Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire
...and a view of the building on the southwest corner of the intersection, which, "anchored" by a CVS, looks like it might have a chance to stay.
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That's the Hollywood Western Building, 5500 Hollywood Blvd, LA Cultural Historic Landmark #336. Can't let that one go by without a nod, and it's a good excuse to post some of my backlog of pix.
Designed by S Charles Lee. Financed by Louis B Mayer and Irving Thalberg:
http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt6p3022jd/
Night-time Grand Opening 8 December 1928, complete
with search-lights and bunting:
http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt009nc28p/
Norma Shearer unlocks the door with a golden key at the "premiere", 8 December 1928.
With her from left, a smiling Irving Thalberg, the exquisite Leila Hyams, co-star with Billy Haines of MGM's first (partial) talkie, "Alias Jimmy Valentine" (1928), Shearer, S Charles Lee looking like he'd just swallowed a very large canary, Owen Lee(?), the delightful Raquel Torres, star of MGM's silent "White Shadow in the South Seas (1928) and Sidney Weisman, Building Manager.
http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt3v19q2vb/
A second shot for coverage (Irving doffs his hat, Norma holds her pose):
Botticino marble lined the lobby. The elevator cab interiors were of mahogany with gold-leaf accents. Elevator doors were of bronze as were the lighting fixtures. Only the ground floor covers the full site. The upper floors form an ell along the Hollywood and Western frontages.
The Hollywood Western was purpose built for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), including the Hays Office. (Irving Thalberg was particularly interested in proving Hollywood could police itself, he even helped write the Hays Office "Don'ts and Be Carefuls"). The building also housed Central Casting, the Ben Hecht Company, other producers and various Industry-support businesses. In the basement, with stairs leading directly from the sidewalk on the Western Avenue side of the building, was Hollywood Billiards and Bowling. The pool hall, "Hollywood's oldest" had been founded at a previous location in 1916. The pool hall lasted until the 1990s when the basement entrance was boarded over. My kindly, elderly, Hollywood neighbor, Mr. Dexter, owned the business for many years. He had great stories about the place:
pinterest
Hollywood Billiards and Bowling (detail from from first photo above):
It's interesting that the Hays Office was in the building as S Charles Lee jokingly claimed that the panels decorating the fire escapes introduced porn to Hollywood:
http://books.google.com/books/about/...d=ZZ3UNjXdYvoC
A classically-inspired (AKA nude) depiction of film-making, although the folks behind the camera are clothed (there's six of these panels in total):
http://www.justabovesunset.com/photo...l_casting.html
Mercury, the god of commerce, with a movie camera (a dozen Mercurys adorn the building):
http://www.justabovesunset.com/photo...l_casting.html
Cast-stone figures representing the Arts (Drama, Literature, Music, Architecture and Film) repeat along the pediment and others, representing Film Directors and Producers, are grouped to support the now-vanished central tower. A head representing Business forms the keystone of the arched entry. The decorations were supposed to celebrate film as the union of art and commerce.
The building has tuned up as a location in a few films. Here's Byron Barr in "Double Indemnity" (1944):
Paramount Studios/netflix
This is a picture of the old Rector Hotel, diagonally across the intersection from the Hollywood Western Building.
I like it because I'm a sucker for '49 Fords and Red Cars (especially together):
http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/hbline.htm
By the 60s Hollywood and Western had become the most notorious intersection in Hollywood. Bukowski country. The Pioneer Chicken with its big red, white and baby blue arches (which figured in several Bukowski stories), was marooned in its parking lot on the site of the old Rector Hotel. In the 70s, a neighbor of mine, new to LA, naively stopped here on his way home late one night and was attacked by a gang of men and women who slit his throat, stole his wallet and boots and left him for dead between two parked cars. It took 144 stitches to close his neck.
Bukowski glides through his fave intersection while he reminisces about the clientele of Pioneer Chicken (in the background)
and the bad old days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xey8sffnFvk
The Hollywood Western Building's tenants were then producing actual porn of the sketchiest variety in studios on the upper floors. Ground-floor space was given over to cheap music rehearsal studios (Studio 9, Hollywood Rehearsal Studios). Guns n Roses used to practice here trying to soak up some cred. Strange, strung-out individuals lived rent-free in forgotten crevices of the building. Mayhem ruled the halls. Hookers, junkies, porn workers, groupies and thieves used to spill out on the sidewalk to drag themselves across to Pioneer Chicken, which was open 24/7. It did a roaring business (not just in chicken). The cops took their cut of various enterprises and shrugged.
The building stumbled along in this vein until the Northridge quake in '94. Then the building got red-tagged and squatters moved in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHhO6bvnLZQ
Los Angeles Times COVER STORY :
Red-Tagged Relics : Battered, Blighted Hollywood Landmarks Teeter on Edge of Extinction
October 09, 1994|SCOTT COLLINS
When the Hollywood-Western building was completed in 1928, movie star Norma Shearer opened it with a golden key. Today, the young vagrants who live there don't need any keys--the back door is wide open and admits anyone brave enough to enter.
In these offices, early movie moguls made big decisions on censorship, antitrust laws and trade unions. Now squatters use the rooms as crash pads, slumbering amid ripped sofas, crumbled plaster and dried puddles of blood.
The 66-year-old building--Los Angeles historic-cultural monument No. 336--is rotting inside and out, a victim of the January earthquake and years of apathy and neglect.
Preservationists worry that the red-tagged architectural jewel, an Art Deco landmark on the southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, will soon fall through the bureaucratic cracks and face the wrecking ball--if one of its illegal inhabitants doesn't set fire to the place first....
More:
http://articles.latimes.com/1994-10-...wood-boulevard
The turnaround:
Los Angeles Times: Hollywood Face Lift Hopes to Reclaim a Building and an Era
Private passion and public money are rescuing the building.
January 23, 1999|BETTINA BOXALL
...The nudes have been cleaned up, the ground-floor bargain store will be gone by the end of the month and the garbage has been shoveled off the floors.
Private passion and public money are rescuing the building--or at least attempting to, since ultimately only a revived neighborhood and appreciative tenants will keep it alive.
The 1994 earthquake that nearly destroyed the building shook loose the government funds to fix it: a $2.3-million earthquake rehabilitation loan from the Community Redevelopment Agency, along with a $1-million city housing loan to renovate an adjacent apartment building that in its early days reputedly housed the mistresses of studio executives.
The quake "was a mixed blessing in a sense," said Mirta Ocana, a deputy for City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. "We just didn't have the funds to do it, and now we got the money."
The private push has been supplied by Matthew Lesniak, an architecture buff and former mime who made the building's salvation something of a personal crusade after learning of the landmark's bleak post-earthquake state...
More:
http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jan/23/local/me-829
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywo...stern_Building
The discreet and convenient little apartment building to the left of the Hollywood Western building at 1167 Western Ave (also visible in the quoted shot at the top of the post), said to be the former home for producers' mistresses back in the MPAA days, was also rehabbed as part of the deal:
gsv
Not exactly what it was. The neon and the tower are gone. The street entrance to the basement is still blocked. The whole place has been given a trivializing pastel paint-job.
The building was "renovated", not "restored", but it's better than the bulldozer. Someone can always do a proper job later.
City Council member Eric Garcetti, scion of one of our less savory crime families (son of Gil Garcetti, former DA) has his Hollywood offices there now. He's smugly confident he'll be LA's next Mayor.
One more look back:
islandora UCLA S Charles Lee archive
And a current (9/12/15) shot from
Matt Maxwell which displays the new, deeper-toned paint job. Much more handsome:
mattmaxwell
P.S.
Upcoming development at Hollywood and Western:
"LGBT Oldsters Getting Hollywood & Western Apartment Complex"
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/0...nt_complex.php
"High Line West Bringing Apartments, Retail, Elevated Park to Hollywood and Western"
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/1...nd_western.php