The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  Prostitution continued throughout the area. Celebrities charged with soliciting Hollywood prostitutes in the late 1990s included Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy. According to the Los Angeles Times (February 2, 2003), Hollywood Boulevard had “two-thirds of all prostitution arrests in the city.” Using a city ordinance that allowed police to seize the cars of pimps and johns, the Hollywood division seized fifty-six cars in four prostitution stings in 2003.

  In 2003, the new Los Angeles police chief, Benjamin Bratton, selected three parts of the city for his “broken windows” system of crime fighting. Hollywood Boulevard became ground zero in his battle, along with MacArthur Park and downtown’s skid row. A broken window signals that no one cares, fostering graffiti, vandalism, prostitution, and more serious crimes. With the hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in Hollywood’s redevelopment, the chief told reporters, “the area is still a magnet for the homeless, and narcotics sales are still a major concern.”

  Social unrest surfaced unpredictably. In 1997, a crowd waiting to enter the Palace Theater threw rocks and bottles, bringing a riot squad of one hundred and fifty policemen in full riot gear. In May 2000, a Latino gang member shot and killed a former leader of Hollywood’s Armenian Power gang in a deli in East Hollywood where the Armenian gang held turf. Stores near the Palladium had their windows broken in a late-night melee in September 2000. On Labor Day 2001, a riot on Hudson, now Schraeder Avenue, involved ten thousand people who arrived for a concert that could not handle the crowd.

  FADE OUT

  At Hollywood and Vine, the Equitable Building sat for years with a For Sale by Owner sign on it of the kind that you buy at hardware stores. Its street-level commercial space remained vacant for a decade until a hardy entrepreneur opened a bar and restaurant. Squatters had moved into the structure when Tom Gilmore, a downtown developer with a preservationist’s instinct, bought the building. After spending nearly $3 million to restore the Equitable, a slumping office market convinced owners to convert the landmark into condominiums.

  Catty-corner to it, Hollywood and Vine’s former Broadway Department Store had failed to become the Motion Picture Hall of Fame announced for 2004. It would have commemorated different genres of movies and introduce the Max Awards, an Academy Award clone. After the Hall of Fame idea died, the building’s new owners converted the former department store into residential lofts.

  The CRA’s push to redevelop Hollywood and Vine into a residential area included the massive block-long project of hotel, condos, apartments, stores, and restaurants above the subway station and adjacent parking lots around the Taft Building. The project immediately threatened a vintage Hollywood business in a vintage building: Bernard Luggage. The owner received an offer from the developers advising him to sell before the CRA took his site by eminent domain. Yet the developer’s drawings contained the building that stood north of the Vine Street Brown Derby.

  Music Giant EMI considered selling the Capitol Records Building early in 2006 to a developer who planned condominiums.

  In the same area, the CRA plans five-hundred affordable units of senior citizen housing in the parking lot behind the Huntington Hartford/Doolittle/Ricardo Montalban Theater. (The Montalban name came in 2003. After a $300,000 facade makeover, the theater was left empty and deteriorated quickly. By June 2005, the nonprofit in charge of it was struggling to survive.)

  Hollywood and Vine’s Equitable Building, 2003.

  In May 2003, the intersection of Hollywood and Vine was designated Bob Hope Square in honor of the comedian’s 100th birthday. Previously designated squares along Hollywood Boulevard were Raymond Chandler Square at Cahuenga and Carmen Miranda Square at Orange.

  The defunct Motion Picture Hall of Fame leaves its signs on the “Now Leasing” Hollywood Plaza, formerly Hollywood Broadway Dept. Store, 2003.

  Sunset and Vine’s conversion to a residential district came with Magic Johnson’s apartments (renting from $1350 and up). Diagonal to these, the 1961 twenty-story office tower also became a candidate for residences. It had sat unoccupied as a ghost tower for three years after an electrical fire in December 2001 forced tenants out. The occupants had to leave their offices intact, with work and equipment inside. They sued months later to gain entry. New owners planned to convert the tower to condos. A second fire in the empty structure occurred in March 2005.

  At Hollywood and Western, the city’s third most crime-ridden intersection had 12 percent of the city’s narcotics arrests in the year 2000. However, Hollywood and Western looked “for a happy ending,” according to the Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2001. The pay phones at the subway entrance, installed three years earlier, were removed to stop drug dealing. Hollywest was finally completed, the most expensive and largest mini-mall in city history. CRA-financed senior housing sat above the new supermarket.

  The Times article also found hope for Hollywood and Western with the arrival of developers specializing in “opening hip businesses in troubled neighborhoods.” The developers bought the St. Francis Hotel and the empty Mayer Building. The St. Francis, a long-time home to ex-cons and recovering addicts, became the Gershwin Hotel. A ten-year veteran clerk at the hotel told the reporter that he doubted the changes would help. “We want to raise the class level at this intersection, we want a better class of criminal, a better class of hooker.” By June 2003, the empty Mayer Building was back for sale.

  At the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, the “mysterious” sinking of Hollywood Boulevard continued to crack and split Walk of Fame stars years after subway tunneling. About one hundred stars were affected; a dozen required replacement. The sinking received news coverage in late ‘03 after Johnny Grant saw a tourist trip and fall on a sidewalk crack. Grant suspected tunneling, but the MTA disagreed, saying that heavy foot traffic bore some responsibility. However, a subway engineer told PAC Chairman John Walsh that more soil than necessary had been removed from under the historic district.

  While the loss and damage to Hollywood may have pained a preservationist or a long-time resident, many welcomed the changes. The director of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce told a reporter in 2003, “Even in its heyday, Hollywood Boulevard was never as glitzy or glamorous as people sometimes think. Now we have the ability to create something that people always expected Hollywood to be.” In 2005, he told a reporter, “We are creating the Hollywood that never was.”

  Vine Street’s Doolittle Theater, formerly The Huntington Hartford, sat empty through most of the ‘90s.

  An apartment house replaced the media production block (containing at one time TAV Celebrity Theater, Music City, and Sy Devore) at northwest Sunset and Vine, 2003. Schwab’s Drugs returned here with a full bar, as did a smaller version of C.C. Brown’s Ice Cream Parlor. Both were out of business by 2006.

  The restored Egyptian Theater became the home to Cinematheque, a film society, 2003.

  Views of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, 2003.

  Street-level retail with senior housing above replaced the vintage Rector Hotel on the northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.

  The southeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue has CRA-financed Hollywood Metro Apartments, built at one of Hollywood’s most drug-infested intersections.

  The northwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue. The Gershwin (St. Francis) hotel is at the left.

  The restored Mayer Building, southwest corner of Hollywood and Western, remains empty with a For Sale sign on it.

  Given that Los Angeles mostly abandons its past, the city, now at its physical limits, rechurns its once-distinct Hollywood into something more homogenized and denser. Cocooned in their homes, driving by on their way to somewhere else, citizens rarely take responsibility for their larger neighborhoods, surrendering them to commercial forces that eat away at the heritage of public areas.

  There is no guarantee that the new “urban villages” won’t decay into grimy dumps filled with souvenirs, T-shirts, sleazy clubs, pizza sli
ces, and transients. They could disappear as fast as the churches and the movie studios did.

  Fifty years ago, the 101 Freeway separated the hillside residents from the shopping district. Gerrymandering in the 1980’s split Hollywood again, this time between two City Council districts, wealthy on one side, poor on the other. The split removed any unified representation. Redevelopment and the local booster mentality also contributed to loss. The insistence that Hollywood become like Times Square completely ignored Hollywood’s indigenous character.

  Since 1988, the Department of the Interior’s National Trust for Historic Preservation published a yearly list of “America’s 10 Most Endangered Historic Places.” The National Historic District of Hollywood Boulevard never once made the list. South Pasadena, facing a freeway through it, made the list for five years. In 1998, the Trust put Monterey’s Cannery Row on the list, although many considered it a model of revitalization.

  Phil Levine, one-time owner of Lee Drugs, felt that Hollywood lost its identity to absentee landlords. Absentee landlords hired real estate management firms that looked for short-term profits. With absentee landlords, Levine said, “The pride of ownership is never there.” The Levines sold Lee Drugs and the building to a Japanese firm in the early ‘80s. By then, absentee owners owned nearly 70 percent of Hollywood Boulevard. (Lee Drugs went out of business within the decade.)

  When the CRA arrived in Hollywood, the law required the establishment of urban design and transportation plans. Although both plans were prepared, Hollywood’s district representatives never incorporated them. Stricter regulation of the historic district would assure that something survives for the future. Traffic studies were also of major importance in redevelopment as Western, Highland, Sunset, Fountain, and Santa Monica were predicted to run over capacity, as would portions of Vine, Hollywood, and La Brea by 2005.

  A long-established entertainment and shopping district, Hollywood needed no large shifts in land use. Sensitively restored, the street would embody a way of going out now lost in the suburban landscape. Yet no CRA program involved restoring the historic district only pieces of it. After the deal with Trizec-Hahn was made, the CRA spent money on a facade restoration for the Chinese Theater. Sid Grauman’s name and the style of marquee he originally chose returned to the venerable movie palace, although many missed the ‘50s neon marquees that were removed.

  The CRA financed the sign for the museum that shares the former Max Factor building with a diner, 2003.

  Before the CRA, Hollywood had retained most of the structures of its golden eras. Since 1986, social damage, greed, and neglect erased blocks of vintage buildings, especially around Hollywood and Vine. Two misconceptions fostered this: that second-level buildings made no major contribution to the area’s identity, and that sacrificing the old fueled new growth. No matter how neglected they had become, the smaller buildings contributed an authentic charm to one of the most famous places on Earth. Tourism expert Arthur Frommer noted that “heritage tourism” is one of the three main reasons that people travel. Keeping Hollywood intact satisfies a tourist’s curiosity as well as retaining residents’ pride of place.

  Adaptive reuse for all buildings in the Historic District is very important. Adaptive-use developers need tax abatement and other incentives. Owners of historic sites need help to save their properties. Restoration projects like Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater must happen on every block.

  When the CRA assessed Hollywood in 1985, the agency had stated that fast-food restaurants and billboards contributed to the area’s “blight.” Thirteen years later, with new fast-food restaurants on major corners and a billboard-building blitz in progress (including multiple billboards on every giant CRA project) the agency claimed these same elements showed economic development.

  In April 2003, the CRA reported to the City of Los Angeles that blight continued to plague Hollywood. After spending $220 million revitalizing the area over seventeen years of redevelopment, the agency considered 73 percent of the properties in need of major rehabilitation. Finding blight was key for the CRA to restore its eminent domain powers that had expired in 1998. Concurrently, the CRA announced the possibility of selling its troubled loan portfolio at a $50–$70–million loss. The agency had experienced problems collecting on loans that were structured to favor developers who, in many cases, had not paid principal or interest in over a decade. Property taxes had yet to rise enough, so the CRA remained largely broke. Taking small tax increments from the Hollywood Project Area (an average of $5 million a year with $852,018,398 to go), the Hollywood CRA paid bond interest and barely covered its staff overhead.

  Critics used the 2003 report as proof that the CRA had failed its mission. Many felt that further money should not be taken from schools, police, and fire services to subsidize private developers. Attempting to build its way out of fiscal woes, CRAs leave cities so broke that cutbacks on infrastructure become necessary.

  Any hope that the CRA would bring more film and television production to the area ebbed in the new century. CBS made tentative plans to move from Television City (Beverly and Fairfax) to the CBS Radford lot in Studio City. Developers would demolish Television City for an expanded shopping area adjacent to The Grove.

  KTLA’s production lot at Sunset and Van Ness headed for extinction. The Chicago-based Tribune Company, who owned the studio and the Los Angeles Times, lobbied the CRA and the local council office to rezone the historic production facility for two high-rise residential towers. Most of the original Warner Bros. lot would disappear except for the colonial facade along Sunset Boulevard.

  The biggest blow to production in Hollywood came with the demolition of the Fox Television Center (Metromedia) at Sunset and Van Ness for a Los Angeles City public high school in 2003. Originally an independent movie studio (Nassour Brothers) and then KTTV, the lot had produced television classics for decades, such as Lassie and more than twenty Norman Lear sitcoms including All in the Family and Maude.

  After the demolition of Fox Television Center (Metromedia Square/Nassour Bros. Studio), at Sunset Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue, 2003

  In 2005, the last radio stations left Hollywood. KFWB and KNX and The WAVE, all Viacom-owned, left for Wilshire. Television stations KCBS (KNXT) and KCAL (KHJ), also owned by Viacom, planned to relocate to the former Republic Studios in Studio City. Early news on the fate of the historic Columbia Square had it demolished for a giant supermarket to accommodate the new residents at Hollywood and Vine.

  In May 2003, City Council extended the CRA’s development plan in Hollywood. It also granted the agency the power of eminent domain over commercial property. Hollywood’s current city councilman, Eric Garcetti, told the Los Angeles Times that it was necessary to keep the CRA “because in poor areas you couldn’t get people to invest without this.”

  Forging ahead on its mindless mission with no master plan, the CRA will never put itself out of business, although that should be its highest priority. Like any government entity or tax, it is nearly impossible to dismantle once in place. In its wake, it leaves angered residents, taxpayers, small business people, and a ruined historic district.

  Free enterprise was, and is, Hollywood’s saving grace. Grace Koopal titled C.E. Toberman’s official biography just that, “Free Enterprise.” It is the reason Hollywood retains some of its past. Musso & Frank’s continues its proud tradition of fine dining in Hollywood. The Pantages Theater hosts audiences in its Deco beauty. The Avalon (Palace), the Music Box at the Henry Fonda, and Yamashiro Restaurant on the hill over Hollywood demonstrate the value and success of adaptive reuse. The Sunset Gower Studios, previously Columbia, born from Poverty Row studios, booms with production.

  One hundred years have passed since Hollywood, a garden paradise with stately homes, transformed itself into a commercial district with the arrival of modern media. It is a poor progress that wastes such a fascinating part of American heritage, the historic district of Hollywood. The manager of the McDonald’s on Vine Street told a re
porter, “Hollywood is a world treasure and what has happened here should never have been allowed to happen by any management of any city.”

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. University of Texas Press, 1994.

  Anger, Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon. Dell Publishing Co., 1975.

  Atkinson, Janet I. Los Angeles County Historical Directory. McFarland, 1988.

  Balloon Tour Brochure (Huntington Library).

  Barbera, Joe. My Life in Toons. Turner Publishing Inc., 1994.

  Barker, Emily. The Story of the Cahuengas. Hollywood High Press, 1926.

  Barnouw, Erik. A History of Broadcasting in the United States. Oxford University Press, 1966.

  Basten, Fred. E. Max Factor’s Hollywood. General Publishing Group, 1995.

  Baum, Frank and MacFall, Russell. To Please a Child. Reilly &Lee Co., 1961.

  Baxter, John. The Hollywood Exile. Taplinger, 1976.

  Beardsley, Charles. Hollywood’s Master Showman. Cornwall Books, 1983.

  Bernstein, Walter. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. Knopf, 1996.

  Belfrage, Cedric. Promised Land. Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1938.

  Bell, Horace. On the Old West Coast. Wm. Morrow & Co., 1930.

  Bitzer, Billy. Billy Bitzer, His Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

  Blake, Michael. Lon Chaney. The Vestal Press, Ltd., 1990.

  Bodeen, DeWitt. From Hollywood. A.S. Barnes & Co, 1976.

  Bono, Sonny. And The Beat Goes On. Simon & Schuster, 1992.