San Diego photologs from the 1970s
130 points - today at 4:55 PM
SourceThe 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...
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
Everything looks so green, but I'm not sure if it's the color correction or because there was water back then. :shrug:
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.
eagleinparadise
today at 9:53 PM
I work in commercial real estate, grew up in San Diego and work in the SoCal market. I am not joking that the MAIN problem is Prop 13, which came into effect 5 years after this video was made.
I deal with these owners EVERY DAY who would rather sit on crappy buildings and land because why not, it costs them nothing. They've owned forever. Literally TODAY I had an offer rejected from a Seller that would have yielded 80 units of affordable housing in an area with $150k median income, delivering completion in 2028-2029.
littlexsparkee
today at 8:27 PM
That was my biggest gripe growing up in SD - felt like Caltrans / SANDAG abdicated responsibility for developing good transit/bike/ped infra, doubling down on car dependency. It should be a mecca of active transportation given the weather!
Agreed it's a bummer.
There's a lot of low-density sprawl in San Diego county which makes effective transit difficult, and because you have to drive everywhere, sentiment trends anti-bicycle. The previous CEO of SANDAG tried to push a mobility-centric vision but left because of intense pushback from folks who wanted more funding for roads and freeways, rather than transit and bike paths.
It is actually absurd the amount of freeways there are in San Diego. How many north south and east west freeways are there? And they are like sometimes 1 mile or less apart from another parallel running freeway. Then you have all these thick roads where its 6-8 lanes across with a 50 mph speed limit basically freeway capacity right there. Probably the most "built for car" urban area in california IMO, with orange county a close second for basically the same reasons (lot of freeway redundancy and also high capacity high speed roads). LA county would be closer but they never finished their highway master plans and it shows with some of the freeway void spaces where planned freeways were never built for varying reasons. They have those 50mph high speed roads but its limited to the comparatively newer sections of LA county like santa clarita, which is very much built in a "san diegan" way compared to the older san fernando valley.
socalgal2
today at 9:34 PM
> It is shocking how quickly California developed from agriculture to this
Check out Disneyland. There was nothing else there when it opened in 1955
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtrVcOxVDls
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.
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. 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.
socalgal2
today at 9:46 PM
Communities did not turn to zoning in response to infill being disallowed. Zoning was around since at least 1917 and already for that purpose.
Zoning in the 70s was more a response to (1) homeownership property value protection (2) nimbys being given the power to block projects like they still do today, especially in highly "progressive" cities. The more progressive, the harder to build (3) people claiming expansion was bad for the environment.
>Communities did not turn to zoning in response to infill being disallowed.
??? Zoning is the mechanism to disallow infill, it can't come in response to it. The book "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein covers how zoning as used as a new tool for racial exclusion in its third chapter. Indeed, modern socal remains a highly segregated area thanks to zoning decisions that ensure working class people, who are predominantly nonwhite, will find no suitable housing they might afford in the various lily white strongholds.
squeedles
today at 5:40 PM
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
stevenfoster
today at 9:02 PM
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.
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.
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
today at 5:35 PM
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.
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
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..
Oh no, they're going to knock down Soma? Such an iconic all-ages venue.
alexjplant
today at 9:25 PM
Rock 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.
When I look at those people first thing I think is that they have never seen a cell phone and I am bit jealous.
littlexsparkee
today at 8:04 PM
Folks might find the archives of California Revealed interesting - photos, videos that you can filter on place, time, subject, etc.
http://californiarevealed.org/search
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
today at 6:34 PM
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.
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.
> 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.
IMHO comparably, cars today look depressing. So soulless, so similar, so boring. White/grey/silver/black, maybe a few boring blue or burgundy.
littlexsparkee
today at 8:20 PM
I 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.
And they are bigger too. Everything is bigger.
gonzalohm
today at 7:18 PM
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
And it's even worse because the colors now could be so good because of modern technology. The potential is so high
>"Hypno-Sex-Ism"
50 years early to the "gooning" trend, I see...
As someone born and raised in san diego since the 70s, this is really nice!
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.
thelonelyborg
today at 8:31 PM
and not a single beach in sight!
burnt-resistor
today at 6:58 PM
Can't forget California smog and haze that varied between yellow, orange, and brown.
annoyingnoob
today at 7:12 PM
And we just can't capture the smell of those vehicles or the smell of gas stations of that time.
Just wait for a mow and blow crew to show up and catch a whiff of that 2 stroke exhaust.
AnimalMuppet
today at 6:51 PM
So many Volkswagen Beetles! The original ones, not the 1990s version.