Cornelius Cole died in Colegrove in 1924 at the age of 102. George Hoover died the same year in his home at Hollywood and Vine. The Janes sisters closed their school in 1926.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce tried to revive the May Day parade in 1921, but the event fizzled. The following year, the organization re-created the fiesta at Casa Don Tomás with a Hollywood Boulevard parade the night before that had noisemaking as its theme. At the fiesta the following day, the old adobe house was decorated with costumes and props from participating movie studios. Missing was the bullfight promoters had valiantly tried to stage but that city law prohibited. The true measure of the event’s nostalgia occurred the following year, when C.E. Toberman demolished Casa Don Tomás, the first house in Hollywood, for his Outpost Estates sales office.
Enough original residents remained to encourage a wistful backward glance. Even jaded Hollywood observers felt a twinge of regret over the loss of Hollywood’s early gentility and culture. G.G. Greenwood, who had worked in Hollywood since Dr. Palmer opened the Hollywood National Bank, did not want new residents to forget Hollywood’s past. Greenwood, now the head of the Security Bank branch at Cahuenga, joined the Hollywood Citizen to organize a yearly celebration of the early settlers with a parade down Hollywood Boulevard and a picnic in Plummer Park.
A horse trough from the rural past remained on Hollywood Boulevard in front of the library, 1936.
Hollywood old-timers prepare to ride down Hollywood Boulevard in the Early Settlers Parade, 1927.
Al Christie and Christie Bathing Beauties in the 1927 parade.
The noontime parade on August 8, 1927, was the pinnacle for this short-lived tradition. The procession included buggies, family surreys, and horseless carriages with citizens who were “young when Hollywood was young.” Earl Gilmore, whose family owned Gilmore Fields at Beverly and Fairfax, drove six mules hauling an old oil wagon. Harlan Palmer pushed a wheelbarrow. Dr. Palmer rode an old sorrel mare. At the picnic, two men re-created their 1904 Hollywood High debate, “Resolved, that Hollywood Boulevard business property will someday be worth $100 a front foot. That evening at the Egyptian, movies of the parade screened along with the first Nestor film made in Hollywood, My Indian Hero. When G.G. Greenwood died in 1933, interest in the old settlers waned.
The march of progress brought an intense dislike for Harvey Wilcox’s pepper trees. How could Hollywood Boulevard be a major shopping avenue with huge trees blocking the store signs? Mary Pickford led a 1922 campaign to spare them. The following year, the Hollywood American Legion chopped down the pepper trees around their stadium. As concern grew, editorials ran in the local papers. One stated, “Every time I see one of these beautiful old trees being chopped down on Hollywood Boulevard, I suffer a physical pain; it is such a hideous sacrilege and such a stupid thing to do. How much more desirable it is to shop along a shady street than in glaring, burning sunlight. And how much more beautiful.” The Holly Leaves condemned the tree cutting and the “irretrievable spoiling of Hollywood Boulevard … the commonplace little stores … the uprooting of trees, the lack of planning.” Anyone who loved the area’s quiet charm wept for “the glory that was Hollywood.” Those who pushed progress eventually had their way. The pepper trees disappeared, paid for by the taxpayers.
Workers demolish the de Longpre home as steel for the Warner Hollywood Theater rises in the background.
The abandoned structures from an earlier era were either demolished or reinvented. Jacob Muller’s 1893 clapboard house on Wilcox Avenue became a Mexican restaurant. Standing side by side between Cahuenga and Wilcox, the de Longpre and Beveridge homes were now hindrances to Hollywood progress. When Warner Bros. decided to build a Hollywood movie theater on the block, the two stately homes disappeared.
The last undivided estate on Hollywood Boulevard disappeared on A.G. Bartlett’s death in 1927. A.Z. Taft, Jr. and twenty other investors paid the highest price for a subdivision recorded to that time in Los Angeles, $1,350,000. Five of the acres of the Bartlett estate at Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle Avenue were sold immediately by the investors’ realty companies. The Bartlett house was demolished in the early ‘30s.
Glengary Castle had become an abandoned hulk when S.I. Hayakawa’s career dissolved and he left for England. It was resurrected briefly as Temple Israel of Hollywood, with Fox Studio’s Sol Wurtzel as its president.
Temple Israel then moved into the Methodists’ church on Ivar Avenue when the Methodists relocated to a grander sanctuary. After Temple Israel built a sanctuary on Hollywood Boulevard west of La Brea years later, Hollywood’s original Methodist Church was demolished.
Harvey Wilcox’s pepper trees come down along Vine Street in front of Hollywood Post Office (left) and the Hollywood Playhouse (right).
Hollywood Methodist Church, Franklin Avenue at Highland. Construction of the sanctuary was delayed when the foundation sank in quicksand.
First National Bank of Los Angeles, northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue.
THE FAT OF THE LAND
Banking in Hollywood now involved hundreds of millions of dollars. Thirty-three banks operated where two had sufficed fifteen years previously.
First National Bank of Los Angeles established itself on Highland Avenue with the second-highest building in the city (after the new Los Angeles City Hall). It was a regal combination of Deco and Gothic. Security Trust built a Beaux-Arts bank at Hollywood Boulevard and Sycamore Avenue.
Hollywood and Vine’s height-limit Bank of Hollywood (renamed the Equitable) was a temple to new money. It replaced the three-year-old, one-story bank building founded by Gilbert Beesemyer. With its gargoyles and copper roof, the Bank of Hollywood Building was also the work of Sam Kress, who had expanded his drug stores to Hollywood Boulevard’s five busiest corners. He sold out in 1926 to a chain called Liggett’s that later sold to Owl Drugs. Kress equipped the Bank of Hollywood building with a brokerage room that connected directly to Wall Street.
Dr. Palmer finally got his department store at Hollywood and Vine. A wealthy lobby of Vine Street investors used stock to finance the height-limit building. The Dyas Department Store Company of Los Angeles leased it. The structure had a baronial penthouse for executives.
Colonel Harry Baine, a recent Hollywood arrival, built the Baine Building in 1927 on the northwest corner of Whitley and Hollywood and brokered the development of the entire block to its west. Baine rushed construction so the first downstairs tenant, Merchants National Trust and Savings Bank, could open the same year. His boast of his status as the “first person to live in a penthouse on Hollywood Boulevard,” (the upper floor of his Baine Building), probably came about because Baine had sunk all his money in the construction.
Dr. Palmer, Gilbert Beesemyer, and A.Z. Taft, Jr. ended the war between Cahuenga and Highland for good with their oddly named Five-Finger Plan. Acting as the Cahuenga to Western Boulevard Improvement Association, they altered the streets in 1926 to what exists today. Their intention was to bring traffic into the center of Hollywood Boulevard. Wilcox, Cahuenga, Ivar, Vine, and Yucca comprised the fingers, and Highland was the “arm” of the plan. Both Wilcox and Cahuenga were lengthened southward beyond their ends at Sunset Boulevard, once the edge of Harvey Wilcox’s tract. Property owners graded Wilcox Avenue to Melrose, leaving Cole Place out of the traffic flow to the annoyance of the owners there.
Cahuenga Boulevard took the brunt of the makeover. Widened from its Pass junction, Cahuenga cut through property south of Sunset Boulevard, where it branched east and west connecting with Cole Avenue as a compromise. Ivar Avenue owners extended Ivar south of Hollywood Boulevard to Sunset. Yucca Street was widened.
The Highland Avenue faction widened and repaved their road from the Pass junction to a point below Wilshire Boulevard. The city condemned a considerable amount of property along the way. Sunset Boulevard was widened and permanently paved from Normandie Avenue to Laurel Canyon.
In 1926, Hollywood had ten miles of paved street
s. By the close of 1927, it had two-hundred miles. Property owners paid the $4 million for street improvement. In 1927, the Los Angles Evening Herald declared that the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga “brings together two of the biggest rush hour traffic streams in the United States.”
C.E. Toberman, the Rotary Club’s Mr. Hollywood for 1926, arranged for Barker Brothers to open a branch of their furniture store in the El Capitan Building. After a premiere-like opening, movie people flocked to buy their household furnishings. Patsy Ruth Miller described George Raft’s home as a “big, Barker Brothers furnished apartment in a nice section of town.” Ray Milland, visiting James Cagney and his wife in their apartment, wrote that the furniture, save for an upright piano, was Barker Brothers Mexican. Barker Brothers remained in the El Capitan for forty-two years.
In the last three years of the decade, owners rushed to build on vacant land. A married couple at Hollywood and Las Palmas (northwest corner) took down their house for the Outpost Building. They modeled the street-level stores after an exclusive shop in Madrid. The Owens Studio Building at 6554 Hollywood Boulevard appeared, with its Moorish arched windows and wrought iron.
The Bank of Hollywood building (page 137) disappeared for the Equitable, northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.
The brokerage room in the Equitable Building.
Hollywood Boulevard, Christmas, 1936.
Harry Baine hatched the idea of decorating Hollywood Boulevard for the holidays in 1928. Declaring it “Santa Claus Lane,” Baine opened the shopping season with live reindeer pulling a wheeled sleigh with Santa and a celebrity down the Boulevard. The reindeer were then displayed in a pen near La Brea Avenue. Street decorations started as live trees fastened to light standards and strung with colored lights. Because they died from lack of water and were knocked over by cars, fireproof metallic tinsel trees came next. These tarnished in damp weather and got caught on passing busses. Then came papier maché Santas in chimneys. The longest-lived decorations were conical trees with fairy tale characters and designs and colored light bulbs that appeared throughout the Depression and into the 1950s.
Edward Everett Horton decorates Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, 1928.
Hollywood Boulevard holiday decorations from ‘20s to ‘30s.
Grauman’s Chinese Theater, 1929.
MOVIE PALACES
In 1927, Sid Grauman abandoned the Egyptian for the Chinese Theater. The last feature to play the Egyptian under Grauman was Topsy and Eva. The Duncan Sisters starred, appearing onstage, in blackface, with their burlesque of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that had packed houses in London. Critics said that Vivian and Rosetta Duncan were better than the picture. After Grauman left, the Egyptian re-opened under new management, adding a front marquee and continuing the forecourt displays.
Grauman’s bastardized Chinese temple was now the most famous movie theater in the world. After five years of studying theaters, Grauman made the Chinese Hollywood’s premiere shrine to the movies. The sandalwood-scented theater with its giant Wurlitzer organ had an enormous stage designed for grand opera. As originally decorated, the interior was equally spectacular. At the end of the overture, soft white light lit the walls and ceiling, making the interior appear to be made of inlaid pearl.
The interior of the Chinese Theater, 1929.
The Egyptian Theater with its new marquee, 1935.
With a formula of cement that easily took impressions, concocted on the site by a European stone mason, Grauman hit on a gimmick that gave the Chinese its aura of timelessness. The handprints and footprints of movie stars in his forecourt drew over half-a-million visitors in the first four months. (In true Hollywood fashion, however, the prints of those whose fame had dimmed were removed at night and replaced in a splashy ceremony by someone more popular.)
Sid Grauman (left) liked big displays in the forecourt of his Chinese Theatre.
A Charlie Chaplin look-alike and Pepito the Clown in Grauman’s Chinese courtyard. They performed onstage for Chaplin’s The Circus, 1928.
Douglas Fairbanks leaves his footprint at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Mary Pickford is at his side, 1927.
Grauman had made a deal with C.B. DeMille to open the Chinese with King of Kings, a “screen sermon” as William Hays proudly called it. For the May 1927 premiere, 100,000 spectators lined a decorated Hollywood Boulevard. Los Angeles’s mayor, police and fire chiefs dressed in Chinese robes to welcome DeMille. Unfortunately, Grauman turned the evening into a debacle. When the audience was seated, D.W. Griffith gave a speech and introduced Mary Pickford who also spoke. The orchestra played a medley of classics, after which Grauman’s prologue began, a series of Bible tableaux from Old and New Testaments that lasted over three hours. When the film finally started, the over-entertained audience began to leave, causing DeMille to rise from his seat and shout at them. At the 1:00 a.m. intermission, only a fraction of the audience remained. DeMille was furious and stalked off with his entourage. The film, however, was a hit.
Grauman pared down his lavishness for subsequent prologues, though not by much. In typical showman fashion, he spent his profits on his audiences. When Chaplin’s The Circus opened in 1928, Grauman put a circus on the stage and hired a Chaplin look-alike to perform in it. For Greta Garbo’s Mata Hari, the stage show came at the end of the feature with Lotti Mayer’s Diving Ballet. Seventy-five girls in Louis XVI costumes and wigs paraded down five stairways into a reflection pool. Disappearing under water, they surfaced again wearing iridescent costumes with headdresses that sprayed water. Fountains along the staircases then burst into spray as ballet girls in front waved multicolored ostrich plume fans. Multi-colored spotlights lit everything. Grauman had become Hollywood Boulevard’s Flo Ziegfeld.
Crowds line up outside the new Warner Theatre at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue, 1928.
Warner Bros. began building their million-dollar movie theater at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue in late 1926. Owning theaters guaranteed an outlet for their studio’s films. Oldest brother Harry Warner challenged the big three studios, Paramount, Universal, and MGM, with a chain of theaters that included Hollywood’s largest. Taking fourteen months to complete, Warner Hollywood had lounges with rich, walnut paneling, authentic antiques, a smoking room, a nursery with toys, and a music room. The architect, G. Albert Lansburgh, had previously designed the Wiltern Theater at Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue.
The only movie theater on the West Coast wired for sound, Warner Hollywood planned to open with Warner’s first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. However, Warner brother, Sam, instrumental in producing ‘talkies,’ died twenty-four hours before The Jazz Singer’s New York debut. The Warners delayed their Hollywood theater’s opening by six months, dedicating it to Sam’s memory.
The lower level lounge of the Warner Hollywood Theater, 1928.
The auditorium of the Warner Hollywood Theater, 1928.
As the studio had added sound sections to three movies begun as silent films, the first talking picture presented to Hollywood was Glorious Betsy starring Conrad Nagel. Al Jolson emceed the premiere. William de Mille, who attended, described it as a forgettable film until the moment an actor spoke and “a thrill ran through the house.”
Hollywood saw its first talking movie when Warner Brothers opened Glorious Betsy in their new Warner Hollywood Theater, 1928.
Warner Bros. installed a huge organ in their new theater just in case talking movies didn’t succeed. The success of talkies, however, catapulted the brothers into major studio status. They were the only company to make, distribute, and exhibit films in Hollywood proper. For a brief time, they contemplated a second theater on Hollywood Boulevard, but it never happened.
In 1928, Lon Chaney, the number one movie star at the box office, leased Hollywood Boulevard land east of Gower for ninety-nine years and built a legitimate theater. Film actress Alice Calhoun rented it for live productions. She combined her and her business manager’s names to call it the Mar-Cal.
Norma Shearer opens the Mayer Building. Her husband Irving Thalberg stands left of her.
THE LOWEST AND THE HIGHEST
Movie-magazine stories contained nuggets of truth. Montana-born Gary Cooper did hang out on Hollywood Boulevard and bump into a couple of “sorry-looking” cowboys near Vine Street. They turned out to be boyhood friends and persuaded him to see a casting director. By three o’clock that afternoon, Cooper was in the movies. Joel McCrea, another budding cinema heartthrob, was a graduate of Hollywood High, Class of ‘24, who lived in Hollywood.
As hopefuls poured from every bus and streetcar, some Hollywood hotels became flophouses. Most waitresses in Hollywood cafés bided their time until the big break. Brothels along Fountain Avenue and Sunset Boulevard offered steady work for attractive females. Upper offices along Hollywood Boulevard filled with fraudulent acting schools and, after 1928, vocal coaches to teach diction and voice.
In response to Hollywood’s population growth of people doomed to failure, the Hays Office created Central Casting in 1926. Funded by the studios and operated by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, it spent its first year on the tenth floor of Hollywood and Vine’s Taft Building. After L. B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg financed the Mayer Building at Hollywood and Western, both the MPPDA and Central Casting moved to its two top floors.
The Story of Hollywood Page 17