San Diego photologs from the 1970s

alexjplant

Les 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.

AntiRush

Your 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

squeedles

Color 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

latchkey

As someone born and raised in san diego since the 70s, this is really nice!

ear7h

The 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-v...

ashleyn

>"Hypno-Sex-Ism" 50 years early to the "gooning" trend, I see...

sllabres

Nice 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?

rnxrx

The 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.

markkat

IMHO comparably, cars today look depressing. So soulless, so similar, so boring. White/grey/silver/black, maybe a few boring blue or burgundy.

ilaksh

I 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

So many Volkswagen Beetles! The original ones, not the 1990s version.

burnt-resistor

Can't forget California smog and haze that varied between yellow, orange, and brown.

asdff

It 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.

rdiddly

Cool project

danans

> 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

Folks might find the archives of California Revealed interesting - photos, videos that you can filter on place, time, subject, etc. http://californiarevealed.org/search

thelonelyborg

and not a single beach in sight!

stevenfoster

Wild 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

Wow- 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

When I look at those people first thing I think is that they have never seen a cell phone and I am bit jealous.