What street/City did you cruise in High School?

The City of Hopkins put a stop to cruising Main Street pretty quickly. I was there last weekend for theaforementioned class reunion and you can still see how they changed the streets to put major obstacles at every corner.

 

1st and 2nd streets then to Kings drive-in. San Jose.

 

They sure did. It was fun while it lasted, and I really don’t recall any harm from it either. Our folks never raced in town, we always went out to what is now part of highway 169 (old county 18).

John

 

Hello,

We had a ton of streets that ran North to South to the ocean in Long Beach. So, hot rod guys/girls from far inland near South Gate/Downey/Paramount/Bellflower could drive straight through Long Beach/Bixby Knolls area on their way to the beach and long shoreline.

One of the most used streets was Long Beach Boulevard. It was packed with all sorts of car dealers, for several miles from the ocean to Bixby Knolls. (About 8 miles inland) Driving by our old high school grounds (2 miles from the ocean) on the next big street over, was part of the fun in cruising to downtown, the Pike, the beaches, Rainbow Pier and of course, Belmont Shore.

As we continued from the ocean back into the Bixby Knolls area, that is where we saw the places where most of our new cars and old used cars were purchased back then. Each new car dealer had a large used car lot, with some specialty smaller dealers handling non factory models. But the cruise down this street was a lot of fun.

The street was originally called American Avenue. Our dad used to take us on a drive from our Westside house to go look for new cars every fall, on American Avenue. But, in 1958, the local city councilmen made the change to Long Beach Boulevard to better suit the main street associated to the City of Long Beach.

It was a cruising street with plenty of huge glass store fronts to check out your cruiser/hot rod’s reflections. There were plenty of restaurants, paint stores and even a modern furniture store that had the longest huge glass window row for the best reflection of us cruising down the street. It was almost a block long building with huge glass panes from one end to the other. The furniture, décor, and products were outstanding.
Frank Bros.

Jnaki

As part of the cruising in Bixby Knolls, this Long Beach Boulevard was one of the main streets that led into the western portion of the area. The other was Atlantic Avenue which was one big street to the East running parallel to Long Beach Boulevard from the ocean to far inland, beyond Bixby Knolls.

Atlantic Avenue had Grissinger’s Drive-In Restaurant and Long Beach Boulevard had Ken’s Burgers and a family dining restaurant. Both places were packed on Fridays and Saturdays. Cruising scene took in both places, as each place had a large parking lot for all of the hot rods/cruisers and families to come for the food and atmosphere.

The parking lots were where the “action” took place in both places. So, both major streets running from the ocean back to Bixby Knolls were the two main streets that had most of the teenage traffic. It was the same on our daily drives to high school. Those two were the feeders to the high school parking area and campus.

Those streets were the cruising streets. But, if any performance action was to happen, there was always Cherry Avenue located between two dark, quiet cemeteries. Cherry Avenue was also a street that went from the ocean to the city of Artesia.

It was a street for straight through driving, but, not a daily cruising road. Cherry Avenue continued inland as Garfield Avenue and several name changes until the city at the base of the local mountains popped up, Altadena. That was one way to get to Pasadena and the local mountains for us.