Roll through LA’s past in these awesome roadside architecture photos

The outstanding, mostly bygone roadside architecture of Los Angeles and beyond lives on today in the thousands of photos taken by John Margolies beginning in the 1970s.

Some of his most memorable photographs surfaced Monday, when the long-running and influential blog Kottke posted about the collection of Margolies’s photos that are publicly available through the Library of Congress.

The one-time editor at Architectural Record magazine and program director at the Architectural League of New York had a great eye, capturing some of Los Angeles’s best programmatic architecture—the Tail O’ the Pup hot dog stand, Long Beach’s Hot Cha teapot-shaped structure, the famed La Puente Donut Hole—as well as motels, gas stations, tourist traps, and storefronts.

As the New York Times noted in its 2016 obituary for the photographer, many of Margolies’s subjects have since been demolished. In Los Angeles, quite a few of the buildings remain but look very different than they did in these vibrant ’70s snapshots.

Below, we’ve selected some of our favorite images from the series. You can view the rest here.

• The weird and wonderful American roadtrip with John Margolies [Kottke]
• John Margolies, Photographer of Quirky Roadside Architecture, Dies at 76 [Curbed]
• The weird roadside architecture of Los Angeles [Curbed LA]