The St. Francis Apartment Hotel, 5533 Hollywood Boulevard, 1925.
The Janes sisters became recluses in their home on the Walk of Fame, 1975.
Hollywood Boulevard looking west from Las Palmas Avenue, 1968.
Gay Pride participants parade down Hollywood Blvd. at Las Palmas Avenue, 1970.
THE SEVENTIES
The tourists who came to Hollywood each year did not stay very long. Universal with its new studio tours became the area’s major draw. For local residents, Westwood became a nicer place to see movies. In 1970, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce settled for “An Entertainment Experience” as Hollywood’s slogan. The Chamber’s public relations rep said, “We had to tone down the image a bit.”
In 1972, Columbia Pictures, the last major movie studio within walking distance of Hollywood and Vine, moved out of Hollywood. The studio had filmed Funny Girl on the Sunset and Gower lot in 1968. Columbia relocated to Burbank in a brief co-venture with Warner Bros. By this time, studios shot movies in faraway locations. The soundstages of the former Columbia lot became an indoor tennis club until ABC took them over for soap operas.
After the Hollywood Palace folded in the fall of 1969, Merv Griffin brought his New York-based syndicated talk show to the theater. Griffin later moved south on Vine Street to the combined Hollywood Recreation Building and Rooftop Ballroom, once Tom Breneman’s.
The Emmy Awards held ceremonies in the Pantages Theater during the ‘70s.
When Barker Brothers closed its furniture store in 1969, the original El Capitan building had no retail tenant. C.E. Toberman unsuccessfully tried to establish a Hollywood museum in it.
Toberman’s plans for a new Hollywood Hotel on Highland never developed. He settled for a Holiday Inn in 1970. After his wife died that year, he retired as a community leader. Anyone interested in talking with him could usually find him at the Hamburger Hamlet at Hollywood Boulevard at Orange Avenue.
Aline Barnsdall’s dream for an art center came true after her death. The Junior Art Center opened in 1967; its municipal gallery opened in 1970.
Hollywood’s foreign-born population radically changed the face of the area as waves of immigrants arrived from 1970 on. Hollywood High served a student body that spoke dozens of languages. Hollywood’s poverty level grew at double the rate as the rest of the city.
Hollywood had America’s first Thai restaurants in 1970. Thai restaurants melded neatly with the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle evolving on the street. Perfect tenants for vintage buildings, they had cheap prices, good food, and late hours.
Hollywood Boulevard retailers began closing early because of a lack of customers. A few stores moved to the new shopping malls in North Hollywood and Glendale. Many Hollywood stores fell into hippie disarray. T-shirt sales were surprisingly good. Craft and head shops became a definable part of the street. The Hollywood and Las Palmas intersection smelled of incense.
Jesus and Krishna disciples hustled pedestrians. Shady characters lurked in doorways or hung out with their motorcycles. Gangs and lowriders cruised on weekend nights, when cars crept down Hollywood Boulevard bumper-to-bumper. On a Saturday night, it often took an hour to go from Gower Street to La Brea Avenue. Gangs threw bottles at each other. The crowd on the sidewalk smoked joints and drank beer.
L.A.’s first Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade marched down Hollywood Boulevard on June 28, 1970, heading east from McCadden Place to Vine Street. The number of participants was small, but 35,000 spectators came to watch. Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis fumed publicly about the parade, giving it lots of free publicity. The parade later became a West Hollywood tradition.
Sex merchants arrived with window displays of erotic toys and clothing. Massage parlors dotted the commercial district. A police officer told a reporter that Hollywood had more open pornography and prostitution than Tijuana.
The Cave Theatre in the former Sardi’s (left) near Hollywood and Vine, 1994.
Pornography shop at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, 1969.
Long a pick-up place for the gamut of sexual preferences, Hollywood became an internationally known, around-the-clock prostitution and drug center. Down-and-out actress Barbara Payton turned five-dollar tricks on Hollywood Boulevard until she committed suicide in her Cheremoya Avenue apartment. Female prostitutes worked Sunset Boulevard. Gay hustlers and drug dealers made the Gold Cup restaurant (southwest Hollywood and Las Palmas) their hangout. Hustlers waited for customers on the steps of the Baptist Church at Selma and Las Palmas. In 1968, silent star Ramon Novarro brought two Hollywood Boulevard hustlers to his Laurel Canyon home, where they beat him to death.
Hanging out outside the Gold Cup, southwest corner Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue.
The Ivar Theatre on Ivar Avenue, 1985.
The Ivar Theatre with its new facade in 2002.
Hollywood’s crime rate was double that of the rest of Los Angeles. Only Los Angeles International Airport reported more crime. Employees and customers in the sex businesses were battered and robbed. The Howard Johnson’s operating in the former Hody’s at Hollywood and Vine removed outdoor pay phones because of the heavy drug traffic. Pay phones at Rexall across the street disappeared for the same reason.
The Apollo and the Newsview Theaters joined the chain of X-rated Pussycat Theaters. The Vista and the Hunley (renamed the Century) showed gay porn. The Century featured male strippers and porn stars between screenings.
The Ivar Theater had featured off-Broadway hits like Dames at Sea and the Andrews Sisters in Over Here. By the mid-’70s, the Ivar succumbed to X-rated films and live nude dancers. Serial rapist and killer Richard Ramirez, “The Night Stalker,” was rumored to have been a frequent customer.
Hippie pads degenerated into drug dens. Castle Argyle became a notorious drug center in the late ‘60s with heroin users predominating as tenants. The building sold in 1971 for close to its construction cost fifty years earlier.
The first new movie theater built on Hollywood Boulevard in thirty years came in the ‘70s. A porno duplex west of the Florentine Gardens, its giant X (for X-rated) sign stood at the district’s east entrance.
In 1966, Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose in his 8825 Hollywood Boulevard home. Four years later, Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin and morphine in her room at the hotel at 7047 Franklin, known for its rock ‘n’ roll clientele.
Former movie star Aldo Ray lived in a second-story office of Hollywood Boulevard’s Gittelson Building, west of Wilcox. Ray had made movies for Columbia until his career ended.
Ed Wood, very much down on his luck, rented an apartment with his wife in the Lido at Wilcox and Yucca, where a drag queen was beaten to death in the hall. The woman upstairs rented her very young daughter to pornographers. The building next door was even worse. Wood was robbed regularly on his trips to the Pla-Boy Liquor across the street. After the sheriff evicted the couple for not paying rent, Ed Wood died in 1978 in a house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.
In the 1970s, a psychology professor, promoting a new psychotherapy, encouraged his clients to buy homes between Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard west of La Brea Ave. The Center for Feeling Therapy took root. Three hundred and fifty people lived in forty houses scattered around the area. Neighbors called the cult “the Screamers” as therapists encouraged their clients to yell out their feelings. Counseling also encouraged abortions, sex with other members, beatings, and low-paying jobs at the center’s companies. The cult went bust in the ‘80s.
One block west of the Chinese Theater, the Garden Court Apartments stood in seedy disrepair. During WWII, a dishonest manager had sold the original furniture, rugs, and even pieces of the building. Much of the woodwork and ceilings had been painted over. In 1970, actor Randy Quaid rented a suite. The oldest resident then was Stella Turk, wife of the composer of I’ll Get By and Mean to Me. At age 92, she had lived there from the day it opened. Dance schools used the basement ballroom where Juliet Prowse, Cyd Charise, Jane Fonda, and Mary Tyler Moore danced regular
ly.
The Garden Court’s owner hoped to see the building cleaned up along with the rest of Hollywood Boulevard. Both, he felt, had historic value. He planned a museum, the Hollywood Hall of Fame, co-sponsored by Debbie Reynolds with her large collection of movie memorabilia. A bank eventually seized the once-stately building, dashing the owner’s plans. In 1974, the building, with its Titan figures on the exterior, became the Lucky 7 Motel. Rooms chopped from larger suites cost seven dollars.
The former DeLongpre and Blondeau block of Hollywood Boulevard in 1979. The two center buildings, whose original facades had been altered, would disappear. Pacific Theaters would soon shut down the former Warners Theater.
Make-up giant Max Factor sold out in 1975 to Norton Simon, Inc. Max Factor, second to Revlon, had its biggest markets in Japan and the United Kingdom. Customers still sampled and bought makeup at the Highland salon.
Arthur Murray Dance Studios, next to the Roosevelt Hotel, closed for lack of customers. After Edna Earle shut the Fog Cutters on La Brea, the building had a short life as a gay disco before the structure burned and was demolished. Next door to it, the Victorian farmhouse in front of the Troupers auditorium disappeared when Grant Parking removed it for more parking.
Ted Mann added Grauman’s Chinese to his theater chain and replaced Grauman’s name with his own to some controversy. He built two smaller theaters east of the Chinese.
At the Vine Street Brown Derby, the last Derby in the chain, the aura of old Hollywood now had the taint of a has-been. James Cagney, Raquel Welch, Rock Hudson, and Milton Berle still dropped in for dinner. ABC President Elton Rule gave Aaron Spelling an exclusive television deal over lunch. Dave Kaufman, who wrote about TV industry for Daily Variety, walked to the Derby every day for lunch to gather information. Robert Cobb ran the business from his second-floor offices until he died in 1970. His wife, Sally, took over the job of manager. In 1975, she happily sold out to Walter Scharfe. Without the Cobbs, the Derby lost its Hollywood high style.
In 1976, Lawrence Welk ended a fifteen-year run at the Palladium. A block west, Wallichs Music City shut its doors in 1979. At Hollywood and Vine, Broadway-Hollywood closed, delivering a blow to the district as a retail center. (Twenty years later the Broadway chain would disappear in a merger with Macy’s.) Up Vine Street, the Ontra Cafeteria closed. A short-lived drag revue opened in the building in 1979.
Room at the Top (later Simply Blues) in the Sunset and Vine tower and, two blocks north, Vine Street Bar and Grill had long runs playing jazz. Musician Shelly Man ran Shelly’s Mann Hole on Cahuenga. The Pilgrimage Theater, renamed after County Supervisor John Anson Ford in 1965, hosted Sunday afternoon jazz festivals. A lawsuit over the separation of church and state had stopped county funding of the Pilgrimage Play.
The sustaining network of people that had built the district slowly disappeared. Trademarks that had served Hollywood went with them. Store by store, restaurant by restaurant, depending on how long individual owners put up with the changing street, businesses left or disappeared. The new retailers who replaced them were more apt to run convenience stores.
Private improvement to the district, however, never stopped. In 1962, Milt Larsen turned a City of Homes estate on Franklin into the renowned Magic Castle. The Florentine Gardens found new life as a disco. In 1978, Hollywood Palace Theater on Vine Street became a disco. The former Columbia lot returned as Pick/Vanoff Sunset Gower Studios, a busy independent production center along with the former Earl Carroll Theater.
The Pantages opened as a legitimate theater in 1977. Live productions, mostly touring road shows, broke Los Angeles’s box office records. When Disney’s live musical The Lion King opened in Hollywood October 2000, many hoped that the show would halt Hollywood’s decline.
Bookshops continued to prosper. A Pickwick Bookstore employee recalled that at the time, “Orson Welles would come in and Peter Finch.” So would Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, and Ray Bradbury. Cherokee Books, another popular store, specialized in rare and hard-to-find books. Collector’s Books, downstairs in the former Montmartre Building, was the place to go for science fiction and comic books. (Above Collector’s, Lee Strasberg Actors’ Studio used the former Montmartre Café for actors’ workshops.)
While property values in other parts of the city zoomed upward, Hollywood’s declined. By 1976, commercial property sold at the same price, or less, that it had thirty years earlier.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the district’s City Council Representative found themselves in the enviable position of having to fix Hollywood. Councilmember Peggy Stevenson called it “35 years of neglect” that had included her husband’s long run on the City Council. Joined by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, Stevenson announced Hollywood’s comeback cleanup, beginning with a campaign to remove the massage parlors on Western Avenue.
The Los Angeles Police, admittedly understaffed, started a campaign to eliminate the area’s prostitutes in 1977. State agents joined them, cracking down on the twenty-five Hollywood bars that ranged, according to a Hollywood Police Division captain, “from those which openly cater to sexual deviants to those which attract so-called ‘leather freaks’ and sadomasochists.”
In 1977, author Carolyn See wrote in Los Angeles Magazine, “Now Hollywood Boulevard is Hell, populated by addicts and transvestites in crushed velvet so used the nap has worn off.” Prostitutes and hustlers claimed established restaurants like the Copper Penny and the House of Pancakes, both on Sunset Boulevard. Coffee Dan’s, relocated on Hollywood near Highland Avenue, was a popular transvestite hangout.
Local grittiness made some cultural contributions. A dank, six-room basement at Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Avenue served as a rock rehearsal space, nightclub, and makeshift hotel. As the Masque, it hosted the Go-Go’s, X, the Weirdos, the Germs, the Screamers, and F-word. The place, usually jammed with people, had terrible acoustics, filthy toilets and graffiti-covered walls. It also had no liquor license, no occupancy permit, and zero safety provisions. The fire marshals closed it in December 1977.
In 1977, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce declared another Hollywood clean-up drive a failure. When October 1979 brought another attempt, the Los Angeles Times opined, “Hollywood either is going to be revitalized or going to become a disgrace.”
Interior of Pickwick Books, Hollywood Boulevard and McCadden Avenue. In 1974, Pickwick had the biggest paperback business in the world.
Hollywood Boulevard looking east from Highland in 1958. Many of these businesses and their neon signs went dark beginning in 1980.
The then-new Hollywood Branch Public Library on Ivar Avenue, 1938.
The burned interior of the Hollywood library, 1983.
The Hollywood Branch Public Library replacement by architect Frank Gehry, 1623 Ivar Avenue, 1990.
DARKER DAYS
Ronald Reagan’s presidency brought prosperity to many. That prosperity, however, did not transfer to the district of Hollywood. Social Service organizations reported a steady increase in homeless transients and indigent families. Teenage runaways flocked to Hollywood with the standard dreams of glory. Outpatients increased at Hollywood Mental Clinic. Many had no permanent homes.
In 1980, the LAPD created another task force to rid Hollywood of prostitution. As AIDS surfaced, Hollywood had a venereal disease rate two-and-a-half times that of the City of Los Angeles. Police raided the former I. Magnin’s on Ivar, that had become a men-only bathhouse. They made no arrests.
In 1980, a court order halted the Gold Cup Restaurant’s heavy drug traffic. Two years later, a narcotics suit closed the restaurant for good. It became a tattoo parlor.
Hollywood’s murder rate nearly doubled from 1980 to 1981. Arrests for narcotics more than doubled. The first gang-related murder on Hollywood Boulevard occurred March 1981; a sixteen-year-old was shot dead after flashing his knife to the occupants of a cruising car.
Many moaned over the changes. A transvestite told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “There used to
be a lotta drag queens down here who were like my mothers … there’s no unity any more. It’s tense now.” Prostitutes headed to the valley. High-class call girls fled to Beverly Hills and West L.A. Gay hustlers moved to Santa Monica Boulevard.
Following the examples of Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley’s Van Nuys Boulevard, the city shut Hollywood Boulevard down on weekend nights beginning in 1981. It was the only way to stop Saturday-night cruising.
On the southeast corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas (across from the Gold Cup), owner Carmen Miceli waged a war against his own tenant, a Jack in the Box franchise. Miceli ran a popular, self-named Italian restaurant down Las Palmas Avenue. (One of the oldest family-owned restaurants in the area, it is notable for its interiors salvaged from the Hollywood Pig ‘n’ Whistle.) Miceli hated the booths in Jack in the Box that filled with pimps, prostitutes, and dope dealers. He personally called Ralston Purina in St. Louis and told them to close the restaurant. Miceli opened his own short-lived restaurant on the site, Hollywood Fastfood Stage. White Castle, with their miniburgers opened there next, lasting a year and a half.
Writer Michael Fessier visited Hollywood Boulevard for a March 1982 article in the now-defunct California Magazine. Fessier walked the street with two cops and met a few of the local characters. General Hershey Bar paraded in full dress uniform with plastic airplanes glued on his shoulders like epaulets and a festoon of ribbons on his chest. The button lady, swaddled in a shawl and a babushka, adorned herself from head to toe with metallic advertising buttons. Fessier watched the police deal with tourists. “They come up, brows knit in disappointment and confusion, asking directions to things they’ll never find,” he wrote.
The Security Pacific National Bank Building at Hollywood and Cahuenga sat vacant except for the downstairs bank. Security Pacific no longer owned the building; a real estate consortium did. The consortium had evicted the tenants for a renovation that stalled. Fessier went inside and took the elevator to explore the building. Vandals had sacked the building, tearing doors off their hinges. Fessier wrote “the damage had been done by a homeless, shadowy tribe known along the Boulevard as the ‘night people.’”
The Story of Hollywood Page 33
