When the CRA turned down the syndicate’s request for $70 million in property taxes for funding, the Bass group withdrew. American Express ended up holding a $25-million loss and the accumulated property.
Other corporations chose not to remain and benefit from Hollywood’s revitalization. See’s Candy, Thom McCann, Florsheim Shoes, and others moved out after decades on Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood’s two entertainment trade papers, Variety and Hollywood Reporter, moved to Wilshire. Bank of America closed its long-running Hollywood Boulevard branches at Highland and in the Guaranty Building at Ivar Avenue.
Established family business like Millers Stationers closed after fifty years. Millers’s owner said, “We think we were pretty tough to survive. It’s a dirty disgusting boulevard.” Beauty schools, once a mainstay on Hollywood Boulevard, left one by one. Large automobile dealerships like Bob Smith, on a huge portion of Cahuenga Boulevard, moved to other parts of the city.
Many mourned in 1988 when Johnson’s Tick Tock on Cahuenga closed, after fifty-eight years as a family business. Bette Davis ate there during her last years. The founder’s son, who had worked to bring the CRA, felt discouraged about the future.
Swap meets replaced many businesses when owners subdivided storefronts into stalls and rented them independently. Discount Thrift Store opened in the Guaranty Building after Bank of America left.
The boarded Gap in the Markham building just before arson destroyed the structure at Hollywood Boulevard and Cosmos, 1990.
Roos Brothers, 6320 Hollywood Boulevard (demolished), got a wave front in the ‘50s for Lerners Dress Shop. In the ‘80s, it became a swap meet. A 1995 fire gutted the interior.
William Horsley’s historic studio (1913), southwest block of Sunset Boulevard and Gordon Avenue, became a parking lot during the CRA’s tenure.
The Janes House got pushed back on its lot and surrounded with a matching mini-mall, 1986.
The Falcon Fencing Studio, 5524 Hollywood Boulevard, became a Spanish church until Rompage’s, a longtime Hollywood hardware store, relocated to it in 2000 for only four years before moving.
The Jacob Stern/Lasky Barn found a home on Highland Avenue across from the Hollywood Bowl.
With a background in urban planning, City Council rep Mike Woo surprised many by allowing a proliferation of strip malls. In the late ‘80s, Hollywood became inundated with cheap shopping centers, some two-story, with parking lots in front of them. The last Gittelson Brothers Miniature Golf Course (Hollywood Boulevard east of Serrano) disappeared for a mini-mall.
When a developer began demolishing Falcon Studios (5524 Hollywood Boulevard) for a mini-mall, the preservation battle reached the upper levels of city government. Ralph Faulkner had given fencing lessons until his death in 1979 at age ninety-five. Over the years, he had expanded his studio into a complex of five buildings. An inner court had a walkway that Faulkner, borrowing from Sid Grauman, had filled with the handprints and signatures of his famous students: John Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, John Derek, Alexis Smith, Anthony Quinn, Danny Kaye, and others.
The CRA followed none of its own guidelines to save the structure. It took a City Council vote on August 1988 to halt its demolition. Unfortunately, by then, only the front structure on Hollywood Boulevard remained.
The Janes House, a Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Monument, was another object of controversy. Vacant since the last sister, Carrie, died in 1986, the house’s new owner wanted it demolished for a mini-mall. Using CRA incentives, Hollywood Heritage worked to spare the house. In 1987, the structure was pushed back on the lot and restored as a visitor’s center. A poorly executed, Janes-House-themed mall rose in front of it.
Hollywood Heritage also worked to relocate the Jacob Stern/Lasky barn, the catalyst for Paramount Pictures. The barn had sat on the Paramount lot since the ‘20s. At one time, it had served as the studio gymnasium. In the mid-80s, the barn was shuttled to different locations on Vine and Ivar while preservationists disputed the Chamber of Commerce over its future. The barn settled across from the Hollywood Bowl and became the Hollywood Heritage museum.
The CRA had told the City Council that they would set “architectural style and development standards.” City Council Representative Mike Woo never enacted design standards for the historic district.
The Galaxy, with Hollywood’s first multiplex cinema, demonstrated the problem of no design guidelines within a historic district. The Galaxy took the place of the demolished Garden Court Apartments. The vice president of the development company building it served, at the time, as president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. The CRA held the Galaxy up as an example of their progress in Hollywood, although it did not fund the project.
The Galaxy ran into many problems during its construction. CRA obstructions and delays ran the building’s cost up by $10 million. For years, the site remained a hole in the ground as community volunteers and neighbors disputed the liquor license for the nightclub and worked to lessen the garishness of a design that boasted Hollywood’s first outdoor escalator.
When the Galaxy opened in 1991, at a reported cost of $48 million, it was an economic disaster. Its lower level, an uninspired food court, remained resolutely devoid of customers. The nightclub in it, the Hollywood Yacht Club, folded after two months in 1993, defaulting on its fifteen-year lease. (The Knitting Factory nightclub opened in the site eight years later.) A street-level video store was the last major tenant to quit when Citicorp took over the bankrupt Galaxy in 1995. The multiplex theaters would close in 2002.
After the Galaxy opened, one by one, Hollywood Boulevard’s historic movie theaters east of Highland closed: The Vogue, the Hollywood, the World (Mar-cal), and the Iris Theater (the Fox since a 1969 remodeling). Pacific Theaters divided its Warner’s Hollywood movie palace into a multiplex. The balcony became two additional theaters with less-than-ideal optics. Pacific Warners closed the theater shortly after.
United Artists wanted to build a high-end retail development around the Egyptian Theater. (In 1978, UA had built two small mini-theaters next to the Egyptian.) When city authorities insisted that the project include low-income housing, UA closed the historic theater. The company considered selling the Egyptian to a buyer who wanted to convert it into a swap meet. The CRA bought the theater for $1.7 million, but left it vacant for years.
The Warner Brothers’ Theater became another of Hollywood Boulevard’s ghost movie theaters in the ‘90s.
The Iris Theater became the Fox Theater in 1965. Closed in the early ‘80s, it remained unused for nearly three decades.
The Galaxy and its multiplex of theaters.
Hollywood Beverly Christian Church lost its sanctuary in the 1987 Whittier earthquake.
Vine Street’s Federal Building/ Ontra Cafeteria, 1719 Vine Street, became a parking lot after arsonous fire on March 12, 1990.
Shades of blight became more apparent after the CRA’s arrival. Owners were reluctant to fix up their property with eminent domain in force.
The CRA had told the City Council that they would require a review of any proposed demolition and postpone it for up to a year to investigate alternative solutions. The catch was historical significance. As with blight, it was subjective. An early Hollywood apartment building on Orchid Avenue came down for CRA-sponsored housing even though the owner had paid to fix the structure before its demolition. The Shelton Apartments on Wilcox came down for higher-density apartments. A former tenant reported drug dealers working in the Shelton during demolition.
When the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety cited half of the structures in the Historic District for seismic upgrading, the CRA failed to mount the massive earthquake retrofitting that it had budgeted.
The Hollywood Beverly Christian Church at Hollywood and Gramercy had wanted to tear down its sanctuary since 1983 to avoid costly seismic retrofitting. The 1987 Whittier earthquake destroyed it for them. President Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman had attended regularly when Reagan’s mother was an active member. Re
agan still sent a monthly membership check. Once wealthy, the church was too poor to rebuild and the congregation moved into an auditorium.
Blight in the form of accidental and arsonous fires took many structures. Consciously or not, these burnings brought demolition, sometimes years later, that cleared land for new development. Fire destroyed the Markham Building at Cosmo Street in the early ‘80s. The site stood as an empty pit for ten years. The Filmarte Theater on Vine Street, with its basement renovated into a successful restaurant, Au Petit Café, also disappeared in fire, as did a Blondeau Building at Hollywood and Cahuenga, once home to Al Levy’s Café. Two vintage Hollywood movie theaters, the Apollo and the Century (formerly the Hunley), left vacant lots after fire hit both of them. Only a few, such as the Las Palmas Theater, were restored after burning.
Hollywood and Vine saw most of its charming small structures destroyed by arson during the CRA’s first decade.
The Federal Building on Vine Street (Ontra Cafeteria and Hollywood’s post office during the silent era) went first. The L.A. Department of Building and Safety had permanently vacated it in 1988, declaring it unsafe without seismic upgrading. The owner wanted the building down. Preservationists tried to list the structure as a Los Angeles Cultural Landmark. On an inspection of the interior, the Cultural Heritage group was one step behind the night people who lived there. An architectural historian hired by the developer disputed the structure’s historical significance, dismissing it architecturally. In 1989, the CRA declared that the building had no special significance to the area. In March 1990, after a spectacular two-hour fire, the site became a parking lot.
The 1932 French Chateau commercial building on the adjacent corner of Hollywood and Vine went next. After the Nederlander Organization evicted the popular Gilbert’s Books, night people took over the building. Fire destroyed it. Nederlander then leased the site as a parking lot.
An Armenian restaurant had opened and closed in the vacant Vine Street Brown Derby when, in 1987, a fire damaged its kitchen and main room. Only half the structure remained, the part that housed the bar and corporate offices of the Derby (once the offices of Cecil B. DeMille). The owners, local developers George Ullman and Steve Worchell, had helped bring the CRA to Hollywood. They tried to demolish the place twice without permits. Twice preservationists got the CRA to stop them. A ‘For Sale’ sign went on the remains. The owners asked $3 million for it.
(Meanwhile in the late 1980’s, the owner of the Brown Derby’s trademark, Walter Scharfe, brought the restaurant to the northwest corner of Hollywood and Vine (formerly Coco Tree/Melody Lane/Hody’s).
Initially, the CRA said it would “encourage the involvement and participation of local citizens and organizations” in Hollywood’s redevelopment. Instead, citizens felt that the agency intentionally froze them out which became part of David Morgan’s lawsuit.
The law required CRAs to have a publicly elected board of local citizens, a Project Area Committee (PAC). The PAC was to protect residents and small businesses against relocation as well as guide the CRA. Only a two-thirds vote of the City Council could override a PAC’s vote against adoption of a redevelopment project.
Most residents were unaware of the initial 1983 PAC election. The members of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, most living outside the district, came to the election in large numbers and dominated the outcome. By statute, residents should have controlled the PAC. In reality, they made up only 32 percent of the board.
At the subsequent public election of members, local citizens wised up and gained control of the PAC, where they used it as a forum for complaints about redevelopment. After six months, in 1989, City Council Representative Woo, in a fit of pique, had the City Council de-recognize the committee. He said the citizen members were too contentious and displayed “wacky behavior.” Woo then personally appointed a new thirty-five-member panel as a Community Advisory Committee (CAC).
The French Chateau at 6264 Hollywood Boulevard, east of the Taft Building, was demolished for a parking lot after an arsonous fire.
The interior of the Vine Street Derby’s dining room after an arsonous fire.
Disney remade the El Capitan into a successful showcase theater.
The Church of Scientology bought up many Hollywood landmarks, including the former Christie Hotel, at southwest Hollywood Boulevard and McCadden Avenue.
Milt Larsen turned a City of Homes residence into the Magic Castle.
Hollywood Boulevard’s Congregational Church briefly became the home to the Screen Actors Guild. It was later bought by the Church of Scientology.
Members of the Hollywood PAC lost a court battle with Los Angeles over the legality of the move. The judge revealed his astonishment “at the city’s preference for appointed, over elected, committee members.” A letter to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner made the accusation, “Most of Woo’s appointees were either trying to get contracts from the CRA … or to get some form of city funding for their causes.” The elected PAC continued to meet unofficially for the next sixteen years, although the CRA and the City Council forbade their employees to attend the meetings.
Successful acts of preservation and revitalization often came independently. Bally Total Fitness leased the Legion Stadium on El Centro, renovating the structure into a successful fitness center. The Hollywood Wax Museum opened beneath the former Embassy Club. Ripley’s Believe It or Not refurbished the Bank of America at Hollywood and Highland into an “Odditorium.” The Hollywood Theater found reuse as the Guinness World Records Museum.
When Hollywood Congregational Church on Hollywood Boulevard at Sycamore closed, community activists talked Screen Actors Guild into making the church its headquarters.
The Church of Scientology became a leader in local preservation. In a real-estate-accumulation drive that started with founder L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, Scientologists bought and rehabilitated the Hotel Christie at Hollywood and McCadden in 1982. Scientologists also made centers out of the former Cedars Sinai at Fountain Avenue near Vermont and the Chateau Elysée on Franklin, that became a Celebrity Center. In 1988, the church bought the Guaranty Building at Ivar. The organization did an extensive upgrading, making it their international headquarters.
The Walt Disney Company, in conjunction with Pacific Theaters, planned to remodel the El Capitan at Orchid into twin movie theaters. (The theater’s original name had returned to it.) During demolition of the 1942 interior, the original plaster ceilings and walls appeared intact. Hollywood preservationist Robert Nudelman persuaded Disney to change plans and restore the theater into a Disney showcase. The El Capitan’s success inspired Disney to do the same with the New Amsterdam Theater in New York, bringing a Times Square renaissance. Disney would also later require the restoration of the Hollywood Pantages for The Lion King.
RAILROAD TO NOHO
After Los Angeles dismantled its extensive rail system in the early 1950s, the city’s public transportation relied on busses in a huge regional system. In 1963, a Swiss company offered to build a monorail at their expense above the Hollywood Freeway. C.E. Toberman had also proposed a monorail on either side of the freeway at the time. The monorail never appeared.
In the early 1970s, County Supervisor Baxter Ward envisioned a 232-mile system of high-speed trains and trolleys running on freeways and flood control channels. Before leaving office, he put a sales tax increase on the ballot to fund its construction. Voters approved the tax in 1976. One cent of every dollar spent in taxable goods went to the MTA.
Two Southern California transit authorities struggled to control that tax money. They eventually merged in the early 1990s as Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to share the pot.
A public transit plan emerged in 1978 after passing through the hands of the CRA and politicians, including California State Senator David Roberti. Instead of following freeways and flood control channels as Baxter Ward had envisioned, the plan, in a Los Angeles tradition, connected the dots of real estate interests. Its rail wen
t from CRA project to CRA project.
Riding on the back of the transportation agency, the CRA made the MTA’s proposed Red Line endpoint Los Angeles’s first redevelopment project in the San Fernando Valley. A 740-acre site in North Hollywood, it was originally a town called Lankershim founded by J.B. Lankershim, an original promoter of the San Fernando Valley. The area retained the faint aura of a Western town before redevelopment authorities removed vintage blocks of thrift stores and bookshops for a planned arts district, coining the nickname “Noho” for the area. Here, the CRA funded a major office complex and theater for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, an organization that had its roots in Hollywood.
The Red Line route originally included an elevated train through Hollywood. Councilman Woo worked to put it underground, guaranteeing far more expense and disruption. The planned path for the subway brought it to Hollywood from Wilshire Boulevard by way of Fairfax Avenue. Plans called for the demolition of the Deco building at the southeast corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga for the Hollywood Boulevard station. This plan changed in the mid-1980s when an explosion of underground methane gas damaged retail buildings at Fairfax and Third Street. The Red Line’s new path ran eighteen miles from downtown along Wilshire, up Vermont to Hollywood Boulevard and then to the San Fernando Valley.
Hollywood Boulevard gets decked for a subway at Highland Avenue, 1993.
Subway decking at Hollywood Boulevard looking toward Vine Street, 1993.
The Story of Hollywood Page 35
