State and Federal earthquake money allotted for historic repair came to a meager $3.5 million for the entire Los Angeles basin. A special committee at the L.A. Conservancy doled out the funds. Ara’s Pastry building on east Hollywood Boulevard got $200,000, the most public money of any Hollywood commercial building. Its renovation proved that any building was savable, no matter how damaged, if the owner was willing and connected. Low-income bungalows on Carlton Way got another sizable chunk. Hollywood’s National Historic District got next to nothing. The Pantages’ Nederlander Organization made a fuss over the $100,000 they received, calculating that they had $1.2 million in damages. Their other theater, the Henry Fonda, needed $600,000 in repairs.
Earthquake damage to Angelina Apartments, 5173 Hollywood Boulevard, 1994 (demolished).
Carlton Way, south of Hollywood Boulevard, 1994.
Ara’s Pastry, 4945 Hollywood Boulevard, 1994.
5620 Hollywood Boulevard had its lantern tilted in the ‘94 earthquake. The owners immediately righted it and restored their building.
In the flurry of emergency demolitions, a mayor’s aide walked a demolition permit for the Vine Street Brown Derby through the city. An inspector from the State Historic Building Safety Board had concluded that the building was salvageable. One prominent Chamber of Commerce member lobbied for its demolition, calling the structure “an eyesore.” She said parking was needed in the area.
Three faces of the Hollywood Vine Street Brown Derby: heydays to hell days to vacant lot.
Wreckers arrived at the Derby January 24, 1994. Collectors snapped up the ornamentation, including the landmark derby-shaped roof sign. The crew pulled the structure apart brick by brick. According to the demolition foreman, the bricks headed to the mid-West for recycling. When preservationists held a funeral on its sixty-fourth birthday, February 14, the wrecker told them. “We’re not tearing down the Brown Derby. That section already burned down. We’re tearing down Cecil B. DeMille’s offices.”
In the wake of this controversy, the Chamber dedicated the CRA’s first Art Improvement Project. While public art supposedly interprets the past in meaningful ways, the CRA went in another direction. At the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea, four female figures, supposedly Anna Mae Wong, Mae West, Dorothy Dandridge and Dolores Del Rio, supported a silver gazebo. Marilyn Monroe in her skirt-raising scene from Seven Year Itch served as the finial. A Los Angeles Times art critic called it, “The most depressingly awful work of public art in recent memory.”
The same day as this dedication, state officials told the press that they looked to Hollywood to keep tourism in the state. An election year, the Republican Governor of California, Pete Wilson, held a crime summit at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church where he surrounded himself with the parents of murdered children. The next month, Governor Wilson held a press conference on the front steps of the Hollywood Division Los Angeles Police Department, where he announced the adoption of the “Three-Strike” law mandating prison sentences for third time offenders.
The Governor aptly picked Hollywood for his press conferences. Crime had increased in Hollywood after the earthquake. Police reports revealed that the area around Hollywood and Vine topped the entire western part of the city in aggravated assaults, robberies, and rapes. Yucca Avenue saw a murder a day at its peak. One neighborhood woman took an ice pick with her on dog walks. A gang of homeless adolescents tortured a transient to death in a condemned building at Yucca Street and Wilcox Avenue. Teenage transients burned an earthquake-shattered apartment building on Carlton Way.
Vandals hit the wounded Egyptian Theater in March, overturning statuary and vandalizing the interior. Stolen jackal dogs turned up later in a Hollywood thrift shop. The storeowner immediately called City Council member Jackie Goldberg, the L.A. Police’s Hollywood Division, and the mayor’s office. He met apathy on all fronts. Initiating a newspaper campaign, he forced the CRA to accept the dogs.
In 1993, police started removing the street barricades that had stopped weekend cruising. Swarms of cars returned. A middle-class visitor stuck in the traffic told a reporter, “My wife told me to get out of there quick. She was absolutely terrified.” Residents and business owners not only wanted the barricades returned, they pushed for a total blockade. Yucca Avenue intersections were permanently cordoned off so cars could not make left turns. Street banners declared that drug dealers would be caught and prosecuted. A special police unit targeted notorious drug-trade areas near businesses like a 7-Eleven at Yucca and Cahuenga and a Burger King on Highland.
The CRA’s gazebo at Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, 1994.
The CRA installed four klieg light sculptures on the corners of Hollywood and Vine, 1994.
With cutthroat drug trade strangling the neighborhood, locals had a fit when clean needles volunteers began handing out syringes in front of Selma Elementary School. Trying to stop the spread of AIDS, needle volunteers complained when they had to move their operation to an alley at Cosmo Street, next to the public library. This alley already had a reputation for needle users. Police had to separate lines of pro- and anti-needle protesters in the alley. The mayor and council members helped Clean Needles Now settle into an adjacent storefront at 1602 Cahuenga Boulevard. A volunteer who ran the exchange’s art center told the Los Angeles Times that the business was “like a bank or a neighborhood barber shop.”
In April 1994, the CRA continued their Art Improvement Project. Four large klieg lights on marble bases appeared on the four corners of Hollywood and Vine. Each pedestal held a plaque that paid tribute to famous places in the area that had burned and disappeared, such as Mike Lyman’s and the Brown Derby. At the unveiling, the intersection had three vacant corners, one (the Equitable) with its windows still broken from the earthquake. All four klieg lights never operated simultaneously from the time of their installation.
Over the months, earthquake damage took its toll. The Hollywood Professional School, 5400 Hollywood Boulevard near Western, had needed seismic reinforcement long before the earthquake. For professional children, the nursery-to-high-school establishment had served Mousketeer Sue Lyon (star of Lolita), Tuesday Weld, Brenda Lee, and Connie Stevens. MacKenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertenelli attended while starring nearby in the sitcom One Day at a Time. Bertha Keller Mann had owned the entire block since 1949. She had started buying property after a fortune cookie message told her: “Buy real estate.” The school’s demolition cleared more land around the future Hollywood and Western subway station.
Hollywood Boulevard’s Hastings Hotel, formerly the Regent, stood near the subway’s Vine Street station at Argyle. A popular rock ‘n’ roll club in the basement had hosted the band Guns N’ Roses. After the earthquake, Building and Safety initially gave the structure a yellow tag that allowed club owners to salvage equipment. For the next few months, the club continued to charge customers to hear bands. Upstairs, night people completely trashed the interior of the hotel. Police regularly hauled out dead bodies.
The Hollywood Professional School, 5400 Hollywood Boulevard, with earthquake damage and after demolition.
The Hastings had impeccable historic credentials and low-income housing funds were available to refurbish it. In a strange move, the owner of the Hastings sold the damaged building to the woman who ran the nightclub. As the new owner did not own the building at the time of the earthquake, no government earthquake loans were available. After a June 1994 fire in the basement, the Hastings came down, with its adjacent building, a vintage one-story car dealership. Re-adapted as an expanded parking lot, the owners, the Nederlander Organization, plotted its future development.
In August 1994, wooden wedges in a shoddily reinforced subway tunnel underneath the Historic District collapsed, causing several blocks of Hollywood Boulevard centering at Hudson Avenue to collapse nine inches. Subway tunneling halted. Hollywood Boulevard shut down as workers shored up the tunnel, this time properly with steel columns. More Walk of Fame stars went into storage. More merc
hants walked away from Hollywood. Mayor Riordan and City Council member Goldberg used the opportunity to step onto the MTA board of directors.
After the sinking, Building and Safety evacuated tenants from the damaged Hillview Apartments at Hollywood and Hudson. (A few tenants remembered the red cars on Hollywood Boulevard.) The MTA held that the earthquake, not tunneling, had damaged the building. Hollywood’s first lawsuit for property damage due to subway construction came from the Hillview’s owner. Cables and scaffolds held the building’s facade from falling into the street. After a New Year’s Eve street party in January 2002, an arsonous fire destroyed the top floor. An independent developer bought the structure with partners and announced, in March 2003, its restoration.
The Hastings Hotel, 6162 Hollywood Boulevard, before and during demolition.
While the City Council’s Jackie Goldberg spoke of preserving Hollywood history to give tourists a tangible look in Hollywood’s “golden era,” her words flew in the face of neglect.
Demolition of historic buildings, theoretically, was not simple. The law required interested parties, certainly groups like Hollywood Heritage, to be notified of the adoption of a Negative Declaration for that building. This is prescribed under Section 106 of U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Historic Preservation Act. When no notice is given and demolition occurs, that demolition is illegal.
The demolition of a 1913 building, one of the oldest in the National Register District at 6401 Hollywood Boulevard, occurred with no notice. It was one of the Blondeau/de Longpre commercial buildings constructed in the yard of the de Longpre estate. This two-story building had displayed the first electric sign on Hollywood Boulevard. In the 1950s and ‘60s, it had served KFWB until Westinghouse bought it, changed it to an all-news format, and moved the station in 1977 to Argyle and Yucca. Although earthquake-damaged, the building was not red-tagged. In September 1995, the owner demolished the building, leaving a For Sale sign on the empty lot. Its neighbor to the east, the other two-story of the three buildings (Al Levy’s first Hollywood café), had previously disappeared in an arsonous fire in 1985 and was replaced.
The earthquake-damaged Hillview at Hollywood Boulevard and Hudson Avenue gets a new life.
In 1995, fire partially ate a vintage Hollywood Boulevard building immediately west of the former Broadway Hollywood. Opened in the ‘20s as the upscale Roos Brothers clothing store, it later became a Lerner’s Dress Shop and then the district’s second Newberry’s. Wreckers exposed a solid steel frame that could have lasted years.
Martoni’s Restaurant operated for decades on Cahuenga. The restaurant had hosted some of entertainment’s most famous faces. After ten-and-a-half months of extensive renovation, the business re-opened after the ‘92 riot. The ‘94 earthquake broke the building. The structure went down for a CRA-funded copy store.
In these cases, the CRA made no historic assessment for public record. The agency claimed that little could be done to protect or restore historic buildings because of budget shortfalls. Architectural historians hired by developers often opposed volunteer preservationists trying to save the structures. With the $138 million that the CRA had already spent in Hollywood, with little to show for it, the agency could have used $500,000 to restore every building along the Walk of Fame and have funds remaining.
In May 1995, the oldest bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, Pickwick Books at McCadden Avenue, shut its doors. The space had been a bookstore continuously since 1931. ‘The neighborhood wasn’t supporting the store,” said a spokesperson for Barnes and Noble, who had bought the business. The bookstore had survived every recent fiasco, including harassment from Bass brothers with their urban village plans. The space reopened as T-shirt Island and later as a Starbucks and the Erotic Museum.
Red-tagged, the historic Mar-cal/World, 6025 Hollywood Boulevard, lost its front and lobby. Owners replaced it with a cinder block box.
The Celebrity Theater on Vine Street became another transient-arson casualty, suffering multiple fires, 1996.
One of the oldest commercial buildings in the historic district (1913) quietly disappeared at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, leaving a vacant lot. (See also page 328).
Procter & Gamble closed the Max Factor Museum a year later, at the start of the tourist season. The Dow Jones company had bought Max Factor in a one-billion-dollar deal with Revlon in 1991. The Art Deco building on Highland had become the Max Factor Museum, a temporary exhibit for the 1984 Olympics that proved so popular it had remained open. The chief archivist for Procter & Gamble said that the company’s operations in Maryland and Ohio were too far from Hollywood to make the museum worthwhile.
Vine Street’s Streamline Moderne beauty, the Hollywood Recreational Center, was vacated in 1993. Night people invaded it and the structure next door, and trashed and burned them in early 1996. Built as a bowling alley, the Streamline building combined with the adjacent structure, the Hollywood Roof Ballroom (remodeled in 1938 to match the Recreational Center) gave ABC a radio center. Merv Griffin bought the complex in the late ‘70s and renamed it the Celebrity Theater. Griffin’s last seasons of his talk show came from here. When Griffin sold his business to Coca-Cola in 1986, Steven Spielberg asked the beverage giant to donate buildings to the Starbright Pediatric Network for a worldwide research center providing medical and psychological care for seriously ill children. However, Starbright’s executive staff preferred to remain in Beverly Hills. “I hate to hear about the fire,” Merv Griffin told a reporter. “That wipes out every good memory of mine. I was in awe of what went on in there.”
The damage to the Celebrity Theater was estimated at $500,000, a sum that did not seem unattainable. Yet no move was made to immediately repair, rehabilitate, and secure the buildings. The burned-out Celebrity Theater became a center for runaway teenagers. Police advised TV crews to stay out of the buildings. A second suspicious fire occurred in February 1997. Three years later, the building continued to house transients who broke windows, threw debris onto the sidewalk, and covered the exterior with graffiti.
The vintage Strothers Mortuary building at Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle disappeared during Halloween 1996. The structure had found adapted reuse in its last years as a successful Equity-waiver theater. The ‘94 earthquake vacated it. The owners, Nederlander Organization, wanted it down. Once Hollywood’s longest-running mortuary, the mayhem caused by Virginia Rappe’s funeral merited the building special note. Bela Lugosi’s funeral there could have cemented its status for tourists. The CRA put no moratorium on its demolition, nor did it give any public notice. The Los Angeles Building and Safety said Strothers Mortuary was not a historic building. That Halloween, Jackie Goldberg decided to initiate for Hollywood Boulevard a yearly street party, shutting it to traffic for the night.
Strothers Mortuary, 6420 Hollywood Boulevard, during demolition, 1996.
The local preservation organization, Hollywood Heritage, quiet on many of these demolition issues, had its own troubles. Arsonists burned the organization’s Studio Museum Barn on Highland Avenue in 1996, requiring several years of restoration.
The exodus of businesses accelerated after the earthquake. Two prominent jazz clubs closed. J.J. Newberry ceased operations in its historic building after over eighty years in Hollywood. An employee told a reporter that the only customers were drug addicts, homeless people, and thieves. (A fire had gutted the store’s original interior in the 1980s.) The last chain-clothing store in Hollywood also closed. Four more radio stations left Hollywood. KISS Radio, in Hollywood for fifteen years, moved to Burbank. Motown left Sunset and Vine for Wilshire’s “new Hollywood.”
New York, Tokyo, London, Sydney, and even Mogadishu, Somalia, had lighted Coca-Cola billboards when Coke pulled the plug on its Hollywood sign. Lit since 1936, the last version, “Enjoy Coca-Cola,” had red waves that danced on and off. Coke said the rent got too high.
Meanwhile, shoddy subway work near an underground spring at Berendo Street triggered a dramatic 70×70-foot
-wide sinkhole at Hollywood Boulevard in June 1995. It took nearly $60 million to repair the damage.
Runyon Canyon, a city park since 1984, made the news when MTA contractors accidentally buried a giant tunneling machine underneath it. An aboveground rail through the Cahuenga Pass, the historic way to the north, would have cost less, but the MTA had decided to tunnel under the Santa Monica Mountains. When hillside residents mobilized to stop the tunneling, the MTA settled the lawsuit, limiting underground explosives.
The agency continued to pump one million gallons of water per day from beneath Runyon Canyon. This caused controversy when long-running springs, like the one in Nichols Canyon, dried up. Though the MTA said it was drought-related, the agency replaced the natural streams with water from city mains.
A longtime resident, Jimmie Hicks, wrote in a local newspaper, “It has been sad to see the decline of Hollywood as landmark after landmark has been closed or destroyed — usually because of the greed of some developer. The businesses have been reduced to mostly junk stores and fast food stands. Add to the suffering the CRA, which has thrown away millions of dollars without helping the community one bit.”
The popular jazz club, Legends, 6555 Hollywood Boulevard (1995 photo), moved to Burbank. The building remained vacant until a nightclub, King King, reopened it in 2002.
Coca-Cola turned off their Hollywood Boulevard sign in the mid-1990s (pictured here in 1965).
HELPING HANDS
Many had hoped the CRA would encourage new media production studios in Hollywood, especially along the southern blocks of Sunset Boulevard between Vine and Western. Instead, the CRA fostered superstores, companies whose profits went out of the area and who abetted the disappearance of local identity. Office supply giant Staples built at Sunset and Wilcox in 1994. Three years later, nearby Alexander’s Stationers, a Hollywood fixture for sixty-one years, closed.
The Story of Hollywood Page 37