San Diego photologs from the 1970s

San Diego photologs from the 1970s(beautifulpublicdata.com)

107 points by jonathanmkeegan 3 hours ago | 24 comments

ear7h 2 hours ago |

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...

AntiRush 2 hours ago |

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

jimt1234 1 hour ago | |

Everything looks so green, but I'm not sure if it's the color correction or because there was water back then. :shrug:

danans 18 minutes 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.

squeedles 2 hours ago |

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

asdff 50 minutes ago |

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.

nomel 28 minutes ago | |

I 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 26 seconds ago | | |

Infill 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. 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.

ilaksh 1 hour ago |

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.

alexjplant 2 hours ago |

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.

jimt1234 2 hours ago | |

I 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 1 hour ago | | |

The most recent draft of the Midway Rising Specific Plan (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..

sllabres 1 hour ago |

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?

reaperducer 1 hour ago | |

Nice 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 1 hour ago | | |

There 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.

markkat 1 hour ago |

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

gonzalohm 45 minutes ago | |

Nowadays 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

ashleyn 2 hours ago |

>"Hypno-Sex-Ism"

50 years early to the "gooning" trend, I see...

rdiddly 37 minutes ago |

Cool project

burnt-resistor 1 hour ago |

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

annoyingnoob 50 minutes ago | |

And we just can't capture the smell of those vehicles or the smell of gas stations of that time.

asdff 48 minutes ago | | |

Just wait for a mow and blow crew to show up and catch a whiff of that 2 stroke exhaust.

rnxrx 1 hour ago |

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.

AnimalMuppet 1 hour ago |

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

latchkey 2 hours ago |

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