In Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) – starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert -- the characters spend a night together pretending to be husband and wife. They stay in an auto court purportedly somewhere on the road from Florida to New York.
Capra filmed a real auto court on Ventura Boulevard in the valley for this movie. The buildings in the film look a lot like the buildings that used to be in the Silver Lake Auto court. Capra got his start in movies down the street from the Silver Lake Auto Court, as a gag writer for the Sennett Studio.
Auto courts preceded motels; that is, they were intended as overnight lodgings for motorists, and they began in the early 1920s.
Los Angeles had other courts, a few of which still exist, that gathered around an open area instead of around a parking lot, that were intended for longer tenancies. The New Hampshire Court, for instance, gone now for many years, housed extras and film doubles for the Griffith silent movie studio, which was approximately where the Vista Vintage Movie Theater is now.
The present strip mall on Glendale Boulevard where Whole Foods will occupy the building that is now a Ralphs supermarket superseded the Silver Lake Auto Court in 1966. Before the Auto Court was built, in about 1920, the location had been Tom Mix's film village "Mixville."
The city phone book for 1961 shows phone connections for many of the tenants at the Silver Lake Auto Court, -- which began as a stopping over place not far from Route 66 – indicating the Auto Court had become a permanent residence for the people who lived there.
The post card view of the Silver Lake Auto Court is idealized or stylized, so somewhat inaccurate. The big street that shows up at the back of the card is India Street. There is a small grocery store with an awning and a tire store.
From the one car in the photograph view of the Silver Lake Auto Court, the photograph may be a little earlier.
At the back of the photograph of the Auto Court is a building comprised of three units or three houses that seem to be built almost on top of each other. That building is still behind the shopping mall. If you go to that structure, you’ll be able to see that the Auto Court only took up one end of the former Mixville movie ranch.
The 1938 photograph of Lillian Lowney, general Secretary of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, with her first car – a used 1936 Pontiac Master Six Coupe -- shows one of the cabins up close. (Interestingly, she wrote Silverlake as one word.)
