a bit of music based upon the classic theme of perhaps the greatest movie ever made depicting Los Angeles of the early 1900s, Chinatown, would fit many of the images throughout this thread....
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^ I think of that sound score when looking at the old b/w photos of dt taken from the north, showing a rather singular city hall & nearby large gas storage silos, called gasometers, now long gone.....when the center of old LA was sort of bluesy, still a wild west, sad but also full of promise, with both realized & lost dreams too.
1950s, early 1960s LA....when its major industry of moviemaking was still quaint, homespun, more localized...before runaway film production had kicked in....can be seen in this vid. dtla from around 1962 is shown at 2:30. The 110 fwy & other fwys in central LA are featured, with a view of the old atlantic richfield bldg & the now demolished statler hilton hotel off to the side....which decades later would become the wilshire grand hotel, only to be torn down, & now the site of what is being billed as the tallest skyscraper in LA. One can also see the union oil bldg & the still rather new signal oil bldg, now the 1010 wilshire bldg, since converted into an extended stay luxury apt bldg.
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another connection to older LA was that such movies were filmed in cinemascope & played at the Cinerama dome in hollwyood.