much better than boxy, oversized modern cars.
- ksd482 5mo agoAnd they are bigger too. Everything is bigger.
- ilaksh 5mo agoI drove down Garnet and Grand so many times as a teenager on the way to the beach. Beings back a few memories. Most of that was thirty years ago, and the videos are from way earlier. But it's kind of interesting that some of it seems familiar. I actually don't really think cities should be like that though. They should evolve more freely. No point in trying to explain it though.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoSo many Volkswagen Beetles! The original ones, not the 1990s version.
- burnt-resistor 5mo agoCan't forget California smog and haze that varied between yellow, orange, and brown.
- annoyingnoob 5mo agoAnd we just can't capture the smell of those vehicles or the smell of gas stations of that time.
- asdff 5mo agoJust wait for a mow and blow crew to show up and catch a whiff of that 2 stroke exhaust.
- asdff 5mo agoIt is shocking how quickly California developed from agriculture to this, and how it basically stopped developing further after hitting this point. These photos could just as believably be van nuys in 2026. No wonder why we have a housing crisis. Progress and building to meet demand has been refused for almost 60 years.
- nomel 5mo agoI think it's the only possible outcome if sprawl is allowed. New families with some money spend too much income buying house. Kids move out, parents get old and don't get out as much. Don't keep up the house, because they need to retire. Sell house that's only attractive to lower income. Low income statistics take over the area. Nearby businesses close from everything related to low income statistics. Repeat with new families and newly built houses at edge of city, letting the interior rot. Like a slime mold.
- asdff 5mo agoInfill development used to be allowed in California but it stopped in the early 70s when communities turned to zoning to exclude blacks and browns after redlining was made illegal. The many sundown towns did not go without a fight. There are still some pieces of what that infil looked like. The bog standard brick 5 story building you see all over east coast cities can be found in california in parts, often sticking out like a sore thumb because nothing has been allowed to be built to that height since the late 1960s/early 1970s. The dingbat is another example of infill housing that was since made illegal although it was quite popular. Most blocks you see with some sort of apartments were at one point single family home lots, but this sort of development carefully limited to the blocks you now see them instead of widespread throughout the area. There was even a time when very large highrises were being constructed e.g. Wilshire Blvd's condo canyon. But that was also seen as a blight and quickly stopped in its tracks from expanding beyond the immediate arterial frontage. All hell would surely break loose if you allowed for student housing to be built on the eastern edge of UCLA instead of contained in the sliver of land between the school and veterans cemetery I guess. Unfortunately for the student body, the school is shoehorned in between two prestigious country clubs, and it is clear where priorities lay among local leadership.
- rdiddly 5mo agoCool project
- danans 5mo ago> before pulling into a Texaco to pay $0.34 per gallon for low-lead Fire Chief gas and fill up your "Mellow Yellow" AMC Gremlin. The nostalgia aside, that's $3.23/gallon today. Cheaper than today with our ongoing war, but same price as Nov 2020. At 20mpg that AMC gremlin was about as fuel efficient as our modern huge SUVs though.
- littlexsparkee 5mo agoFolks might find the archives of California Revealed interesting - photos, videos that you can filter on place, time, subject, etc. http://californiarevealed.org/search http://californiarevealed.org/search
- thelonelyborg 5mo agoand not a single beach in sight!
- stevenfoster 5mo agoWild there's a Safeway sign in there and not Alpha Beta, Fedco, and the old Coronado bridge sign. My parents grew up around this time and a lot of it still looked liked this when I was a kid in the 90s. I always wanted to move back to this San Diego, but it no longer exists. Appreciate whoever did this work.
- corlinp 5mo agoWow- the entire Point Loma area pretty much looks the same as it does today. Too bad they didn't drive down Newport to see Hodad's. Torrey Pines area definitely looks the most different, mostly because of the growth of UCSD I'm thinking.
- vvpan 5mo agoWhen I look at those people first thing I think is that they have never seen a cell phone and I am bit jealous.
- bilto32 5mo agoahh the good old days!
- wetpaws 5mo ago[dead]