Google Launches LA Street View, but It's a Bit of a Letdown

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — As noted in the Times this morning, Google’s now rolled out its Street View imagery for Los Angeles, including Downtown. The shots are taken by Immersive Media, and are far less high-resolution than Google’s own work in Mountain View, CA. The article gets into all the typical overblown fears about privacy, but doesn’t address something far more important: this imagery is old.

The Hanover tower at 717 W. Olympic, now topped out, is shown as a hole in the ground. The Spring street contraflow lane, which went out of service June 18, 2006, is still there.

In fact, referencing posts here on blogdowntown against views on the street, I can pretty confidently say that most of the Downtown imagery was shot in the second half of January, 2006. It’s likely that the shots were taken over the course of a few days or a week, but that’s the basic timeline.

First, on Wilshire we can see set dressing for Fast and the Furious 3, which I posted about on January 20, 2006. On the other side of Downtown it’s clear that the shots were taken after January 23rd, when there was a fire at the old Produce Market (visible fire damage). A single view, likely picked up later, shows construction at the Roosevelt, while other views don’t include the scaffolding that went up in the last week of January.

Who knew that blogdowntown could be used for dating imagery?