The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  When the subway tunnel collapsed under the Historic District, Hollywood Boulevard at Whitley Avenue took the brunt of the damage, 1994.

  The southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle came down for the Vine Street subway station after arsonists trashed it, 1993.

  The Hollywood and Vine station at Argyle under construction. Strothers Mortuary is being demolished in the background, 1994.

  As the subway slowly burrowed its way west along Wilshire during the late 1980s, costs escalated. Once out of office, Baxter Ward deeply regretted starting the tax funding. Ward wrote in 1988, “I can’t believe we’ve wasted these years and hundreds of millions of dollars. I see a collapse of the whole effort.” By the time the tunneling headed toward Hollywood, critics were calling L.A.’s Red Line a national disgrace and a boondoggle. With the federal government adding funds, the cost eventually averaged $300 million a mile.

  Subway construction began on Hollywood Boulevard at the foot of Barnsdall Park. The owner of a ‘50s car wash on the site happily sold. At Western Avenue, an abandoned 1960s Bank of America disappeared for a subway station.

  At the southeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle, Stella Adler, a noted drama coach from a famous acting family, gave lessons until her death in 1992. Though her theater (originally an automobile dealership) continued, the MTA took the parcel by eminent domain from the Nederlander Organization. Nederlander fought the seizure, but ultimately settled. A series of night-people fires trashed the vacated building just in time for its 1993 demolition. On the site, the MTA anticipated a high-rise in an undetermined future codevelopment.

  After the Stella Adler Academy lost their home, the group received a $250,000 forgivable CRA loan to relocate in the former Embassy Club near Highland. Ten percent of their loan was forgiven annually. (The CRA doled the relocation funds out to those who complained vociferously or who had connections.)

  Subway construction despoiled Hollywood’s already tarnished reputation. Local merchants expressed terror at the long construction period. Lawsuits, many from closed businesses along Wilshire, already haunted the project. Some of the biggest landowners, boosters of revitalization, fought the MTA’s tax assessment ($10.45 per square foot) around the subway stations. Workers uprooted sections of the Walk of Fame, sending the stars of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and dozens of others to a temperature-controlled warehouse in East L.A.

  Tunneling beneath Hollywood Boulevard halted for eight months after workers struck an underground river at Edgemont. Though the agency claimed that geological borings had failed to detect the water, local children, contractors and gardeners for nearly a century had encountered it when digging deep holes in Hollywood ground. Since the subway passed below the water table at Edgemont, engineers installed over two hundred pumps to remove the steady flow of 350 gallons of water per minute.

  A giant mural of Angelyne, on the side of the Plaza Hotel, peeks down Vine Street. Angelyne became famous for her self-financed billboards. She drove through Hollywood regularly in her pink Corvette. Angelyne told an interviewer, “I feel like I’m a pioneer of glamour in Hollywood.”

  In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts played a hooker who lived at 1738 North Las Palmas Avenue.

  Angelyne perches on the 1914 Davis Building, 6680 Hollywood Boulevard (northeast corner at Las Palmas Avenue). One the of district’s oldest commercial buildings, the builders kept the Davis simple so it would not compete with the beautiful homes nearby.

  Women working at Sunset and Fairfax, 1988.

  THE EARLY NINETIES

  Disney’s film Pretty Woman (1990) emphasized the tawdry image of Hollywood. Few hookers, however, looked like Julia Roberts, whose character lived on Las Palmas Avenue, north of Hollywood Boulevard. Most of the real hookers worked Sunset near Fairfax. Hollywood’s madam of the moment, Heidi Fleiss, found one of her girls when a procurer followed a twenty-two-year-old fledgling actress into a Hollywood Boulevard check-cashing office.

  In these years, five major street gangs sold crack cocaine along Hollywood Boulevard; Los Angeles Magazine rated Wattles Park a favorite spot for outdoor sex. The Palladium had a curfew imposed on it after fans of the Ramones, unable to get tickets to a sold-out show, broke nearby windows and fought with police. Popular local DJ Rick Dee, broadcasting from Hollywood on KISS Radio, popularized the term “Hollyweird.”

  On Halloween night, 1990, revelers smashed windows, looted shops and clashed with police in a spontaneous Hollywood Boulevard street party. Rioters vandalized the recently relocated Brown Derby at Hollywood and Vine while understaffed police stood by. The $50,000 in damages ended the Derby’s days in Hollywood.

  Hollywood Boulevard at Western Avenue had decayed into a crime-ridden corner, soiled with trash and human excrement. The CRA called the intersection Hollywood’s Eastern Portal. A reporter described the Rector Hotel at the intersection as “dilapidated.” The Mayer building across the way sagged with neglect. Central Casting had moved out in 1962. The seedy pool hall in the basement lured Michael J. Fox, Nicholas Cage, David Bowie, and Jim Carrey.

  A drug bust on Hollywood Boulevard between Whitley and Cherokee, 1989. The photographer uses a wide-angle lens to capture the block.

  In 1990, with great fanfare, City Council’s Mike Woo and the CRA announced plans for Hollywood and Western’s northeast corner. Developer Ira Smedra would revitalize it into Hollywest, the largest CRA project in Hollywood at the time. Hollywest mixed affordable senior housing with a giant Ralph’s supermarket. Critics pointed out that an existing Ralph’s operated two blocks south at Sunset. They also questioned the wisdom of putting seniors at an intersection where, that year, gang members had shot and wounded two motorists.

  Hollywest’s original plans called for renovating the Rector Hotel to provide 74 units of low-income, single-residency housing. The CRA loaned the developer $4.5 million for the housing project and $4.5 million for the development’s air rights. Two years later, Smedra had done nothing, not even make a payment on the loan. He said he could not get financing unless the Rector Hotel was demolished. The CRA loaned him funds for the demolition. In July 1993, workers dismantled the Rector brick by brick, revealing massive steel beams in its original construction. Salvagers shipped bricks to Mexico for recycling. Smedra’s replacement, according to one proponent, had a “Ventura Boulevard kind of configuration.”

  Smedra eventually defaulted on the CRA loans. He then rented the empty lot for $10,000 a month to the MTA, who used it as a staging area for the nearby subway station. Although the CRA owned the land, Smedra used the rental money to fund controversial developments in Westwood and a proposed demolition of Chasen’s Restaurant in West Hollywood. The CRA never foreclosed on Hollywest.

  The doomed Rector Hotel at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue was demolished for a giant supermarket and apartments for senior citizens.

  Hanging out on Hollywood Boulevard at Las Palmas Avenue, 1994.

  Civil unrest came to Hollywood Boulevard with the filming of Alex in Wonderland starring Donald Sutherland, 1970.

  The CRA chairperson fingered neighborhood groups for creating a bad impression of Hollywood’s redevelopment. The three lawsuits initiated by Morgan and company had frozen CRA property tax funds earmarked for Hollywood. The first lawsuit, based on the Environmental Impact Report that brought the CRA to Hollywood, made it to the California Supreme Court, where it was denied review. The two other lawsuits, involving multiple issues, combined and reached the U.S. Supreme Court which also denied review. The lawsuits, however, had stopped the Hollywood CRA from using eminent domain and receiving tax increments. In June 1992, the agency had to borrow $48 million on bonds.

  On April 29 and 30, 1992, the acquittals of police officers in the Rodney King brutality trial produced an incident some called a riot and others called an uprising. The participants left a path of torched businesses and destroyed property from South Central Los Angeles outward. Gangs and lowlifes joined the advancing anarchy, reaching Hollywood
Boulevard at Vermont by 4:00 p.m.

  The spectacle was both frightening and ludicrous. A mob looted and burned a commercial building east of Frederick’s of Hollywood. They broke into Frederick’s and stole Madonna’s bra from the celebrity lingerie museum. At Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox, a crowd attacked the roll-down doors of Hollywood Swap Meet with crowbars and sledgehammers. After looting the place, they torched the building. (It was the early commercial building constructed in the yard of the Whitley/Hurd home.) One Hollywood looter was arrested on television stealing a bag of ice. By 8:30 p.m., the participants had gone home or were arrested. Firefighters put out the blazes within a half hour.

  For the following two nights, the understaffed LAPD refused to send out cars. Hollywood gift and souvenir shop owners sat on their roofs with their privately owned weapons. Those around the Chinese Theater pointed their guns toward Highland Avenue.

  Most missed the fact that CRAs had pulled millions from city services, so the police had little money to fight the civil disobedience. Real estate prices dropped drastically after the riot. CRA LA used the opportunity to increase its project areas where the mobs had run.

  The CRA and Los Angeles seemed helpless to counteract widespread districts going to seed. Skid rows seemed to proliferate across the basin. Downtown had not come back as a major financial center. Westwood Village’s glory days ended when a drive-by shooting in the 1980s killed a young woman on the sidewalk. More violence in 1991 fueled an exodus of retailers and customers.

  Nearby Universal opened a huge multiplex cinema on its hill north of Hollywood. Then Universal created CityWalk, hiring architect Jon Jerde, who had designed the unbuilt Hollywood Promenade. CityWalk would serve locals in ways that Hollywood Boulevard did not. An MCA document declared, “We see this opportunity to build the real physical embodiment of the entertainment capital of the world.” CityWalk opened in 1993 with two small streets of shops. Crowds flocked to it.

  In response to CityWalk and the 1993 city election, Hollywood Councilman Mike Woo scrambled to make Hollywood presentable. Running for mayor instead of a second term on City Council, he announced in June 1993, with only a week’s notice, a CRA-financed $4.4-million remake of Hollywood Boulevard. Improvements included sidewalk extensions, benches, jacaranda and palm trees. Crosswalks of asphalt block laid in filmstrip patterns appeared, along with light posts that looked like movie-studio lighting. The CRA resurfaced the street in glittering glassphalt for $500,000.

  An LAPD officer said the benches “were the worst idea they [CRA] ever had.” Four years earlier, Hollywood Economic Recovery Effort had installed benches that store owners removed because they provided seating for “undesirables.”

  The remodel disrupted street and pedestrian traffic during the busy summer season. The beautification process also started just as the MTA began burrowing beneath the historic district.

  Hollywood Councilman Mike Woo’s opponent for mayor was Richard Riordan, a millionaire executive. Hollywood activists and Republicans worked at Riordan’s Hollywood headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard near Las Palmas. Once he defeated Woo, however, Riordan ignored his Hollywood supporters, appointing Woo’s supporters (local business boosters) to his Hollywood Advisory Committee. This immediately tarnished the mayor’s reputation locally.

  The first open lesbian to serve on City Council won Woo’s Council seat. The press described Jackie Goldberg as “left-leaning.” Neither she nor her opponent had come out against the CRA, so voters did not know whom to pick. Goldberg won by five hundred votes.

  The Pussycat Theater (Newsview) in the center of the historic district became a church, 1994.

  Richard Riordan’s mayoral campaign flyer against Hollywood’s City Council representative, Mike Woo, 1993.

  Movie-style light standards on Hollywood Boulevard courtesy of the CRA. The Galaxy is in the background at right, 1995.

  That summer (1993), the Screen Actors Guild left Hollywood. The Church of Scientology bought the church they had occupied. SAG’s newsletter raved about the new headquarters on Wilshire: “Realtors are calling the area the ‘New Hollywood,’ due to the many entertainment firms moving to the neighborhood, including Daily Variety, Hollywood Reporter, E! Entertainment Television, Spelling Productions, and many advertising agencies and publishing firms.” The Motion Picture Costumers union and IATSE also left Hollywood in 1993.

  The original Hollywood Chamber of Commerce headquarters, 6522 Sunset Blvd., 1926.

  The Johnny Grant Building before renovation. This 7000 Hollywood Boulevard building held Rudolph Valentino’s short-lived nightclub in the ‘20s and Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio later.

  The Johnny Grant Building on Hollywood Boulevard, 2000.

  The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce remained one pocket of prosperity. Curtis Management, who represented deceased entertainment and sports celebrities, told a reporter that the Hollywood Chamber was its most successful client. The Chamber had amassed its money based on two historic trusts for the Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Sign. Both trusts had boards of directors made up of Chamber members. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce made money off the name Hollywood, claiming it as a service mark. It licensed the Walk of Fame Star and the Hollywood sign and even got into a trademark battle with Hollywood, Florida over the name.

  Hollywoodland residents, annoyed at the Chamber using their hillside Hollywood sign (once reading Hollywoodland) as a promotional billboard, discovered that the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was illegally dipping into the sign’s historic trust fund to cover its own budget shortfalls. The Chamber had borrowed close to $700,000 when the State Attorney General started an investigation. The Honorary Mayor of Hollywood, Johnny Grant, arranged a settlement. The Chamber agreed to pay back $224,000 of what they took, little by little, until the year 2003.

  The Chamber had long abandoned its vintage 1920 offices near southwest Sunset Boulevard and Wilcox. Built for them, it had remained their headquarters for fifty years. Painter Norman Kennedy, whose work spanned several decades, had created several, large murals of Hollywood’s early days for the interior. When the Chamber moved to a nearby glass tower in the early 1970s, they abandoned the murals. The new tenant rolled up the larger murals and eventually threw them away.

  The Hollywood CRA renovated a vintage structure next to (and owned by) the Roosevelt Hotel to share with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1991. Designed by the Garden Court’s architect, Frank Meline, it had been boarded up since Arthur Murray left in the ‘70s. The CRA deemed the structure both historic and blighted in order to fund its renewal. Officials renamed it the Johnny Grant Building for the former radio announcer who had emceed more than four hundred Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremonies and several Republican functions. A T-shirt and souvenir shop opened at street-level soon after the restoration.

  The Hollywood Professional Building (built as the Rehbein Building), 7046 Hollywood Boulevard at Sycamore. Architect John Lautner had his offices here until his death.

  The vintage Hollywood Security Building, Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, lost its downstairs bank tenant in a 1993 merger. The space remained empty into the new millennium.

  When Bank of America took over Security Pacific Bank, in 1993, Hollywood lost two of its oldest bank branches, the 1921 Hollywood and Cahuenga Security and Security’s branch in Hollywood and Highland’s Deco tower. Neither site found a tenant for the rest of the decade.

  Home videos killed this porno duplex on Hollywood Boulevard near Bronson (1995). It had the X sign pictured on page 327.

  The Egyptian Theater showed the damage of the Northridge earthquake when its hollow, 1922 terra-cotta bricks collapsed. 1994.

  TINSELTOWN GOES TO HELL

  In spite of redevelopment and a heavily publicized change of guard at the CRA, Hollywood was, in the words of Los Angeles City Council member Joel Wachs, “a sewer.” Empty offices and boarded-up buildings proliferated. Increasing number of homeless people slept in doorways. The smell of urine hung over alleys.
Apartment houses that neither owners nor police could protect dotted the area. Many were landmarks.

  Hardened bands of teenagers survived under freeway overpasses and in abandoned buildings. Homeless teenagers took over the Vine Street Brown Derby building, causing a total of six fires in the structure. Patrons of the Doolittle Theater (Huntington Hartford) across the street reported being mooned by the Derby squatters. The CRA asked the property owners to secure the building.

  In a few seconds on January 17, 1994, the Northridge earthquake cleared away more vintage structures than the CRA and MTA had done in a decade. The earthquake damaged fifty historical landmarks in the area, much of it preventable had the CRA done seismic upgrading. The Chinese Theater’s exterior wall had massive cracks. The Pantages Theater’s interior crumbled in large sections. Inspectors feared that the El Capitan’s west wall would collapse. The Hollyhock House had $750,000 worth of fractures.

  The Building and Safety Department dealt out red tags like playing cards. Red tags meant “unsafe for occupation.” Large, old brick buildings filled with Spanish-speaking immigrants became instantly uninhabitable. Police estimated the earthquake caused a 25 percent increase in homelessness. Prostitutes, drug dealers, and squatters moved into dozens of empty, boarded buildings.

  Property owners faced a decision: repair or demolish. Declining property values made demolition their preference. The Small Business Administration turned down thousands of government loans around Hollywood Boulevard. Only 30 percent of business applicants and 22 percent of home applicants received loan approval. Most owners did repairs on their own.