Note: This is an encore post from 2011.

I picked up “The Big Picture,” Melba Levick and Stanley Young’s 1988 book about Los Angeles murals, not realizing what a terribly sad book it would be. As Young notes: “Most artists are aware that, exposed as it is to the elements, both human and natural, there is a limited life-expectancy for any mural.”

I wanted it for one picture, specifically.

“The Big Picture” is listed on Amazon and Bookfinder.

The picture I wanted was Kent Twitchell’s “Freeway Lady,” a destroyed artwork that was one of my favorites. Unfortunately, the book is a catalogue of murals that have either been blotted out or badly damaged by vandals and the elements.

More important, as we are debating super-graphics on large buildings, the book serves as a reminder of the enormous murals that were painted in downtown Los Angeles and in Hollywood as ads for Nike in a campaign by the Chiat-Day agency.

A gigantic mural titled “Baseball” by David Larks covers what was then the Bekins Building. The building is, of course, blank today.

3614 S. Grand Ave., via Google maps’ street view.

And here’s John McEnroe by David Larks and Adam Lustig, looming over the Pantages Theatre.

6246 Hollywood Blvd., via Google maps’ street view.

And even the murals that survive are in terrible condition:

Here’s how Ruben Brucelyn’s “Sports” looked in 1988.

604 Glendale Blvd. via Google maps’ street view.

Here’s a particularly annoying example. I see Twitchell’s “Bride and Groom” and East Los Angeles Streetscapers’ “El Nuevo Fuego” every day because it’s on the Victor Clothing Building (formerly the City Hall Annex) next to The Times parking structure. Only now it looks like this:

I’m sure Levick and Young intended “The Big Picture” as a celebration of one of the great things about Los Angeles and instead it serves as a requiem for what is no more. Even “Ed Ruscha Monument,” which is on the cover, has been destroyed.  (Twitchell sued the U.S. and 11 other defendants for $1.1 million in 2008.)

It’s important to note that “The Big Picture” also documents vernacular artwork found on the Eastside and Judy Baca’s famous “Great Wall,” in the San Fernando Valley, which has suffered its own type of destruction.

Is there any hope in all the gloom and doom?

After all, Baca told Patt Morrison last year: “We’re in the most destructive time ever in the history of murals in L.A.”

“Nino y Caballo” by Frank Romero is peeling and has been vandalized.

Well, I bought “The Big Picture” at the Last Bookstore, which just opened at Spring and 5th streets. So far, the shop seems to be popular. Is it too great a leap to see a connection between downtown’s rebirth and a renaissance in murals? I suppose so. Then again, I wonder what “Freeway Lady” would look like printed as a super-graphic and hung on the Hotel Figueroa.

Note: At last report, “Freeway Lady” is to be repainted on a section of the Student Services Building at Los Angeles Valley College.

The Christmas House in Boyle Heights, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Note: This is an encore post from 2019.

Long before the inauguration of Instagram and trying to win social media by posting the most elaborate or flashy photo, George G. Skinner designed a homespun holiday light installation in the late 1930s meant as a simple opportunity to enjoy happy times and pleasures with friends and family. A popular holiday destination in Los Angeles similar to Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena, the Christmas House at 919 S. Mathews St. perhaps inspired later fancy holiday light displays throughout Southern California.

Born in Canada in 1912, George Skinner found himself in Los Angeles when his father Albert abandoned the family and took his son with him to sunny Southern California in 1920. The teenager developed a strong bond with his father, enjoying camping and beach trips. Though he yearned for his family, he remained with his dad, who told George that the warm weather better suited his health.

Mary Mallory’s “Living With Grace” is now on sale.

“Hollywood Celebrates the Holidays” by Karie Bible and Mary Mallory is available at Amazon and at local bookstores.

Jean Portland, left, and Windy Gilmore, in bathing suit, play in “snow” after a fire damaged the Christmas House in 1938, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

George thrived. In 1934 he was about to graduate from business school and hoped to propose to his girlfriend. While swimming laps at the Los Angeles City College pool May 22, 1934, George suddenly lost feeling in his arms and legs. Two strong athletes rescued him from the pool as he sank toward the bottom.

Rushed to Los Angeles County General Hospital, Skinner would spend two years encased in a huge, casket-like 650-pound iron lung to recover from polio.  Friends and neighbors visited often, showering him with cookies, candy, letters, cards and books. Skinner vowed to one day repay these people for their kind deeds.

Inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who also had polio, Skinner devoted himself to getting better. In one of his fireside chats, Roosevelt mentioned hydrotherapy and the healing waters of Warm Springs, Georgia. George yearned to try it, but Los Angeles County Hospital only offered hydrotherapy in its pool freely to those under 21. George received the treatment after writing a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt with the help of a nurse, as long as he could pay whenever he could.

In May 1936, Skinner finally went home to the tiny white bungalow with its white picket fence and small porch, wearing a body brace on his upper body and steel braces on both legs, using canes to aid his mobility. Tool and die maker father Albert struggled to support his son, but found enough money to construct a simple backyard gym to help him gain strength.

The Christmas House grew out of George’s dreams during his two year stay at the hospital, when he imagined Christmas in Canada with his far away mother, who taught him everything about the true holiday spirit. Good at design and construction, Skinner hoped to entertain and enthrall children, and thank his neighbors for their generous and kind support of him. He sincerely aspired to grace others with a little bit of sunshine just as he had been blessed. Working on his proposed design kept his mind occupied, a chance to escape from Depression blues.

That first year, 1936, George creatively devised a glittering light display through simple but smart ways. Per his daughter’s book, “The Christmas House,” George figured out that mirrors would increase the twinkly light display, freezing steam would make icicles to hang from the rooftop, painting cereal flakes white could replicate snow, and playing 78s of Christmas carols on the family record player would provide a little musical ambiance which people could sing along with.

George’s giving attitude and boundless energy inspired businesses and even movie studios to lend costumes or props or even make a small donation. Snow shipped in from Utah was dumped on the front lawn and when it melted, ingenious George dressed up his cereal flakes with white spray paint to serve as snow. Father Albert constructed a Santa figure for the roof and even dressed up as Santa to surprise guests, aided by a wishing well equipped with recording equipment and microphone.

Members of the Women’s American Legion Sunrise Post 370 pulled together his designs and watered the 12 eight-foot tall live trees inside as well as making hot chocolate to share with the many visitors.

The first time Albert flipped the switch turning on the lights, the fuses blew from overload. George realized they were drawing twice the electricity provided by the power company. Telephoning the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, George mentioned that a reporter from the Herald-Express was coming to cover the Christmas House opening. The supervisor offered to loan him an emergency generator.

Radio stations and newspapers like the Los Angeles Times ran stories about the enthusiastic young man and his sweet cause, inspiring bumper to bumper traffic from admiring gawkers. The December 21, 1936, Los Angeles Times reported on Skinner’s display, noting that two elaborately lighted and decorated Christmas trees stood on the front lawn. The Times stated, “The snow effect on the roof is made of cotton batting; the icicles are covered strips of rubber and the flake snow in the yard is the chemical kind used by motion picture studios.” The stories drew tens of thousands of marveling Angelenos, creating what might be the first “Happiest place on earth.”

In 1937, papers announced that 265 carolers would serenade guests and serve homemade pastries with milk and hot apple cider. Eight life-size reindeer towing Santa’s sleigh graced the roof and even more decorations and costumes were loaned by businesses and studios. The Santa Rosa Republican on December 25, 1937 ran a photo feature, noting that decorations included 150 pounds of artificial snow, 304 feet of tinsel, 250 pounds of cotton, and more than 350 electric lights adding sparkly charm to the house. Papers in 1938 estimated that over 80,000 children toured the exhibit.

George spent the year of 1938 getting ready for the next big show, focusing on a Snow White theme to coincide with the Walt Disney Company’s animated feature released that year. Decorations included a wishing well, cascading waterfall, sparkling Christmas lights, and replicas of Snow White’s cottage, all complementing the 30 Douglas firs trucked from Tahoe inside the house. Skinner’s passion and enthusiasm continued to inspire business owners to donate goods and services, with even the Los Angeles Department of Power and Light paying the family’s light bill.

On December 8, a fire causing $10,000 worth of damage swept through the bungalow, resulting from faulty wiring. The interior was badly damaged, as well as half of the display. Heartbreakingly, the family lacked insurance. The December 15 Los Angeles Times reported the 16 person crew, 12 women and four men, began reconstructing the site after spending six months building props and six weeks getting everything ready. The cleaned up site, with damaged areas hidden under fake snow and tinsel, opened to the public on December 19, with papers later estimating that over 100,000 visited Christmas House that year.

On May 17, 1939, Joe Seewerker and Charles Owens wrote and illustrated a column about the Christmas House and its demise for the Times, but stating that a stray cigarette caused the fire. They reported that as the family worked in the backyard, just hours from opening, a man tired of waiting stepped over the ropes preventing entry and ushered his wife and daughter into the home. When he carelessly threw away a cigarette, it landed on one of the 30 live trees inside the home, setting it ablaze.

George married Pearl Majoros in 1942, moving out of the Mathews Street home, which was eventually demolished. The Skinners moved to Hollywood by the late 1940s, with George working as a sound engineer and later designer at movie studios. After the birth of his daughters, Skinner and his wife even devised a shimmering display for their Curson Avenue home.

Other areas of Southern California began displaying elaborate Christmas lights, from the Griffith Park Light Display to the boat parade at Naples to neighborhoods like Upper Hastings Ranch in Pasadena and Candy Cane Lane in the San Fernando Valley. Soon these decorations became a way to bedazzle crowds and outdo neighbors rather than a sincere effort to enjoy the holiday spirit.

Daughter Georja collected the stories on her father’s Christmas House for her 2005 book, hoping to inspire readers with her father’s indomitable spirit. His work pulling together the holiday house healed his life emotionally and spiritually. In the concluding paragraph of her book, Skinner states, ”My hope is that the story of the Christmas House might help others find a way to hold on to and strive for whatever they believe in, no matter how impossible their goals might seem.” Focus on possibilities, not insurmountable obstacles. Following George Skinner’s maxim, “Dream big. Otherwise, why bother?”

Merry Christmas!

From its beginnings, Los Angeles attracted dreamers and schemers looking to devise new, more successful lives. Early leaders practiced hucksterism and hyperbole to draw Midwesterners and others to the golden, promised land of sunny Southern California and its budding metropolis Los Angeles. Umberto (Bert) Rovere arrived in Los Angeles and fashioned a successful life through his own boosterim and branding promoting his restaurant, The Paris Inn Cafe.

Born in Turin, Italy, in 1890, young immigrant Rovere sailed to New York in 1906, finding work as a waiter and employing his singing to help pay the bills. Gradually, he ended up as a busboy at the Waldorf Astoria, where he claimed to make $20 a week. Rovere worked as a singing waiter on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, performed with opera companies as a grand baritone, and sang occasionally in vaudeville acts preceding film screenings before arriving in Los Angeles in 1922. When not working, he found time to compete in running, wrestling, and swimming matches. During the summer of 1922, he even sang in a production of “Carmen” at the Hollywood Bowl.

Tired of the touring life, he took over downtown Los Angeles’ Paris Inn Cafe in 1924. Opened originally by Madame Zucca at the U.S. Hotel at Main and Market in 1920, the Paris Inn closed for a short time before Rovere reopened it after she moved on to open a new restaurant. The Dec. 28, 1924, Los Angeles Times proclaimed Paris Inn Cafe’s new opening, acknowledging singer Rovere as proprietor.

Looking to create a popular tourist attraction and hot spot, Rovere introduced singing waiters as entertainment, claiming the introduction of the practice in the cafe. Singers and dancers also performed twice daily. Rovere played to taste makers as well, hiring chef Innocente Pedroli, formerly a chef in Rome, Milan, and St. Moritz before stints at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel and San Francisco’s Fairmont. Pedroli claimed to speak three languages and cooking in them as well.

Paris Inn outgrew its original 110 E. Market location by 1929. In late November, the proprietors announced they would move next door to 210 E. Market, spending a combined $150,000 for land, construction, and furnishings for an elegant European cafe featuring its own miniature Eiffel Tower and Parisian street scene for its’ bohemian “lowbrow” side and more upscale furnishings for its’ “highbrow” three private dining rooms and 500 seat banquet hall. Per city permits, Amy Phillips was listed as owner, with S.N. Benjamin serving as architect. At the January 4, 1930,  cornerstone laying, Judge Carlos S. Hardy and Eugene W. Biscailuz appeared.

A few weeks behind schedule, the glamorous new Paris Inn Cafe opened March 26, 1930, now claiming a combined $300,000 was spent in creating the fabulous nightspot. The March 20 Los Angeles Daily News stating that “the ‘lowbrow’ side is an exact duplicate of the interiors of Paris’ enticing cafes. Fantastic paintings adorn a wall, incredibly ancient looking with the cobwebs and delightful mustiness, so long associated with fast Parisian restaurants.” Artist Art Feigl updated the design and Muschi created the elaborate paintings.

Proprietor/manager Rovere served as master of ceremonies and singer, along with other acts like singing waiters, nine-piece orchestra, and dancers Julio Velasco and Miss Angeleno, Dorothy Granger, performing the tango, sparkplug dance, and Mexican hat dance. Opening night included apache dancers, “Spanish, French, and Italian street singers,” along with jazz orchestra and string orchestra. Ads proclaimed newsreels would film the opening, along with KTM broadcasting it on the radio. Always looking to remain hip, Rovere added electric organ that fall, updating his talent regularly.

Popular from the beginning, the Paris Inn attracted Europeans, vacationers, and even celebrities for its lavish entertainment. In the mid-1920s, the club featured motion picture nights and parties with regulars like Bull Montana.

Artful Rovere practiced skillful publicity and advertising, gaining mentions in society and cafe columns along with buying ads in newspapers and creating an elaborate lithographic postcard. Listings in the city directory stated, “Dine, Dance, Romance, Singing Waiters, Open Daily Except Sunday, Matinee Dansants, Suppers,” and a 1933 listing called the cafe “The House of Singing Chefs and Waiters.” In 1931, Rovere even added a fancy rooftop sign.

Broadening his reach and brand, Rovere landed a twice daily radio show on KNX in 1931, lasting six years. In 1932, Rovere composed the music for the “Paris-Inn Cafe” foxtrot along with F.P. Marini, with lyrics from C. Stedman. Fernando L. Cabello even composed a radio jingle titled “Paris Inn Is on the Air,” which acknowledged singing waiters and Rovere’s and Pedroli’s management. Columbia Radio Network took over broadcasting of the Cafe’s show in 1937.

Successful beyond his wildest dreams, Rovere purchased a part interest in Lucca’s in the mid-1930s before buying full interest in 1940. The Paris Inn Cafe remained in operation at 210 3. Market through the end of 1949, before construction of a jail on the block. The Paris Inn reopened at 845 N. Broadway in late summer 1950, without elaborate decoration or hipness. Rovere moved on as well, retiring to the Lake Elsinore area before dying in 1957.

Masterful in advertising, creative in design, Rovere devised one of Los Angeles’ earliest programmatic and theme restaurants with his cafe’s lavish decoration, along with creating one of the first jingles promoting his business. Rovere’s singing for his supper paid off, making him one of Los Angeles’ earliest celebrity restaurant owners.

Note: This is an encore post from 2011.

Most people today probably haven’t heard of motion picture musical conductor Constantin Bakaleinikoff, but he was instrumental in setting up theatre orchestras around Los Angeles in the 1920s, before he became music director at several film studios.

Born in Moscow, Bakaleinikoff served in the Russian army in World War I before immigrating to the United States after the Bolshevik Revolution. He played the cello in the Los Angeles Philharmonic for several years. Likewise, his brother Vladimir later traveled to L.A. to play in classical groups as well.

Bakaleinikoff left the Philharmonic after a few years to head the Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre Orchestra, where he compiled, composed, and orchestrated scores to accompany features. He would soon head the Egyptian Theatre Orchestra, and later the Criterion Theatre Orchestra.

In 1923, Bakaleinikoff married the silent film actress Fritzi Ridgeway, who had originally starred in silents before falling to supporting parts. They lived at 2837 Beachwood Drive in Hollywoodland, where Ridgeway would buy properties, hire an architect to design and build houses, before she sold them to consumers. By 1927, Bakaleinikoff had become a United States citizen. He and Ridgeway later divorced.

With the coming of sound, Bakalenikoff joined Paramount as a musical director, later serving MGM, Columbia and RKO. He usually employed the credit C. Bakaleinikoff onscreen. During his studio career, he composed scores for about 40 shorts, and was nominated four times for Academy Awards for Best Original Score. He also appeared in four films as a conductor.

During his film career, he found time to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl for more than 20 years, as well as the Greek Theatre and other local venues.

Bakaleinikoff retired from the film business in the late 1950s, but would lead the Burbank Youth Symphony and Burbank Symphony Orchestra within a few years. While working for the city of Burbank, he commented to the Times that the government should support the arts, which would provide increased opportunities for participation as well as adding jobs. He died in 1966.

6376 Yucca Ave., via Google Street View.

More than 98 years old, the Halifax Apartments at 6376 Yucca Ave. exists due to boxing and the movies. Built by Leach Cross, known as the “boxing dentist,” the apartment house served as a solid investment in a city booming from the movies. Classy and elegant, the structure possesses a story as fancy as any movie.

The motion picture industry was exploding in the early 1920s as film production in the United States moved west from Fort Lee, N.J., to sunny, warm California. Blessed with abundant sunshine and varied landscapes within short drives, Hollywood grew exponentially as new production companies opened every day and men and women moved to the city looking for new opportunities.

A cigarette card showing Leach Cross, listed on EBay at $24.99.

Boxing dentist Leach Cross hoped for new beginnings too. Recently retired from the ring for the second time, he hoped to find a career in Hollywood while investing his earnings in real estate. Born Louis C. Wallach Feb. 12, 1886, in New York to a businessman father, Cross studied dentistry at New York University. Needing some extra money for school, he took up boxing in 1905, creating the name “Leach Cross” trying to hide his exploits from his parents.

A 135-pound lightweight, Cross fought at a time when matches could last 40-50 rounds until someone literally collapsed. In 1909, Cross lost a 41-round fight. Though he graduated with his dentistry degree, Cross loved the thrill and money of boxing. He continued the sport through 1916, though he possessed only middling skills.

Recognizing his fame came more from his background than his actual talent, Cross took to the stage, playing up his history. Comedian Lonny Haskell helped him and lightweight world champion Abe Attell create an act, which they premiered at Hammerstein’s in 1910. With Attell as straight man and Cross as the comedian, the two performed exhibition matches and comedy sketches. In 1913, comedian Fred Mace hired Cross to perform boxing skits in some of his one- and two-reel comedies. Cross set up his own film company in 1914 with two of his brothers, hoping to “engage in the motion picture business in all its branches.”

Though nothing came from the company, he did appear in some films, such as a small scene in the 1917 Douglas Fairbanks film “Reaching for the Moon,” where he and others tried to attack Fairbanks. Cross trained some stars in the pugilistic sport after his first retirement in 1916, but realized he missed boxing, returning to the sport for a short time in 1921 to pad his funds before retiring permanently.

Unlike many of his compatriots, Cross saved and invested his money. By 1921, he looked for profitable ways to increase his savings. Harry Carr wrote in the Jan. 20, 1922, Los Angeles Times that the boxer intended to build something “midway between a regular hotel and an apartment house” on land he had recently purchased. About the same time, Camera magazine reported in its gossip column that he had purchased “a tract of land at Cahuenga and Yucca, where he intends to build an apartment house that will be a credit to Hollywood.” Six months later, Cross went to court, winning the right to permanently change his name from Wallach to Cross in order to play off his fame.

Papers noted in early February 1923 that Cross planned to build a four-story, 172-room Class C apartment hotel building for $225,000, hiring renowned architects Walker and Eisen, architects of such structures as the Oviatt Building, Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and United Artists Theatre to design a striking facade. Opening onto Yucca, the building would contain lounge area, kitchen, and public rooms in which guests could entertain. Guests could stay for short times or rent for long periods. Cross’ wife Alta, a painter of some renown, helped decorate the interiors. Copying old masters and creating her own landscapes, she turned out 150 paintings to fill the building, known as the Cross Arms Apartments.

After owning for less than a year, Cross sold the building, furniture, and lease on the property on June 1, 1924, to Boston financier A. C. Burrage for $1 million, moving into the restaurant/nightclub business. His restaurants did well for a few years before the stock market crash virtually wiped him out. Cross returned to New York and once again worked as a dentist, later serving as a New York boxing referee.

The apartment building in the 1927 film “Fast and Furious.”

Burrage made further upgrades to the building and renamed it the Halifax Apartments in December 1924. Located a block above Hollywood Boulevard, the house served as home base for actors like Ned Sparks and Henry Heink, son of opera singer Madame Schumann-Heink, as well as those attempting to break into the business. Thanks to its public rooms, the new Halifax hosted luncheons and lectures as well as occasional small film screenings. The building appeared in the 1927 Universal film “Fast and Furious” as well, in a scene with Reginald Denny in an office at the intersection of Hollywood and Cahuenga looking north up the street towards the building and the Hollywoodland Sign on the hill.

While few celebrities actually lived in the building, dramatic events happened in and around it, often including tragedy to its residents. On June 2, 1928, 25-year-old aspiring screenwriter Helen Carlyle was one of the first to commit suicide in the building, swallowing poison. In late July 1931, a water main pipe burst a few blocks down the street, flooding the basement and lobby of the building. Robert Horner, another 25-year-old living in the building, died in a car crash May 4, 1935, on a hunting trip with actors Junior Durkin and Jackie Coogan when the car was forced off the road by another roadster, hit rocks, and ran over an embankment. Along with Horner, Durkin and Coogan’s father Jack Coogan Sr. were killed, while the famous young actor himself survived while being thrown from the car and landing in a tree, breaking bones. On July 21, 1948, 65-year-old resident Bess Mumford jumped from a 12-story building downtown to her death.

A murder also occurred in the Halifax. Resident Hyman Miller, a 31-year-old sports promoter and deli owner, was shot to death in his room Nov. 15, 1937, surviving in a coma for a few days before dying, days after being questioned about the rackets. The police suspected actor Dennis (Danny) Wilson, who fled Nov. 26, 1937. For three years, Los Angeles detectives sought him before arresting him in New Orleans under the alias James Cannon but a judge later dismissed the charges for lack of evidence.

The Halifax saw several changes through the years as new ownership tried to maintain its refinement and attractions. By 1932, S.J. Straus took ownership of the building with Leigh Battson, second husband of Ned Doheny Jr.’s widow Lucy, serving as head of the Board of Trustees. The group hired Electric Products Corporation Jan. 24, 1933, to erect a neon roof sign, which still stands. An awning was erected in 1939, only to be removed in 1940. The apartment apparently changed hands in the 1940s before once again passing on to another in April 1955 when Louis Friedkin exchanged properties and $1.25 million with Max Drezdner. Keeping up with the times, he added a new pool.

By the late 1960s, the apartment house and its clientele slid slightly downhill along with the neighborhood as stars moved west to more upscale areas. Senior citizens began moving in, and in 1988 Regent Properties purchased the building, before selling to Halifax Properties in 2019. Halifax has painted and made upgrades, recognizing the quality construction of the building. One of the more recent tenants is the Thai Community Development Center.

Still a beauty 98 years later, the Halifax Apartments exudes class and dignity, a grande dame saluting Hollywood’s glory days of the 1920s.

The opening of “King of Kings at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Photo courtesy of Bruce Torrence.

Note: This is an encore post from 2017.

Still ready for its close-up, the TCL Chinese Theatre, originally Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, turns 90 on May 18, looking as glamorous and exotic as when it premiered on Hollywood Boulevard in 1927. Under construction for almost 16 months, the Chinese Theatre stands as perhaps legendary theatre impresario Sid Grauman’s ultimate masterpiece, a fabulous moving picture palace that outshines virtually anything produced by the Hollywood studio system.

While not the first film theatre devised and built by visionary Grauman, the Chinese Theatre represents the pinnacle of motion picture theatre construction, an atmospheric pleasure dome for the senses which still overwhelms with its unique beauty. Opening just two years before the start of the Great Depression, the theatre stands as a fascinating concoction of hallucinatory dream and kitsch, the ultimate symbol of success for those hoping to make it in motion picture business. Like the Hollywood Sign, the theatre acts as an iconic symbol for the city in which it was created, drawing people from around the globe hoping to soak up just a tiny bit of its special stardust.

Hollywood at Play, by Donovan Brandt, Mary Mallory and Stephen X. Sylvester is now on sale.

Sid Grauman, Charlie Chaplin, Norma Talmadge, Conrad Nagel and Anna Mae Wong were among the celebrities at the groundbreaking for the Chinese Theatre. Photo courtesy of Bruce Torrence.

The Chinese Theatre sprang out of the imagination of inquisitive Sid Grauman. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana March 17, 1879, Grauman and his family immigrated westward in search of fame and fortune in entertainment. Ending up in Dawson City, Alaska during the 1890s gold strike, the Graumans survived by providing shows to lonely miners before making it to San Francisco and opening small theatres before the Great Earthquake of 1906 destroyed them. Quick on his feet, Sid located a moving picture projector and began showing films in a tent. The family quickly prospered and acquired several film theatres around the area before Sid decided to seek his fortune in the western motion picture capital, Los Angeles.

Obtaining finance through partnering with Famous Players-Lasky, who purchased the family’s San Francisco chain of theatres, the Graumans purchased the Rialto and constructed their first elaborate moving picture theatre in downtown Los Angeles in 1918, the Million Dollar. Sid introduced what became to be his calling card, the world famous “Prologues,” which combined dance, singing, and showmanship to provide a thematic introduction to the films. Over the next nine years, Grauman would go on to open other elaborate theatres, including the Metropolitan and his first Hollywood showplace, the Egyptian Theatre, the site of his first grand Hollywood premieres.

An early postcard of the Chinese Theatre.

By 1924, Grauman had sold his interest in the downtown theatres to Famous Players-Lasky and concentrated his full attention in Hollywood, running the Egyptian and conceiving of new schemes before selling out the Egyptian to West Coast Theatres but continuing management. The January, 22, 1924 Hollywood Daily Citizen reported that Grauman had relinquished control of the downtown theatres and planned to open two new elaborate theatres in Los Angeles and one in Long Beach to realize long time dreams “to compete with any cinema palace in the country.” Grauman departed for a long European vacation to visit theatres.

His long percolating idea began taking shape that fall. The September 23, 1924 Exhibitors Trade Review stated that master showman Grauman intended to construct a 2,500 seat theatre in Los Angeles. On November 2 in Chicago, he announced plans to construct a new Hollywood theatre to cost approximately $2 million. Thanks to the help of renowned Hollywood real estate man C. E. Toberman, Grauman had obtained property at 6925 Hollywood Blvd. between Sycamore and Orange, and obtained a demolition permit on July 19, 1924 to remove the L. C. Jones residence, which has also been purported to be the residence of Francis X. Bushman.

For the next year, Grauman bided his time, lining up financing and working with architect Raymond Kennedy of Meyer and Holler to devise a fantastical design. Meyer and Holler had designed the gorgeous Egyptian, and logically worked on the Chinese as well. Main architect Kennedy focused on the more delicate Chippendale style of Chinese architecture, as well as more imaginative designs.

Sid Grauman, who followed the Million-Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles with the Egyptian and then the Chinese.

As usual, financing and construction matters took longer than anticipated to transpire. Film Daily announced Grauman’s elaborate plans to document construction on September 6, 1925. Grandstands would be constructed to allow journalists and the public to observe concrete pouring for the foundation, with a jazz band and other divertissements providing entertainment.

On October 13, 1925, Film Daily reported the formation of Grauman’s Greater Hollywood Theatre Inc. in Sacramento under the partnership of Grauman, United Artists executive Joseph Schenck, and producer Sol Lesser with $1 million in financing. The November 21, 1925 Moving Picture World called forthcoming construction of the Chinese Theatre “to make the finest palace of entertainment on earth… .” To creatively get things going, steel for the theatre’s trusses was feted at the new McClintic Marshall Company plant in south Los Angeles on Armistice Day, with Grauman and Chinese American actress Anna May Wong posing for photographs.

By December, financing plans had been finalized, with ownership split evenly between Grauman, Schenck, and West Coast Theatres in the construction of the Class A Theatre for $900,000. The December 16, 1925 Variety reported that Banks, Huntley and Co. submitted a $450,000 bond issue for the theatre, with some reports stating that the theatre would cost into the millions of dollars.

The foyer of the Chinese Theatre.

Newspapers across the country splashed stories regarding the elaborate groundbreaking at 7 pm on Tuesday, January 5, 1926, with 10,000 people coming to watch. Master showman Grauman lined up MGM actor Conrad Nagel as master of ceremonies, with Chinese bands and acrobats and prologue dancers from the Egyptian Theatres’ “The Big Parade” to perform in an elaborately staged Oriental garden flooded by spotlights and decorated with Chinese lanterns and banners. Chinese tea, cakes, and candy were served, before the ringing of large gongs announced the ceremony’s beginning.

Anna May Wong once again participated, this time in support of actress Norma Talmadge, Schenck’s wife. Talmadge lifted the first spadeful of dirt with a golden shovel and then pulled a level of a giant steam shovel to start excavation work. Thousands of exploding Chinese firecrackers completed the ceremony. Celebrities such as Louis B. Mayer, Schenck, A. P. Giannini, Charlie Chaplin, William Farrell of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and Dr. Wong Fook of the Chinese community attended, per wire reports.

A detail of one of the murals in the theater.

The February 6, 1926 Moving Picture World described construction plans for the 2,500 seat theatre, with an Oriental garden planned for the forecourt, and forty foot tall walls protecting it. The 40’ x 140’ stage would be one of the largest in the world, surrounded by a 65 foot tall proscenium arch. Fanciful Chinese sculpture and design would decorate interiors. Ticket prices for the flamboyant theatre would range from $1.65 to $2.50 and include Grauman’s legendary prologue before the two a day screenings. United Artists would now operate the theatre, as part of an original idea between Grauman, Schenck, and Shubert Theatres to open a chain of 22 movie palaces across the country. The Chinese would play top end “run” pictures intended to play for weeks or even months.

Grauman pulled his first permit March 29, 1926 for the theatre, with estimates of 109 tons of reinforced steel and 7,400 bbls of cement required for construction. Additional permits were pulled on July 16, to increase the size of the orchestra pit, stage doors, and for other alterations. The June 7 Los Angeles Times estimated that 800 tons of steel would be required for construction. On March 25, 1927, Electrical Products Corporation pulled permits to erect two vertical electrical signs.

While the Chinese was under construction, Grauman and Schenck joined with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and others to finance the building of the Roosevelt Hotel across the street, intended to serve as the abode for stars participating in premiere or special events at the Chinese. The Roosevelt opened shortly before the theatre.

Director Cecil B. De Mille at the premiere of “King of Kings,” the film that opened the Chinese.

Construction deadlines evolved over time, with optimistic projections of opening in late 1926 continually pushed back until May 18, 1927. In October 1926, Liu Yu Clung, a renowned Chinese scholar, appeared to examine approximately 46 models of statuary planned as decoration, all constructed by the model shop on the property devised by Meyer and Holler in order to study lighting and effect work.

On February 12, director Cecil B. DeMille and Grauman signed an agreement for “King of Kings” to receive its West Coast premiere at the opening of the theatre as work moved madly forward to reach May completion. By March, Grauman was ensuring secrecy on decoration by posting guards and barriers to prevent people from seeing the facade until the grand opening.

On April 30, 1927, Sid Grauman hosted America’s Sweetheart Mary Pickford and dashing action hero Douglas Fairbanks in the first hand and footprint ceremony in the theatre’s forecourt, with photos sent by wire across country. Grauman announced that he hoped to obtain the prints of Hollywood’s major stars to decorate the theatre’s exterior before the theatre’s opening, but only Norma Talmadge’s ceremony beat the May 18 premiere.

Motion Picture News saluted Grauman on May 11, 1927 for the upcoming opening of the Chinese. They noted how Grauman was the first to recognize the importance of the organist in accompanying silent films, the first to introduce trousered usherettes, the first to use the overhead spot, creating the prologue, and the like.

Grauman’s Chinese was featured in Variety.

Hollywood businesses joined in to celebrate the Chinese Theatre’s opening. The May 13 Los Angeles Times noted that the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and its Retail Merchants’ Bureau heartily joined in, hoping to promote their own businesses with a week long list of celebrations. Each agreed to decorate their own buildings, street lamps, electric poles, cafes, hotels, and the like in Chinese decoration, along with street parades, floats, night celebrations, bands, orchestras, and all street lights the length of Hollywood Boulevard in the main business district to be turned into Chinese lanterns for the week. A gigantic dragon more than several hundred feet long would also take part in the parade.

The Wednesday, May 18 ceremony sold out within two days of its announcement at $11 per ticket, one of the highest ever. It dazzled the thousands of people outside the theatre, 22,000 lining the sidewalks 10 deep. Huge spotlights crisscrossed the sky as stars arrived for the grand opening to walk the red carpet and be interviewed by radio. A veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood participated in the grand ceremonies, included the Chinese actor Sojin and San Francisco Mayor James Rolph.

A gorgeous color program promoted the theatre’s opening and the “King of Kings” premiere. Striking Oriental drawings decorated the pages, along with detailed and hyperbolic descriptions of the theatre. A pagoda like box office sat in the forecourt with bronze roof aged to the color of green jade to match that of the main theatre. Stone dragons and statues graced the exterior walls of the theatre, with the massive front doors flanked by gigantic red lacquer columns. The 2,200 seat auditorium “gives the impression of entering a gigantic shrine of the time of the Five Emperors…” and a giant chandelier in the form of a Chinese lantern hung in the massive lobby.

Mary Pickford waves from a biplane promoting Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

The fireproof curtain was described as replicating twin doors of an immense lacquered cabinet, opening to a stage four times the size of the average Los Angeles theatre. Power and lighting for stage shows operated from its own power plant. Furnishings were provided by Barker Bros. Oriental shop, including cow horn lanterns. Per the May 11 Variety, “The decorating scheme of the house is a color symphony based on the dominating color of Chinese art, red, interpreted in ruby, crimson, pale scarlet and coral lacquer, with complementary hues to to provide contrasting values… .”

Before the prologue, director Fred Niblo introduced D. W. Griffith as master of ceremonies, who then introduced director Cecil B. DeMille to describe the film. MPPDA director Will Hays said a few words before introducing Mary Pickford, who rang a bell to announce the curtain and start the prologue, which was supposed to start at 8:30 pm, but started late to arrivals having difficulty wading through the crowds. 200 people participated in the “Glories of the Scriptures” prologue, accompanied by the Chinese 100 piece orchestra, and Pryce Dunlavy Jr. at the mighty Wurlitzer organ, performing the score created by Dr. Hugo Reisenfeld. The 24 minute prologue focused on events in the Old Testament and included a dance sequence by Theodore Kosloff and his dancers and 125 performers for the first scene alone.

In the August 13, 1933, Lee Side of L.A. column, the otherworldly nature of a Grauman house was described. “…When you enter a Grauman house, you know you are leaving the world of reality behind and entering the world of make believe.” Still a stupendous achievement in architecture and atmospheric design, Grauman’s Chinese still enthralls all who enter its doors in search of superior and wondrous motion picture entertainment.
Hollywood Heritage will host a 90th anniversary celebration of the Chinese Theatre on May 1. Tickets are $20 to $50.

The home at 6831 De Longpre Ave., via Google Street View, as shown in 2014.

Historic buildings tell as much about people and their eras as they do about architecture and usage. Preserving the actual structure celebrates the past and honors those who inhabited or worked in the building. Historic preservation can entail restoring and preserving in place, maintaining its original use or adapting it for new purposes, or by moving a structure.  Alice A. Harrod preserved what is now 6831 De Longpre Ave. by moving it a few blocks from its original Highland Avenue address, keeping its story alive.

Born March 18, 1858, as Alice Dixon, Harrod grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, with her family, loyal to her church and community. In 1877, she married fellow Waterloo resident Shelton R. Harrod and gave birth to three daughters. Along the way she became a nurse, serving homebound patients. Shelton Harrod raised and purchased horses as well as property, serving one term as tax assessor for their city. He died of cancer in 1893 in Illinois.

A drawing of the home in the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 15, 1901.

To help support herself and her daughters, Harrod bought and sold property, using the 150 acres inherited from her husband. In 1903, oldest daughter, Enid, married another Waterloo resident, architect Arthur R. Kelly, and they moved to Hollywood for Kelly to pursue his dreams. Kelly first joined the Greene and Greene Brothers office before setting up his own architectural firm, designing churches, schools, and upscale residences. He eventually designed such structures as the original Hollywood Woman’s Club, Hollywood’s Hotel Christie, William S. Hart’s Santa Clarita home, and probably his most recognized structure, what is now the Playboy Mansion, originally the home of Arthur Letts.

Harrod suffered from health issues in the early 1900s. She experienced appendicitis in 1905, undergoing surgery, and while visiting her daughter in Hollywood in 1906, came near death before removal of part of her large intestine. Though Harrod returned to Waterloo, by 1914 she returned to Hollywood and lived with Kelly and his wife at 5346 Franklin Ave. for a few years while her youngest daughter attended the University of California at Berkeley. Harrod moved to 1746 Orange Drive by 1917 before eventually moving to 6833 De Longre Ave in 1920. She also served as one of First Baptist Church of Hollywood’s charter members.

1606 Highland Avenue, via Google Street View. The building was demolished to make way for an apartment building.

In 1923, Harrod purchased 1606 Highland Ave. which contained a Mission-style home on the property, in an area growing increasingly commercial. Recognizing the home’s beauty and perhaps recognizing a chance to preserve the environment, she moved the home to 6831 De Longpre Ave., adjacent to her own small, simple bungalow at 6833 De Longpre. Her son-in-law Kelly helped create a new foundation for the residence.

Moving homes and businesses was quite common at the time; the 1883 Los Angeles City Directory lists one home mover, and the 1923 City Directory lists 10 in their house movers section. Many people purchased lots and hired companies to move their homes via large wagons or a truck and trailer. Very large homes were often cut into two to three pieces and reassembled once they arrived at the new location. While not considered at the time, moving a home was the most green option, in that it required no new wood or other items for construction and nothing was tossed away.

Although certain documents claim a c. 1910 construction date for 1606 Highland Ave., research shows that the home was actually built in late December 1901 by architect William J. Bliesner as his own residence. Vintage records for the period do not exist, so it is not known what the original address would have been prior to the 1910 Hollywood annexation. The December 15, 1901, Los Angeles Evening Citizen News stated: “The first floor will contain a large reception hall, family room, den, dining-room and kitchen. On the second floor there will be four large bed chambers and bathrooms. The building will be lighted by electricity and supplied with modern conveniences generally…when finished, it will be another specimen of the adaptability of Mission architecture to comfortable family mansions.” Bliesner would own or reside in the home for almost 13 years.

Mission Revival architecture arose in California in the late 19th century and found inspiration in the design of the Spanish missions throughout California, mimicking the look of old missions with thick, unadorned stucco walls, bell towers, decorative Mission-shaped roof parapets, and red clay tile roofs, with deep door openings and windows. The Bliesner home features parapets, stucco walls, clay tile roof, and a deep door opening typical of Mission style.

Many residents called 1606 Highland Ave. home over the next two decades, perhaps because of its location on one of Hollywood’s busiest streets. In 1912, Hollywood Citizen society editor Mabel Lewis resided at the home with her family while Bliesner occupied a separate location. The architect returned to living in the home in 1913 and 1914. City directories show Good Fellows Grotto Cafe owner George Arnerich and family living here in 1916 before S.F. Max Puett resided in the property in 1917. By 1920, Dr. Joseph Robert Shuman and his family lived at the address, moving later that year. Harrod appears to have purchased the property in 1923 in order to take advantage of the growing commercial nature of the street.

Harrod hired her son-in-law Kelly to design a $26,000 brick, two-story, 13-room building to replace the home. It would act as the 1920s version of a mini-mall, with two-room offices for various companies. The structure was named the U.P.D. Building because United Producers and Distributors occupied most of it when completed. Exhibitor’s Trade Review also established an early office there. In 1924 and 1925, Screen Library Service occupied various rooms in its capacity as a motion picture casting company servicing studios not through casting directories filled with photos but via actual film to watch. The Persian Tea Garden Cafe, Wood Realty, and Jim’s Beauty Parlor also operated at the location through the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Hollywood Fashion Center School employed the building as their office. In the late 1930s the Farnlund Drum and Marimba School operated out of the complex.

By the 1940s, the building had offices for businesses such as publishing, security, bookkeeping and doctors. By the early-mid 2010s, new owners demolished the building. An apartment building recently finished construction on the site.

Harrod died in 1936 at the house on De Longpre after a long illness and is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park. Because she moved the two-story Mission residence from Highland Avenue, one of Hollywood’s oldest homes still stands proudly, a reminder of the area’s family feel of the early 1900s, when Hollywood still served as a mostly farming community far from cosmopolitan downtown Los Angeles.

The exterior of Paulais at Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas, c. 1925. Courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries and the California Historical Society.

The 1920s Jazz Age brought high-spirited verve, flamboyance and progressivism in reaction to the haunting death and destruction of World War I. Blending eclectic cultural elements, eye-catching colors, and lavish ornamentation, design of virtually every type reflected the more optimistic and exuberant period.

Dessert shops and cafes combined lavish decoration and sweet treats, appealing to all the senses. Why just buy treats when one could enjoy luxurious and upscale furnishings suggesting plentiful times for everyone? Henry G. Mosler and Saul Magnus’ Hollywood branch of their Paulais Cafe did just that, reflecting the jazz-mad time in its lush and stylish interiors. Two years before the opening of the Pig’N Whistle on Hollywood Boulevard, Paulais brought high-end elegance to dessert just east of the Egyptian Theatre.

The shops at Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas.

The Hollywood branch of Paulais reflected the cosmopolitan elegance of its two owners, Saul Magnus and Henry G. Mosler. Born in 1887, the son of well-to-do Cincinnati whiskey merchant Joseph Magnus, the young Magnus worked in his father’s businesses and served in World War I before buying Christopher’s Cafe and Candy Shop at 741 S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles in 1920. His co-partner and former Cincinnati resident Henry G. Mosler was born in Ohio in 1888, working for his father’s Mosler Safe Co. before going into business on his own and forming the business partnership in 1920.

Spending $100,000, they purchased and remodeled Christopher’s into the upscale Paulais, offering meals, desserts, candy, ice cream, and confections, opening in 1921. Growing success led them to open branches in the Ambassador Hotel and at Wilshire and Western by the mid-1920s. In 1924, they decided to branch out to Hollywood, opening an opulent store representing the exploding success of the neighborhood and its world-famous motion picture industry.

In February 1923, newspapers announced that the team had purchased a 25-year lease on 6702 Hollywood Blvd. for $500,000 just east of the Egyptian Theatre, with 60 feet of Hollywood Boulevard frontage to Las Palmas Avenue. The May 26 Hollywood Citizen reported the hiring of Edward Klarquist as architect for a four-story building featuring “elaborate interior decoration,” including $125,000 for first-floor furnishings. A year later, newspapers stated that the men had purchased a 99-year lease costing $1.6 million on the property, formerly owned by Eulalie Grass. Permits at this time reveal McNeil Swasey as architect and Joseph Emanuel as interior designer. Emanuel would create lush interiors for the Hollywood I. Magnin Department Store to open a few years later.

A September 22 Hollywood Citizen story described the swanky, colorful interior two weeks before its October 8, 1924, opening. The Venetian Renaissance-style building would feature mineral-stained blocks on the exterior “giving the appearance of an old weather-worn surface,” with encrusted Venetian medallions to add a showy touch. Display windows equipped with electricity, gas, and water could create elaborate effects, while the establishment also featured wrought-iron doors at the entrance with a gold-relief ceiling.

The interior would include tea room, fountain room, and men and women’s club and dressing rooms on the mezzanine. Electrical elevators would lift customers to this floor as would a rear staircase decorated with leaded cathedral windows. The basement would include the kitchen, refrigeration, and supply rooms. Ventilated pastry and confectionary display cases would line the left side of the fountain room with a 135-foot-long fountain, which featured walnut armchairs at a normal height from the floor. “Smartly immaculate attendants” would offer impeccable service to their clients. Imported tapestries would frame a stone fountain at the rear of the room designed by Richard Zeitner reproducing “The Spirit of the Woods.”

Paulais’ snappy color scheme would rival any peacock’s. “The color background for the tea room is Venetian green with hand decorated ceiling beams and Venetian canopies over the entrances. Upholstering will be of a canary yellow and blue stripped (sic) design with a narrow line of Morocco red outlining the stripes. A separate room in the same design adjoining the main tea room will accommodate small parties.” 200 employees could serve 8,000 guests daily in the swanky interior, which seated 475.

Paulais’ October 9 Hollywood Citizen News ad trumpeted Magnus and Mosler branding their restaurant as special, calling it a “confectaurant,” “…a new and superior arrangement for pleasing the varying moods and tastes of discriminating epicures. It combines the priceless atmosphere of great dining rooms with the excellent cuisine of masters…all at moderate prices…a palace of fine foods and unobtrusive service…of excellent appointments and a cuisine characteristic of those well trained.”

Celebrities helped inaugurate the showy sweet shop, adding sparkly stardust to festivities. Los Angeles Times fashion maven Peggy Hamilton headed the receiving line that evening, happily posing for photos with owners Magnus and Mosler and other partying celebrities. Adding a touch of humor, silent stars Bryant Washburn and Syd Chaplin dressed as snazzy soda jerks to serve ice cream to friends and family. Shapely starlets like Clara Bow, Carmelita Geraghty, Lillian Rich, Priscilla Dean, Helen Ferguson, and Virginia Lee Corbin served as hostesses, enjoying sweet treats and posing for the camera while other celebrities also partook of the tasty delectables. Paulais’ own Venetian Players strummed string instruments inside the cafe, while Roberts’ Golden State jazz band rocked the roof.

Over the next few years, Paulais served meals and decadent desserts to guests shopping or attending the adjacent Egyptian Theatre, along with selling catering, confections, and candy as well as hosting social and business groups in their private rooms. Families came for special holiday meals at times like Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas as well. When the Pig’N Whistle threw open its doors at 6714 Hollywood Blvd. in 1927, Paulais suffered. Beautiful but not as elaborate as Paulais, Pig’N Whistle’s cheaper prices and newness drew customers away, badly hurting business.

Though the cafe reconfigured somewhat in the spring of 1928, revenue remained depressed, leading Magnus and Mosler to close Paulais that year. After general remodeling, the establishment reopened as Leighton’s Cafe and Coffee Shop at the end of 1928 before closing in 1930 after the stock market crash. Film producer Charles Christile purchased the store, converting it into Eggers’ Dollar Store in 1931. Investors bought him out, but lasted only three years before they too closed. New owners converted 6702 Hollywood Blvd. into Central Hardware in 1934, surviving six years before Union Pacific Railroad purchased the location for a Hollywood ticket office, remaining in business at least through the 1970s. After the Egyptian Theatre underwent extensive renovations in the 1990s, the former Paulais’ location hosted many small cafes and sandwich shops, none of which gained much traction, and now sits empty.

Magnus and Mosler slowly closed or sold out their remaining stores by 1930 as initial costs overwhelmed their investment. New owners moved the former Ambassador store to 7th Street in 1933, remaining in business until 1937.

Though Magnus and Mosler’s extravagant designs and costs exceeded their ambitions and dreams, for almost four years they operated Hollywood and Los Angeles’ most discerning dessert establishment, as gorgeous and eye-filling as any French pastry.

The Hollywood Storage Building as seen in Google Earth.

Originally Los Angeles’ tallest building when opened in 1926, the Hollywood Storage Building at the southwest corner of Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard towered over the rapidly expanding film city. Today it ironically advertises entertainment programming with giant billboards on its edifice. The Hollywood Storage Building still serves as one of Hollywood’s premier storage locations, as beautiful as it is practical.

Los Angeles residents needed little to no extra storage space pre-1900, as few possessed many superfluous items. With the rise of department stores and the birth of credit, many began purchasing consumer products advertised in magazines or newspapers to keep up with their acquisitive neighbors. Most storage facilities began small, more for businesses to store records and documents, led by the Bekins family and their moving/storage business.

The Hollywood Storage Building in 1928, showing the radio antennas on the roof.

Bekins brothers John and Martin founded their family moving company in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1891, eventually helping many Midwesterners transport their goods westward to the expanding western boom town of Los Angeles. In 1906, they constructed a concrete storage warehouse downtown to store company business records and homeowners’ worldly goods, with the solidly constructed businesses offering consumers reassurance their items would remain safe and sound. Other companies followed suit, building storage facilities around the city, including the Hollywood Fireproof Storage Co., erected at 1666 Highland Ave. in 1915 by Charles E. Toberman.

Hollywood construction magnate Toberman decided to compete head-on with Bekins in 1924 after purchasing land at the corner of Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, conceiving of a massive structure at the site, one as attractive as it was dominating. Newspapers trumpeted his plans to build a 12-story, storage warehouse costing $300,000 for the Hollywood Storage Co. in 1924. Not until May 1925 did Toberman pull permits, however, for a 14-story facility designed by the renowned Los Angeles’ architectural firm Morgan, Walls & Clements to be constructed of steel and concrete. Unlike other monumental storage buildings around Los Angeles, this would feature Spanish design throughout, along with an elaborate lobby and other public spaces.

At 217 feet deep, the structure would include three large freight elevators and two passenger elevators along with office space. The May 3 Los Angeles Times said the company’s offices would be on the first floor, with a giant ballroom to host 1,000 located on the top floor. Individual floors would be assigned for rug storage, piano storage, silver, furs, and jewelry, and even one devoted to automobiles. Half of the allotted space in the building would be leased to outside businesses. Manager Charles A. Reinhart told the Times on September 27, 1925, that the building would house not only storage “but will afford a vast amount of space for offices, showrooms, and warehouse facilities for manufacturers’ agents… .” Unlike other storage facilities, the Terminal Storage Building featured railroad spurs allowing easy movement of large materials.

Los Angeles Times artist Charles Owens drew a cutaway of the building, showing KTTV on the 14th floor, March 24, 1949. 

Starting construction a few months later, the William Simpson Construction Co. finished the building in early 1926, with a final cost of about $500,000. Trussless Architectural Roof Co. pulled a permit on January 8 to finish the interior roof. Adding an unique touch, KMTR radio outfitted the 12th story as a studio and broadcasting facility, opening June 18. One studio would host the work of solo performers, while the other would allow orchestras or other large groups to perform. Two antennas 150 feet tall on top of the structure would provide the strongest broadcast signal of any station in the Los Angeles area. After confusion with the Pacific Electric Terminal Building downtown, the facility was officially renamed the Hollywood Storage Co. building.

Morgan, Walls & Clements’ outstanding design won awards; the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded it a certificate of honor, while the American Division of the Pan-American Congress of Architects honored the firm with a medallion.

The staid storage structure sometimes played risque as well. In 1930, the 14th floor, leased out for meetings, special events, and parties, hosted a fraternity-sponsored Prohibition event leading to a massive vice raid. Over 500 fraternity men faced arrest December 5, 1930, after a blow out “fraternity benefit stag smoker” featuring four topless dancers, gambling, and plenty of illegal alcohol in the top floor ballroom, rented by a group of men claiming to be with the Sigma Rho fraternity. Glenn C. Mapes provided the gambling tables, which he rented from Hollywood studio prop rooms. Mac D. Jones, millionaire ex-policeman recently appointed to lead the city’s vice squad, headed the raiding party of 12 officers dressed in tuxedos. At the height of the women’s dance, they locked the elevators and doors after identifying themselves. Looking to escape arrest, partygoers threw bottles, smashed chairs, and flipped over dice and card games. Six men eventually pleaded guilty to conducting illegal gambling and received short jail time.

In 1932, Toberman and associates sold the building for $385,000 to Bekins, with California’s Railroad Commission approving the sale on February 1. Not until May 5, 1939, did Bekins switch the facility’s name from Hollywood Storage Co. to Bekins, however. In 1949, the 14th floor was remodeled into the Los Angeles Times-CBS Television Station, lasting for a short time. For the last few decades, however, the entire structure has operated as Iron Mountain, an entertainment-related storage facility for records, film and photographic materials. At the same time, its exterior serves as giant billboards for other entertainment projects and companies. Monumental as well as attractive, 1025 N. Highland still serves as a storage facility 95 years after its construction.

When early moving picture companies set down roots in the farming community of Hollywood, they employed simple structures like barns, warehouses, and even an abandoned roadhouse as studios. These early production entities ventured west in 1909 and 1910 to escape frigid, icy winter conditions looking for sunny, warm weather in order to shoot scenes, while some later companies arrived to escape the wrath of the Motion Picture Patents Company.

In 1911, David Horsley rented a former rest stop and tavern at the northwest corner of what is now Gower and Sunset from Marie Blondeau to establish Hollywood’s first permanent film studio. In existence for less than 20 years, this simple one-story building possessed a colorful story ready made for the daring, adventurous young medium.

The tale begins with a former perfume and soap exporter from France who came to Hollywood looking for new possibilities himself. Rene Blondeau, born in Normandy, France May 3, 1838, was the son of an ardent Republican exiled from Paris to Normandy during the Empire regime. Educated in Jesuit schools, the young Blondeau took up exporting perfumerie and art goods to European countries, making a successful living as he traveled the world.

In 1868, the adventurous Blondeau immigrated to New Orleans, Louisiana looking for new merchandising opportunities in South and Central American countries. While in the Crescent City he met a Marie Lousteau, marrying her May 1, 1870 and becoming a naturalized citizen. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1874 sensing new possibilities, with Blondeau continuing his exporting work in South and Central America for 15 years before they retired to Hollywood.

On July 5, 1889, real estate man Harvey Henderson Wilcox sold the Blondeaus the seven acre Lot Eight of his new development called Hollywood for $2,000, just two years after the tract was opened to the public. The Blondeaus first tried farming before constructing a rambling, one-story facility which they operated as a way station for weary travelers offering blacksmith service and sleeping quarters. In February 1892, Blondeau was granted a liquor license by Los Angeles, which some Hollywood residents protested against in March to no avail. With a year, the couple named their establishment Cahuenga House, which gained a reputation for sometimes disreputable practices like prize fights.

Marie filed for divorce from Rene October 14, 1900 but apparently pulled her decree after Blondeau fell ill. The couple leased the hotel and saloon for ten years from January 1, 1902 to Maier and Zobelein Brewery, one of Los Angeles’ most successful breweries looking for a new distribution center and outlet. German immigrant Joseph Maier and George Zobelein had taken over the site of the Philadelphia Brewery near El Aliso, the sycamore tree that marked the spot of the Gabrielino village of Yang Na near the current site of Union Station and established Maier and Zobelein Brewery September 30, 1882. Growing quickly, the successful company grew in size, adding malthouse, bottling plant, kiln cellar, and shop turning out pilsners and other German type beers.

For unknown reasons, the deal appears to have fallen through. After Rene’s death in early 1903, Marie leased the structure some newspapers called Casa Cahuenga to J. W. Jeal on March 26, 1904 which he continued to operate as a tavern. Not long after however, Sheriff G. T. Gower arrested Jeal for selling liquor without a license, the first violation of the new Hollywood liquor ordinance forbidding the sale of alcohol and closed the business. The Los Angeles Herald called the establishment “…with one or two others, an eyesore to the people of Hollywood.” Blondeau was found liable for leasing the property to a party selling alcohol. On April 8, 1906 Los Angeles Herald reported that she had “sold six 1/4 acres to an eastern investor for $22,500.” Once again, the proposed sale collapsed, leaving Marie with the property, which she subdivided that year.

In October 1911, David Horsley and Al Christie arrived in Hollywood from Bayonne, New Jersey looking for a large open facility centrally located to establish a West Coast branch for the young Nestor Film Company. Originally established on the East Coast in 1907, the company turned out a variety of product, from roustabout comedies to respectable dramas. Horsley leased the property October 27, 1911 from Blondeau, converting the former roadhouse into offices, dressing rooms, and storage for his new studio, with Christie serving as general manager.

As the company leading director Al Christie reminisced in 1928, “Motion pictures are a business now, but they were a “freak” when we came out to Los Angeles in 1911. Hollywood was a sleepy little town of dusty roads and yellow orchards, pepper trees, ad a profusion of flowers. Hollywood Boulevard seemed all orange trees, sunset all lemon trees. The flowers and fruit were so beautiful that we tried to use them as background in every picture…There stood an old abandoned roadhouse [Bondeau Tavern], a low, rambling building with a big veranda and many private dining rooms. There was a big bar which we made into a carpenter shop. Margarita Fischer and Harry Pollard were given the little dining rooms for dressing rooms. A lot of others who weren’t so fortunate dressed in the old barn, where the horses had formerly been kept.”

An expanding Universal Film Manufacturing Company purchased Nestor in 1912, taking over the fledgling studio location and continued operating under both names. In 1913, director Lois Weber would feature a side shot of this studio in her one-reel short “Suspense,” as a husband borrows an automobile parked nearby to rush home and rescue his wife from a home invading hobo.

The aging studio was virtually demolished in a raging fire in 1926, though newer facilities remained in operation as the Christie Comedies studio into the early 1930s. In 1936, the remaining studio was demolished to make room for CBS Columbia Square, later the home of both radio station KNX 1070 AM and KNXT Channel 2, later renamed KCBS. A bronze plaque was installed in September 1940 to recognize the historic location.

A postcard of the Avila Adobe, listed on EBay for $1.89.

“A people that has lost touch with its historical past, forgotten its traditions and wasted its heritage is as unfortunate as a man who has lost his memory. Without knowledge of the past, both the present and the future are meaningless.”

Harry Chandler, Olvera Street News, December 1933

Note: This is an encore post from 2019.

Long before Los Angeles or Hollywood possessed any historic preservation organizations fighting to save architectural, cultural or historically significant buildings, Los Angeles Times Editor and Publisher Harry S. Chandler astutely summed up what preservation is all about: saving structures that help define a sense of identity and place, showing where we as a society and people come from.

Throughout its history, the city has often turned a blind eye to its past, demolishing buildings reflecting the daily lives of both ordinary and powerful citizens trying to make an impact on their own time and place. These sites and buildings often reveal the history of less powerful citizens of the time, those of other races, cultures, and orientations that are often written out of historical texts.

Mary Mallory’s latest book, “Living With Grace: Life Lessons from America’s Princess,”  is now on sale.

The Avila Adobe in 1929, via the Los Angeles Times.

It took the overpowering passion of a transplant from Northern California, Christine Sterling, to save and then rehabilitate in a new form what is now Olvera Street in the Plaza, promoting what was is now called adaptive re-use. Taking the story of Olvera Street to the media and people of Los Angeles, Sterling acknowledged the Spanish history of our city in this one street in a romanticized fashion, remembering the multicultural and ethnicity of the people that originally populated the area.

On September 4, 1781, New Spain Governor of California Felipe de Neve led 44 settlers from Sonora and Mazatlan from the San Gabriel Mission to establish a pueblo called El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles near the Los Angeles River. The tiny community of Los Angeles became part of Mexico in 1822 when it broke away from New Spain to establish a new independent nation. After the Los Angeles River overflowed twice, the settlement moved to what is now the Plaza.

Olvera Street had originally begun as Wine Street, thanks to vineyards and wineries nearby. In 1877, the short throughway was renamed Olvera Street in honor of Agustin Olvera, Los Angeles County’s first judge and supervisor who fought for Alta California in the Mexican American War and helped negotiate peace with the Americans in 1847. By the 1920s, the area had been abandoned by ruling white elites as they moved the city center south and west, leaving the street and area around the Plaza neglected, filthy, and down on its luck, home to bootleggers and machine shops.

Sterling, born Chastine Rix in San Francisco in 1881, discovered the area when she, her husband, and two children moved to Los Angeles in the early 1920s, coming to love the Spanish and somewhat romanticized version of the city’s past. Saddened and disappointed in what was left of the original section of the city in 1928, she began speaking out about its dilapidated appearance, particularly the forlorn condition of the Avila Adobe.

Built by one of the original pobladores and twice mayor of Mexican Los Angeles, Francisco Avila, in 1818, the city’s oldest extant residence, the home had become has rundown as the area surrounding it, full of holes and cracks letting rainwater leak through the roof. City fathers condemned the structure to demolition, but Sterling spoke out to preserve it.

Drawing on American history to entice white Los Angeles save the adobe, Sterling erected a sign on the roof, per the December 12, 1928, Los Angeles Times. The sign noted that the home was once the headquarters of Commodore Robert Stockton and Gen. John C. Fremont, and acknowledging the bravery of Kit Carson and others in defeating Gen. Andres Pico in 1847, leading to the American annexation of California through the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847.

By February 15, 1929, Civic organizations and women’s clubs pledged their assistance to Sterling to restore the building, and Los Angeles Parlor No. 45 of the Native Sons of the Golden West offered to help. The Henry-Weaver Roof Company donated fine roofing paper that the Advance Roofing Company placed on the adobe while money was raised to replace the roof.

Sterling reached out to historic groups and the general population, giving talks to organizations like the Historical Society of Southern California while also giving interviews to local newspapers. She began promoting the idea of reconstructing the street a la Santa Barbara’s State Street to create a colorful open-air bazaar selling goods by local artisans from various Mexican states. Harry Chandler, editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and president of Times-Mirror Company, rallied to her cause, printing many stories supporting her efforts to restore both the Avila Adobe and create a Mexican-style mercado.

On May 26, 1929, the Times ran a full page story wholeheartedly extolling “A Mexican Street of Yesterday in a City of Today.” Lavishly illustrated by Charles H. Owens, the piece noted that cleaning up Olvera Street and creating a romantic Spanish shopping area “…will be the painting on the canvas of today of a picture in the romantic manner,” an imagination of old Mexico and model for future simalcrum like the Grove and Disneyland.

Leading politicians and industrialists joined her cause over the summer as she held fundraisers and get-togethers at the Avila Adobe. Many saw this as a way to create a picturesque tourist attraction just across the street from what was intended to be the main train station for the city, though much of Chinatown would be demolished to make way for Union Station.

The City Council approved shutting the short street to vehicular traffic and allowing it to be tiled that summer, and later overturning Mayor Porter’s vetoes of these items in September. The few property owners not supporting the idea of turning Olvera Street into an open-air market appealed to the City Council, but once again the Council recommended closing the street and renovating the area. The Mexican Consul wholeheartedly supported the plan as well.

To help gain public approval and support for restoring Olvera Street, Sterling promoted a campaign to raise funds for paving the street with padre tiles costing 10 cents each, thereby costing the city of Los Angeles nothing. Prison labor would be employed in digging up the street and laying the tile.

Surveying and grading began on November 7, 1929, with city workers quickly finding a forgotten section of the zanja madre, the city’s original water supply. After excavating it, officials decided to create a special tile to be laid diagonally across the alley to represent the old water way.

On January 3, 1930, Constance Simpson sued the city and Sterling, asking for an injunction against closing the street and laying decorative tiles to exploit the “Spanish atmosphere.” Judge Gates allowed paving and work to continue, and finally rules against Simpson on September 30, 1931, noting that she was now receiving higher rents for her properties after the restoration and renovation work gentrified the area.

After more than a year to obtain approvals and then carry out reconstruction, the Avila Adobe and Olvera Street, rechristened “Paseo de Los Angeles,” opened Easter Sunday, April 1930. The resurrected area boasted the Golondrina Cafe in the old Pelanconi winery, flower shops, pottery shops, curio shops, a puppet theatre, tamale stands, musicians and street vendors dressed in Mexican garb.

Called charming and quaint, newspapers around the country praised the shopping area for its beauty and suggestion of old Mexico, what the October 25, 1930, Washington, D. C. Evening Star called “Just the good old Spanish days in a condensed version.” Sterling herself wrote in her diary, “Olvera Street holds for me all of the charm and beauty which I dreamed for it because out of the hearts of the Mexican peoples spun the gold of Romance and Contentment.”

Olvera Street quickly won the hearts of Angelenos and tourists alike, becoming a popular spot to visit. El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument was listed in the National Register of HIstoric Places in 1972.

While some call Sterling the “Mother of Olvera Street,” others denigrate her for maternalistically romanticizing and sprucing up the history of the area, mostly without the participation of the actual peoples she hoped to memorialize. She would go to create a fake, cheap China recreation area called “China City” in 1938, which failed miserably and later was burned to the ground.

Sterling’s public shaming of the city for allowing its city center to virtually disintegrate did achieve important results in preserving some of the earliest buildings and history of the city. Then as now, historic preservation relies on dedicated and passionate history and architectural lovers tirelessly promoting vintage structures to remind the public of how they define the city’s past and evolution. Without historic preservation, future generations will be unable to feel a strong connection to Los Angeles’ past, and how former generations of residents defined their times and their city, connecting then and now.

Image: Lobby of the New Rosslyn Hotel, showing murals by Einar Petersen.

Note: This is an encore post from 2011.

Fame is an odd thing. An artist might be successful and popular in his lifetime and forgotten with the decades, while other artists receive little or no recognition in their lifetimes, only to become household names later. For example, painter Vincent Van Gogh was virtually unknown during his life and sold only one painting during his career, but within decades of his death, was recognized as one of the world’s greatest painters.

Muralist Einar Petersen, on the other hand, was a well-respected and successful artist during his life. He created many elegant and beautiful murals in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1910s and 1920s, only to drop into obscurity within a few decades. Not only was he forgotten, but most of his work was also destroyed.

Photo: Einar Petersen murals at Clifton’s Brookdale.

Born in Denmark, Petersen studied art in Europe before arriving in America in 1912. Working his way westward across the United States, Petersen arrived in Los Angeles in 1915. He painted and created more than 20 murals in Omaha, Neb., Spokane, Wash., Manila, Honolulu,  San Francisco and Los Angeles throughout his career.

His first commission was designing and painting six 19-feet  by 9-feet murals depicting Los Angeles history from the Spanish days to the 1920s for the lobby of the new Rosslyn Hotel at Fifth  and Main  streets in 1915. The Oct. 31, 1915, Los Angeles Times highly praised his work, stating, “Each of the five panels holds a composition that is excellent in its lines and masses… the handsome big panels in the Rosslyn (each of the five is 19×9 feet in dimensions) are, of course, southwestern in theme, and even local in subject, for they depict the fine and simple elements of life in the Los Angeles of a far-off yesterday.”

Several other businesses hired Petersen to design murals. The Hunter-Dulin Building in San Francisco opened in 1926 with murals he designed of pioneers crossing the plains filling the lobby. The Mayflower Hotel (now the Hilton Checkers) at 535 S. Grand Ave. commissioned him to paint murals of pilgrims, while the Spring Street Guaranty Building and Loan Association at 435 Spring St. hired him in 1928 to draw murals of Aladdin and his magic lamp for the lobby and conference rooms, which they promoted in Los Angeles Times ads announcing the grand opening. Clifton’s Cafeterias paid him to paint a forest mural for Clifton’s Brookdale Cafeteria on Broadway (which still exists), and to design and build a garden of rest for their Pacific Seas Cafeteria. Petersen designed Spanish murals for Glendale’s Guaranty Building in 1930.

Thanks to his success, he and his wife hired architect Harry Muck to design a Spanish Renaissance home for them at 2706 Beachwood Drive in Hollywoodland in 1927. The house, later owned by actor Ned Beatty, still gracefully greets guests as they enter the gates of Hollywoodland.  He also built 4350-4352 1/2 Beverly Blvd. as artists’ studios, and the city did vote them Cultural-Historical Landmark No. 552 in 1991.

Petersen passed away in 1986,  and the years were not kind to his murals. By the 1970s, many had been obliterated or hidden behind fake walls, and in the 1990s, others were destroyed as well. New owners decided that these works were out of date or didn’t want to spend the money repairing them, so instead they replaced them with bare walls.

Honolulu at least remembered Petersen in 1985, when it celebrated his 100th birthday on Oct. 17 with Einar Petersen Day.  In Los Angeles, however, Petersen and his work have been consigned to the dustbins of history.

I’m happy to recommend Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Essence of Sunshine and Noir, by my Crime Buddy Nathan Marsak, published in 2020 by Angel City Press. The book is full of historic photos and vintage ephemera, and the text is a deep dive into L.A. history in Nathan’s freewheeling style. If you’re fortunate and have a local independent bookstore, try it first.

Nathan is also the author of “Los Angeles Neon” (2002) which is out of print, but available from a variety of dealers.

Bunker Hill is in stock at Skylight Books, Book Soup and Vroman’s in Pasadena.  Also available online from Angel City Press.

Also available from Amazon.

Note: This is an encore post from 2011.

I picked up “The Big Picture,” Melba Levick and Stanley Young’s 1988 book about Los Angeles murals, not realizing what a terribly sad book it would be. As Young notes: “Most artists are aware that, exposed as it is to the elements, both human and natural, there is a limited life-expectancy for any mural.”

I wanted it for one picture, specifically.

“The Big Picture” is listed on Amazon and Bookfinder.

The picture I wanted was Kent Twitchell’s “Freeway Lady,” a destroyed artwork that was one of my favorites. Unfortunately, the book is a catalogue of murals that have either been blotted out or badly damaged by vandals and the elements.

More important, as we are debating super-graphics on large buildings, the book serves as a reminder of the enormous murals that were painted in downtown Los Angeles and in Hollywood as ads for Nike in a campaign by the Chiat-Day agency.

A gigantic mural titled “Baseball” by David Larks covers what was then the Bekins Building. The building is, of course, blank today.

3614 S. Grand Ave., via Google maps’ street view.

And here’s John McEnroe by David Larks and Adam Lustig, looming over the Pantages Theatre.

6246 Hollywood Blvd., via Google maps’ street view.

And even the murals that survive are in terrible condition:

Here’s how Ruben Brucelyn’s “Sports” looked in 1988.

604 Glendale Blvd. via Google maps’ street view.

Here’s a particularly annoying example. I see Twitchell’s “Bride and Groom” and East Los Angeles Streetscapers’ “El Nuevo Fuego” every day because it’s on the Victor Clothing Building (formerly the City Hall Annex) next to The Times parking structure. Only now it looks like this:

I’m sure Levick and Young intended “The Big Picture” as a celebration of one of the great things about Los Angeles and instead it serves as a requiem for what is no more. Even “Ed Ruscha Monument,” which is on the cover, has been destroyed.  (Twitchell sued the U.S. and 11 other defendants for $1.1 million in 2008.)

It’s important to note that “The Big Picture” also documents vernacular artwork found on the Eastside and Judy Baca’s famous “Great Wall,” in the San Fernando Valley, which has suffered its own type of destruction.

Is there any hope in all the gloom and doom?

After all, Baca told Patt Morrison last year: “We’re in the most destructive time ever in the history of murals in L.A.”

“Nino y Caballo” by Frank Romero is peeling and has been vandalized.

Well, I bought “The Big Picture” at the Last Bookstore, which just opened at Spring and 5th streets. So far, the shop seems to be popular. Is it too great a leap to see a connection between downtown’s rebirth and a renaissance in murals? I suppose so. Then again, I wonder what “Freeway Lady” would look like printed as a super-graphic and hung on the Hotel Figueroa.

Note: At last report, “Freeway Lady” is to be repainted on a section of the Student Services Building at Los Angeles Valley College.

At a time when women faced enormous hurdles and obstacles in the workplace, possessing fewer opportunities and earning lower wages than men, the progressive and woman-owned and operated Averill Morgan Co. recognized the strength of working women and immigrants by offering them respect and chances to advance. Ahead of its time in the 1920s and 1930s, the cleaning and dye company offered not only superior service but also a classy work environment in its 1141 N. Seward headquarters.

Averill Morgan’s executives gained years of experience working for City Dye Works, many starting in menial jobs and advancing into leadership positions. Founded in 1881 and incorporated in 1901, City Dye Works was run by President John J. Jenkins and was considered Los Angeles’ largest and best equipped cleaners, dyeing textiles and garments for trade businesses and the official cleaners for the theatrical circuit. As with many textile manufacturing companies at the time, women made up a majority of employees because they earned lower wages and worked in more hazardous conditions as they desperately needed the income.

In 1923, Kathleen Alice Enright Averill determined to form her own organization to better support and understand the needs of working women and immigrants. She joined forces with financier Thomas L.F. Morgan of Cincinnati, who had purchased Balloon Dye Works downtown on March 31, 1923. An ad in the November 27, 1923, Los Angeles Times noted that the company was incorporated October 1 at a cost of $150,000, with its main office and plant at 820 E. 16th St. and three branches in downtown and Hollywood. At that time, Morgan served as president while Averill served as secretary and treasurer of the new Averill-Morgan Company, Inc.

The ad noted the co-operative nature of the business, “which means that all of its employees have acquired an interest in the business,” enabling them to acquire experts and veterans in the field. Most of the employees listed are women, with years of dedicated service to City Dye Works. By 1925, however, Morgan appears to have moved on, and Averill now served as president and general manager, making the decisions and determining that intelligent, thoughtful, mature women could best lead and inspire the staff of the new company. Women served in all officer positions, an incredibly unusual situation for the time, recognizing the difficulties other females and immigrants endured at jobs. Lucy Eby served as Vice-President and Eloisa Cosgrove served as Secretary-Treasurer.

Averill herself immigrated from Ireland with her husband in 1889 at the age of 29. Widowed in 1900 and never remarrying, she found work as a domestic before joining City Dye Works in 1903-1904 as a clerk. By 1912, Averill advanced to secretary and by 1923 she served as Secretary/Treasurer and General Manager of the organization.

Lucy Eby, born 1873 in Arizona to an Anglo father and a Mexican mother, had joined her husband Edward as a laundry worker by joining City Dye Works in 1905, serving as forewoman. She continued in that position to at least 1921, when she appears to have left the company.

Eloisa Cosgrove, born 1869 in Arizona, also to an Anglo father and Mexican mother, is listed as presser for City Dye Works in the 1904 City Directory, a spotter in the 1910 Directory, and in 1920 as a forewoman for the company.

On September 13, 1931 newspapers announced that Averill-Morgan had leased 1141 N. Seward as their its headquarters for the next 15 years. Designed by Saunders & Sons to the specifications of Averill, the fireproof $50,000 two-story building featured over 16,000 square feet of floor space and was constructed specifically for the company by the owner, the adjacent lumber company. Proud of their striking new headquarters, Averill Morgan would feature its facade on matchbooks it distributed as well as ads in local newspapers.

A 1938 Los Angeles Times story would note the company possessed ten delivery wagons and 65 employees, covering areas as diverse as Los Angeles, Hollywood, Burbank, Glendale, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Westwood, and beach cities, and called them the ‘“highest-priced” cleaning and dyeing concern in this community.’ Its “high quality work and care” attracted customers, as did its efficiency.

The company suffered damage to a truck and boat from a fire to the Lounsberry & Harris Lumberyard at 6641 Santa Monica Blvd. and Hollywood Door & Mill Co. on Lexington Ave. in 1946. Averill had left the company by this time, but the organization still maintained the name, even after her death in 1957.

On October 31, 1966, the Hollywood Citizen News announced that Maury Stein had purchased the building and equipment for $1.5 million as the new location of his Crest Film Lab, located at 932 N. La Brea Avenue. After servicing the film industry for decades, the building has served as offices for music and general business concerns, and continues to stand on Seward, though some of its windows have been covered.

1141 Seward Street offers a nice memorial to Averill-Morgan, the foremother of other strong and women-led concerns.

Note: This is an encore post from 2012.

Los Angeles and Hollywood have been the Mecca and Medina of movies, where their acolytes came to worship, work and learn in the teens and 1920s.  After making movies, reverent places of worship were required to view them in style. Broadway in downtown became Los Angeles’ Great White Way, containing elaborate and beautiful film and legitimate theaters that drew thousands.

Most of the major theatrical chains built flagship theatres in downtown Los Angeles, palaces to host film premieres as well as screen their released product.  One of the last to jump on the bandwagon was United Artists, founded in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith to own and control their films.  Originally releasing only films by its four founders, the studio required films by other major stars to bring in enough revenue to cover production costs.  Major stars such as Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton and Norma Talmadge joined the company, as well as producer Samuel Goldwyn, all creating quality film productions.

Production head Joseph Schenck, husband of Norma Talmadge, organized Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Sid Grauman and Lee Shubert into forming United Artists Theatre Circuit Inc. in May 1926.  They would build and operate 20 theaters in various states with approximately 1,600 seats each, and charging top prices up to $2 or $2.50.  Grauman would act as president, operating the chain along the lines of his Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.  That is, each film would have an unique presentation, exclusive long runs, and be opened simultaneously in all United Artists Theatres.

By Nov. 21, 1926, UA announced that it would soon break ground to build its $3-million theater with over 2,200 seats at 9th Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, along with a 12-story office building connected to it.  Both would be constructed in Spanish Gothic style, with the building at the height limit imposed by the city of Los Angeles.

The March 6, 1927, Los Angeles Times reported on the May 5 12:30 groundbreaking for the theater, with Mary Pickford operating a steam shovel that turned over the first earth of the project. Director Fred Niblo acted as master of ceremonies, with Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, Estelle Taylor and Vivian and Rosetta Duncan in attendance.  During his remarks, Fairbanks stated that he hoped the theater “will always be a reminder of the fact that Los Angeles is the center of production of the film industry.”  Because of Doug and Mary’s appearances, the newspaper estimated that more than 5,000 people attended the ceremony.  Also attending were executives from California Petroleum Corp., which had already signed a $3-million 30-year lease on the 12-floor office building.

To achieve its own unique look, United Artists hired Gladding, McBean and Co. to provide 600 tons of polychrome and pulsichrome terra-cotta in a light tan color, unlike anything else in the city.  Architects C. Howard Crane and Walker and Eisen had drawn up the palatial plans.  Supporting the massive structure would be a frame consisting of 2,000 tons of steel.

United Artists wanted to open the theater before the end of 1927, so it was a race by the contractor to try and meet that date.  Men worked 24 hours a day in three eight-hour shifts to accelerate construction.

By November, The Times could report that “The United Artists Theater will be to Los Angeles what the Roxy and the Paramount Theaters are to New York.”  That is, the theater would be one of the most elaborate and sophisticated showplaces on the earth, the perfect place to world premiere United Artists films.  Interestingly, West Coast Theaters, Inc. would manage the facility, under the direction of Harold B. Franklin.  Carli Elinor would leave his position as leader of the Carthay Circle orchestra to headline as musical leader for the planned 60-member orchestra.

Photo: The United Artists Theatre at 9th Street and Broadway, via Google’s Street View.

Edwin Schallert of The Times reported that “The dominant note in the auditorium itself is gold–distant spaces of greenish gold for the ceiling and walls, crystallizing directly overhead in a brilliant sunburst. Aisles are roomy and chairs comfortable…Mural paintings adorn the side walls, depicting film portrayals and personalities.”  In fact, the murals depicted UA talent like Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Valentino, Barrymore, Swanson, Talmadge, Dolores Del Rio, and D. W. Griffith, along with cameramen and angels with the faces of UA executives.  The journalist noted that Schenck had canceled any prologues or other stage shows before film screenings but approved a fine musical accompaniment.  “Attention will be concentrated on the shadow entertainment.”

The theatre opened to grand fanfare Dec. 26, 1927, premiering Mary Pickford’s film “My Best Girl.”  The Anthony Heinsbergen designed lobby and foyer soared three stories, resembling a Spanish cathedral with a ceiling painted to resemble stained glass.  The stage was not deep, designed exclusively to show films, but featured a wide proscenium arch.  The film theater featured plush, luxurious seats, wider than those in average theaters.  Spacing between rows was also much larger than normal, so that late patrons would not bother others.  A mezzanine directly under the balcony contained no boxes.  Pickford’s private theatre was located under the mezzanine.

John Barrymore performed as master of ceremonies, with Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, Talmadge, Swanson, Griffith, Ronald Colman, and others giving short speeches at the dedication.  Colorful banners and pennants decorated the street, and huge arc light generators illuminated all the sophisticated goings-on.  One microphone was located in the lobby, one in a sound booth, and another on stage, all broadcast by 20 loudspeakers along Broadway.  Announcer Freeman Lang would pick up the program on his long-wave length mobile set and then it would be rebroadcast over KPLA Los Angeles and KTA San Francisco, starting at 7 p.m. and lasting until 8:30 pm. Before the feature, a short about New York screened along with a color film called “Comrades.”  The orchestra was supported by a chorus singing from off-stage, and a Maxfield Parrish-like setting functioned as tableau during the evening.  At the conclusion of the feature, the audience saw film shot of the stars arriving at the premiere.

Within nine months, prologues and other entertainment returned.  The theater remained as UA’s flagship for the next couple of decades, but gradually saw decline in attendance and care.  Wide-screen processes were added in the 1950s to draw audiences to the next big thing, and the mezzanine was removed to create a new projection booth.  By the 1970s Metropolitan Theatres owned it, and soon it became a strictly Spanish-language theatre.  Dr. Gene Scott and his Los Angeles University Cathedral congregation moved in during 1989, actually improving the theater’s condition.  The church group restored and carefully maintained the structure.  Scott died in 2005 and his widow carried on until putting it up for sale in 2010.  Greenfield Partners of Connecticut purchased it in the fall of 2011, announced that they would convert the office tower into the boutique Ace Hotel.

Courtesy of KCET/PBS SoCal.

Note: This is an encore post from 2020. The documentary is online here.

Long renowned for its excellent documentaries and intelligent programming, KCET PBS SoCal premieres another strong work with its moving portrait of pioneering African American architect Paul R. Williams in “Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story.” Co-producers/co-directors Royal Kennedy Rodgers and Kathy McCampbell-Vance focus on Williams’ inspiring story with an insightful production as graceful and stylish as the man himself.

Born in Los Angeles in 1894 after his parents moved from Memphis looking for a healthier climate, Williams was orphaned at the age of 4, separated from his brother Chester Jr. and raised by a foster family. Scolded by a guidance counselor for considering a career in architecture, Williams transformed himself into one of Southern California’s premier designers of elegant, refined homes.

A trailer for “Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story” is here.

Frank Sinatra goes over plans for his home with architect Paul R. Williams and Williams’ daughter, interior decorator Norma Harvey. Photo from Ebony Magazine, used in “Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story.” Courtesy of KCET/PBS SoCal.

Inspired by his foster mother to dream big, work hard, and pursue his passion, Williams followed a circular path through art sessions, landscape design training, architectural engineering classes at USC and apprenticing in some of Los Angeles’ top architectural firms before establishing his own practice. Coming of age at the same time as the West’s most booming city, Williams found more freedom and opportunity to chase his dream.

Williams ingratiated himself with mentor figures such as architect Reginald Johnson and  U.S. Sen. Frank Flint (R-Calif). His mastery of diverse architectural styles led silent film star Lon Chaney to hire him to design a glamorous but classy residence for himself. Other Hollywood icons such as Cary Grant, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Frank Sinatra followed, winning him the nickname “architect to the stars.” After becoming friends with client, comedian Danny Thomas, Williams later designed St. Jude Children’s Hospital for free.

Current residents of Williams-designed houses like Disney CEO Robert Iger and producer Steve Tisch praise the luxuriousness and quality of their homes, extolling such touches as romantic curving staircases and grand, expansive entranceways featured onscreen. Christopher Hawthorne, chief design officer for Los Angeles, extols Williams’ designs, arguing for the historic preservation of these iconic structures.

Tenacious as well as supremely talented, Williams contested racism along the way. The refined man found himself unwelcome in hotels or restaurants he had designed, and endured having to draw upside-down and on the opposite side of the table from his white clients. Williams and his family were also restricted from living in many of the neighborhoods where he built homes.

An interior of a Paul R. Williams home, shown in “Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story,” courtesy of KCET/PBS SoCal.

The first African American to become a member of the American Institute of Architects in 1923, Williams excelled in commercial buildings as well. Such businesses as legendary Hollywood restaurants Perino’s and Chasen’s, department store Saks Fifth Avenue, talent agency Music Corporation of America, and the Beverly Hills Hotel, with its iconic script signage in his own handwriting, feature his sleek and dazzling designs.

Besides showcasing his work, the producers highlight Williams’ enduring legacy contributing to the betterment of others, especially the African American community. The architect promoted affordable housing and opportunities for disadvantaged youth, including building the 28th Street YMCA for youngsters in similar situations to those in which he grew up. He designed the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building which serviced the needs of fellow African Americans and helped found Broadway Federal Bank, which provided financial services of minorities in Los Angeles.

Timely and compelling, the documentary features interviews with Williams’ grandchildren as it reveals how the dignified Williams employed dazzling talent and strong perseverance to rise to the top of his profession as he battled racism and prejudice.

Released to coincide with Black History Month, the documentary premieres Thursday, February 6, at 8 p.m. on KCET PBS SoCal, later streaming on PBSSoCal.org and airing on PBS stations across the country.

Norman Kerry in 1924.

Note: This is an encore post from 2019.

Long before billionaire investor Ron Burkle purchased and restored such historic architectural properties as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House, Harold Lloyd’s Greenacres, and Bob Hope’s Palm Springs and Toluca Lake houses, silent film star Norman Kerry became one of the first Los Angeles-area preservation angels by rescuing a doomed Greene and Greene Brothers Craftsman home in the Wilshire Boulevard district. The 109-year-old landmark still stands near the Beverly Hills Hotel, the only Greene and Greene home in that city.

Multi-talented Earle C. Anthony originally constructed the graceful home after becoming one of the West Coast’s most successful Packard dealers. An automotive pioneer, Anthony designed Los Angeles’ first electric car at the age of 17 before founding the Western Motor Car Company with his father in 1904. Diversifying his portfolio around transportation, Anthony created an intercity bus line and constructed a chain of gasoline stations which he sold to Standard Oil Company in 1913.

Mary Mallory’s latest book, “Living With Grace: Life Lessons From America’s Princess,”  is now on sale.

To signify his success, Anthony hired the renowned Greene and Greene brothers of Pasadena to design and build him an elegant mansion on family owned property at the southeastern corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Berendo Street, opposite his father’s property on the southwestern corner, their first in the Los Angeles area.

Anthony pulled a permit April 13, 1910 to build a two-story, $15,000 home at 656 S. Berendo St. Around this time, Charles Sumner Greene departed to England, and so Henry Mather Greene did the majority of the designing at a time when the brothers’ work was moving away from elaborate and detailed work into more traditional California Craftsman bungalow styles. Randall Makinson in his book “Architecture as Fine Art” describes it as “L” shaped, with a pergola on the street side providing separation from the street. As with other Greene and Greene brothers’ work, it featured split shake-clad walls, open porches, fireplaces, and wooden light fixtures.

While the auto dealer enjoyed the beauty of his new home, his wife found fault with some details. Upon his return from England in 1914, Charles Greene designed interior lighting and leaded glass windows, some of his best work, to brighten up interiors. Some of the trim downstairs was painted to lighten the home as well, while a sleeping room was added upstairs. In 1921, Anthony hired Henry Greene to design a garage in back.

Since the family had taken up residence in 1910, the neighborhood surrounding it had undergone a gigantic building boom, seeing historic estates demolished to make way for commercial developments and apartment buildings. By 1922, Anthony was ready to move on to something more private.

The Los Angeles Times announced on March 22, 1922 that real estate management company A. C. Blumenthal & Co. had purchased the property on behalf of a group of San Francisco investors in order to construct a Class A apartment building. By the end of July, the company announced they planned to relocate the home as soon as possible to a lot at Wilshire and Lucerne Boulevard in order to construct the $850,000 apartment building.

As usual with real estate projects, time moved more slowly in completing the development than intended. Owners/developers McDonald Kahn Company of San Francisco received a permit December 26, 1922 to move the residence now listed at 666 S. Berendo “Outside the city.” Newspaper stories in 1923 and 1924 announced that McDonald Kahn intended to construct a 10-story, Class A apartment building designed by Aleck Curlett and Claud Beelman named the Francesca Apartments after their Francesca Apartment building on Powell and Sacramento in San Francisco. Finally completed in 1924 and using 3278 Wilshire Blvd. as its address, the building opened under the name Talmadge Apartments after film studio executive Joseph Schenck and his wife, film diva Norrma Talmadge, acquired the property.

Little documentation exists to show exactly when Norman Kerry acquired the home and for how much. The debonair, restless actor enjoyed life as a bon vivant, living beyond his means, but seeming to marry wives with large portfolios. Kerry enjoyed sports and automobiles, both interests of Anthony, so perhaps the two men enjoyed a friendship which facilitated the purchase.

The pool at 910 Bedford in a 1924 L.A. Times photo.

Born Norman H. (Hussen) Kaiser June 16, 1894 in Rochester, New York, Kerry attended private schools while his father owned and operated the Kaiser Leathergoods Company with the help of his father-in-law Alexander D. Lamberton. The young man traveled to the West Coast occasionally in the early 1910s assisting the family with business. In 1916, Kaiser lucked into a job in the film industry with Art Acord, with some papers claiming he first appeared in the Douglas Fairbanks’ film “Manhattan Madness.” After starring in several pictures under his real name, including Mary Pickford’s “The Little Princess,” he changed his name in the press to Norman Kerry to escape the German connotation. Kerry quickly traveled to Toronto to join the British Royal Flying Corps.

Thanks to his attractive looks and charming personality, the suave, intelligent young man quickly became a light romantic star following war’s end. Kerry starred in “Up the Road With Sallie” with Constance Talmadge in 1918 and many others and before landing at Universal. In 1922, he starred in Erich von Stroheim’s film “Merry-Go-Round,” which led the studio to sign him to a five-year contract. Over the next few years Kerry would appear in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Phantom of the Opera,” two bonafide classics. These films perhaps appealed to his romantic, dreamy nature, which possibly carried through into his love of architecture as well.

The August 3, 1924 Los Angeles Times reported that Kerry “wanted a home of real Hawaiian timbers, without a nail in it,” and importing wood and workers from Hawaii was cost prohibitive. When “a friend” in the Wilshire District decided to cash in the value of his property for an apartment site, Kerry purchased the mansion. Cut into three parts, the twelve-room residence moved seven miles to 910 N. Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. Moving a home was common during this period, in fact, 10 house moving companies are listed in the 1923 Los Angeles city directory.

Cost to move the home was supposedly twice the price to purchase it, and then the cost of buying the Beverly Hills lot and improving it with swimming pool, tennis court, garage, kennels, and gardens equaled four to five times the purchase price. An Eastern magazine called the residence “the strangest and most beautiful home in filmland.” The Times described it as “marvelous’ – one which couldn’t be duplicated and worth many times its cost.

Kerry hired Henry Greene to properly site the home on the larger, triangular plot, building a brick retaining wall and designing gardens around the property. By 1924, the generous actor was hosting swimming parties for his male buddies and elaborate dinners and events for he and his wife’s friends.

While the actor loved his home, Kerry endured marriage problems over the next six years. His first wife threatened to walk out in 1924; they reconciled but eventually divorced in 1930. Kerry married his second wife in 1932 before she asked for a divorce in 1934. Entertainment trades listed such people as Lorenz Hart (who supposedly wrote “Isn’t It Romantic?” there), Marion Davies, Countess di Frasso, and others renting the home over the years.

Eventually Kerry sold the home, and it passed through several hands over the years. Mrs. Rozene T. Emmerich owned the home beginning in 1933. E. H. Kron owned 910 N. Bedford in 1947, and actor Ed Gardner owned it in 1963. He listed it for sale in 1965 for $189,500, Leslie Dixon and Tom Ropelewski owned the home in the 2000s. The home has sold multiple times since that date, but thankfully Dixon recognized its historic significance and value, getting it named Beverly Hills Landmark No. 14.

Thanks to the foresight and quick thinking of Kerry, Earle C. Anthony’s gorgeous Greene and Greene brothers’ bungalow survived and thrived in Beverly Hills. Here’s to more like-minded individuals stepping up and heeding the call of history and preservation.

100 years ago, the Hollywood Bowl hosted its first official summer Symphonies Under the Stars concert, inaugurating a tradition that continues today. Constructed as a way to celebrate the arts in a magnificent outdoor setting, the Hollywood Bowl sprang to life thanks to the passion and inspiration of several women looking to place Hollywood as the epitome of arts and entertainment in the summer.

The idea to enjoy the arts in an outdoor setting grew out of a massive 1916 celebration for the 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. A group of famous stage and film actors joined with the Hollywood Carnival Association to honor the Bard as well as raise money to benefit the Actors’ Fund. Colossal sets spreading over what is now the Hollywoodland entrance at Beachwood Canyon, Belden, and Westshire Drives featured hundreds of performers and major celebrities in a lavish production of Julius Caesar that drew more than 40,000 spectators to the May 18 evening performance, illuminated by massive lights donated by General Electric. The success of this magnificent production inspired others to consider building an elaborate art showplace or outdoor amphitheater in Hollywood in which to celebrate arts and culture and fashion Los Angeles as “the Athens of America.”

Two years later, Philadelphia doyenne Christine Wetherill Stevenson, heiress to the Pittsburgh Paint Company, traveled to Los Angeles promoting her idea of outdoor amphitheaters providing spiritual and cultural nourishment, especially in the sunny climate of California. Founder of the Philadelphia Arts Alliance, Stevenson produced an elaborate presentation of The Light of Asia on the grounds of Krotona Colony in Beachwood Canyon with the Theosophical Society as their version of the Oberammergau Passion Play. Besides inspiring the group to build an outdoor stage, she hired professional actors in New York to star in the production, to be augmented by the Brotherhood Players of the Theosophical Society. Stevenson, a strong supporter of the cultural and fine arts, intended the play to become an annual production.

Actor Walter Hampden, who played the Buddha in The Light of Asia, described the opportunity to present productions in outdoor settings to the Los Angeles Evening Express in June 1918, setting the stage for the Hollywood Bowl. “Los Angeles can easily be the mecca for many other dramatic endeavors of this nature, for in this wonderful out-of-door vista there are such tremendous opportunities to present great pageants of light and color on a big scale for you are limited only by the hills,” Hampden said.

On June 14, Stevenson promoted the construction of a major Fine Arts building or amphitheater to the same newspaper. “Los Angeles is the mecca of all activities in art in the West. Here you have everything on which to build. There are hundreds of wonderful sites which command a broad view of hill and valley. There are the great possibilities for landscape architectural gardening to surround the building. There are great opportunities for unusual features in architecture.

“The climate is perfect, and will be the means of attracting many pilgrimages of creative artists to this city should there be a center for them to visit,” she said.

Several Hollywood organizations celebrated and promoted the arts at concerts during this time, including the Hollywood Community Sing, organized by society matron Artie Mason Carter in 1917. Her initiative and enthusiasm helped bring 1,000 residents together to celebrate singing and classical music in the Hollywood Community Chorus. Her future involvement would inspire the popularity of entertainment under the stars as well as assist the financial underpinnings of the Bowl organization and site.

In late summer 1918, a group led by Stevenson began meeting to develop a workable plan for constructing a magnificent open air stadium in which to celebrate spirituality and the arts, later incorporating as the Theatre Arts Alliance in May 1919. They convinced Carter to join the group, recognizing her ambition and drive would be essential in getting Hollywood residents’ support.

Many considered a 59-acre site in Bolton Canyon called the Daisy Dell, a popular picnicking location, as an appropriate site for a Hollywood showplace because it was walking distance from the commercial center and also along the Pacific Electric’s Cahuenga Pass route. William Reed and his son H. Ellis Reed scouted the location and others for the group, with the father speaking across Bolton canyon to his son and quickly realizing the wonderful acoustics. To facilitate the $47,500 purchase of the property, Stevenson and Marie Rankin Clarke each contributed $21,000, with the Theatre Arts Alliance members contributing the $5,500 required to complete the transaction.

While working to complete the construction of the Arts Alliance open-air theater, Stevenson purchased 29 acres across Cahuenga Pass to construct her own theatre and began producing the Pilgrimage Play. As plans moved slowly toward approving and building a theater, one celebrating the arts and not just spirituality, Stevenson decided to resign her post as Theatre Arts Alliance head on July 24, 1920. The group would later reimburse her $21,000 contribution to purchase the Hollywood Bowl site.

On October 25, 1920, the Community Park and Art Association was founded to construct and operate the proposed Bowl in Daisy Dell. The group began referring to their proposed theater as the Hollywood Bowl after conductor Hugo Kirchhofer’s comment on its shape. The group employed a simple wooden platform as stage and moveable wooden benches for seating for their first season.

Several presentations in 1921 demonstrated the Hollywood community’s galvanizing support for outdoor productions. An Easter sunrise service was held in March and Hollywood High School students produced Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In November, the association presented The Landing of the Pilgrims featuring professional actors and Native Americans, attracting 10,000 to the site, along with a Women’s Peace Concert held on November 11, Armistice Day. During that year, Daisy Dell was also employed for a variety of community events from pageants to choral programs to band concerts, with all proceeds employed to help fund the first concert season.

On July 11, 1922, the 10-week Symphonies Under the Stars officially began under the baton of conductor Alfred Hertz. To open in style, the group presented an over-the-top production of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen with an 85-piece orchestra and 250-member chorus. California Governor William Stephens and Los Angeles Mayor George Cryer attended the opening event, with proceeds and donations helping pay for the location’s first seats. The first concert featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra occurred days later, as the site soon became the Philharmonic’s summer home. Artie Mason Carter’s drive was crucial during this time convincing guests to donate funds and buy subscriptions to develop a financial foundation for the site and organization. Her charm and conviction would inspire many to throw their support behind such a worthy endeavor.

In 1924, the land on which the Hollywood Bowl sits was conveyed to Los Angeles County on a 99-year lease to safeguard it for future generations, with options for another 99-year renewal. The Hollywood Bowl Association was then established as the organization to govern the theatre.

While the Hollywood Bowl has seen numerous changes and renovations since its 1922 opening, it continues to serve as the apex of outdoor cultural entertainment both in Los Angeles and across the United States. Long may it continue to reign!

The Hollywoodland Sign, in a photo published in the Los Angeles Evening Herald, Dec. 8, 1923.

Note: This is an encore post from 2017.

Originally constructed as a publicity gimmick and branding symbol to help generate sales for a real estate development, the Hollywood Sign is now a worldwide icon just as powerful as Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty, signifying a land of glamour and opportunity. Myths have always existed about it, from the date of its construction to how the city of Hollywood obtained it. After in-depth research by both historian Bruce Torrence and myself, we can conclusively say the sign was constructed in late November and early December 1923, and illuminated in that first week of December.

Like me, a California transplant involved in history, research, and writing since I was child, Torrence has always been fascinated by Hollywood history, perhaps because his two famous grandfathers contributed much to it. His paternal grandfather, Ernest Torrence, starred in many classic silent films such as “Steamboat Bill Jr.” and “Peter Pan” after a successful career as an opera singer. His maternal grandfather C. E. Toberman could be called the builder of Hollywood for his construction of so many iconic structures around Hollywood Boulevard. Bruce began a photo collection of Hollywood in 1972 with thirty photographs, which has blossomed into thousands. He employed these photos in writing one of Hollywood’s first detailed history books in 1979 called “Hollywood: The First 100 Years.”

Hollywood at Play: The Lives of the Stars Between Takes, by Stephen X. Sylvester, Mary Mallory and Donovan Brandt, goes on sale Feb. 1, 2017.

Both of us are dogged in searching out facts and details to get Hollywood history right, made much easier with the opening of newspapers through microfilm and now digital searching, along with such great digitized sites as the Media History Digital Library and Variety Archives at the Margaret Herrick Library. We look for multiple citations to back up evidence, and especially primary evidence, such as documents, building records, and films, and secondary sources like newspapers, magazines, and books. Getting history right often means correcting yourself, as I admit I fell into the trap of claiming the Hollywoodland Sign was constructed in July 1923. After years of research by both of us, we have discovered the missing pieces clarifying the history of the sign.

When I began writing my Arcadia Publishing book “Hollywoodland” in 2010, I began searching out the history of the development and its world famous sign. Few if any period sources could be found providing a detailed, accurate history of the Hollywoodland Sign, even the Los Angeles Times, owned by one of the five partners of the Hollywoodland development. No newspaper reported the actual day of the beginning or completion of construction, but thanks to discovery on the history of Hollywoodland publicity chief L. J. Burrud, I began slowly piecing the puzzle together.
L.J. Burrud, Hollywood Publicity Man

Hollywoodland developers Tracey Shoults and S. H. Woodruff announced the opening of the real estate tract in late March 1923 newspapers. They focused mainly on the newspapers of record for Los Angeles, like the Times and Examiner, attempting to appeal to upper middle class and rich businessmen and entertainers. Since Times publisher Harry Chandler was one of the partners, the newspaper provided ample free publicity of the site in multiple stories virtually every day of the week, often with photographs. With real estate booming all round the city, sales initially took off, but the real estate men realized they needed special publicity to help brand their neighborhood as the “supreme achievement for community building” for people of discriminating taste.

On September 7, 1923, Woodruff turned to Lake Arrowhead press man L. J. Burrud to devise unique ballyhoo gimmicks to land stories and photographs of the Hollywoodland development in newspapers and magazines across the United States. Copying tactics from his past as a newsreel cameraman, actuality and documentary filmmaker, Burrud conceived of one of the first mass media campaigns to brand the special nature of the community. Besides planting stories in newspapers, the publicity man shot a film documenting construction of the Hollywoodland demonstration home, arranged for sports motor cars to traverse the rough, unpaved hills, and even created a Hollywoodland Community Orchestra to play grocery store openings and radio shows.

In later years, advertising man John Roche claimed in interviews that Times publisher Harry Chandler asked him to design a gigantic billboard visible from miles away, but it seems strange that someone would wait decades to state such information. Unfortunately no paperwork from the Hollywoodland development exists, so until it shows up, there is no definitive proof of who conceived the look of the sign and when. While virtually all other major real estate developments built thin, red-colored name signs, Hollywoodland’s would be gigantic 45 foot letters spelling out the world Hollywoodland, making it much more visible all over Los Angeles. Falling back on his filmmaking experience, publicity chief Burrud conceived the brilliant idea for newsreel coverage documenting the construction of the sign, a gimmick to help announce the opening of their stupendous development to the world.

Holly Leaves, November 1923.

I discovered that construction of the Hollywoodland Sign began in November 1923, after finding a photograph taken from the Hollywood Athletic Club published in the November 16, 1923 Holly Leaves revealing a barren hillside above the development, devoid of any sign or construction equipment. Fox Movietone newsreel footage exists of the Hollywoodland Sign’s construction, revealing workers, mules, and caterpillar tractors laboring to carry sheet metal, telephone poles, pipes, and chicken wire up the precipitous slopes to build the giant sign in a jagged line on the steep hill.

Realizing that filmmakers usually employ a slate in front of their footage listing title, date, and running time, I contacted Greg Wilsbacher, director of the Fox Movietone Newsreel Collection at the University of South Carolina, to inquire about a slate or paperwork for the newsreel footage shot of this event. Wilsbacher revealed that cameraman Blaine Walker shot the Sign’s construction, stating that the undeveloped negative arrived at the Fox Movietone Newsreel office dated “November 27th-23,” with the punch record of the New York Fox office also showing a late November 1923 date. Train travel across the United States took approximately three days at that time, meaning the footage would have departed Los Angeles on November 27 and arrived at the end of the month. As Wilsbacher also stated, a newsreel cameraman’s job was to get unique footage first and rush it to production offices for immediate distribution to theatres, meaning Walker filmed it immediately before sending it off to New York.

Not only were the developers constructing an enormous billboard to advertise Hollywoodland by day, but also one to blaze its name at night. They hired Crescent Sign Company to devise a way to build the Sign on the hill, and Woodruff hired Electrical Products Corporation to illuminate it with electric lights, creating what the December 9 Los Angeles Examiner calls the “largest electrically outlined word in the world.”

Historian Torrence discovered the actual date of first illumination when investigating when the letter “H” was actually blown off the Sign after a question posed by a reader. He, I, and everyone else mistakenly believed the letter was demolished by winds in 1949, though his examination of Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Los Angeles Times proved it actually happened in 1944.

A worker stands in crossbar of the letter “D” in the Hollywoodland Sign, Practical Electrics, September 1924.

While there, he decided to peruse the November/December 1923 Evening Herald to find information on the final days of the Sign’s construction after my discovery of the November date for the newsreel footage. He discovered the missing link, connecting the Sign’s November/December 1923 construction to its first electric illumination. Torrence came across a December 8, 1923 Evening Herald story stating that the sign, “believed to be the largest in the world,…will be illuminated tonight.” The article includes photographs showing the full length of the sign as well as an image of a worker dwarfed by the gigantic letter “D” he stands in.

On Saturday, December 8, 1923, S. H. Woodruff and his crew flipped the switch turning on the illuminated lights which spelled out the words “Holly,” “Wood,” “Land,” “Hollywoodland,” with Woodruff stating in an article in the December 9 Examiner, “it was only fitting that the first blaze of electric lights to shine forth from the tremendous sign should be in commemoration of some important event in the development of Hollywoodland,” namely the opening of Unit No. 4 to sales. In an ironic twist, the Los Angeles Herald and Los Angeles Examiner note the first lighting of the Hollywoodland Sign, while the Los Angeles Times, owned and published by Harry Chandler, one of the major partners in the development, failed to report it.

An ad in the Dec. 12, 1923, Los Angeles Times notes the completion of the Hollywoodland Sign.

Paul D. Howse, president of Electrical Products Corporation, bought an advertisement in the December 12, 1923, Los Angeles Times with an illustration of the electrified sign. He congratulates Woodruff for completing the stupendous sign, declaring “You had the vision to undertake and accomplish the greatest realty enterprise in California…” and then stating, “…We thank you, Mr. Woodruff, for having given us the opportunity to engineer and install this great electrical sign. May your expenditure be appreciated by those who love to see Los Angeles lead in enterprise and really “big” things.

A description of the Hollywoodland Sign in Practical Electrics for September, 1924.

Further sealing the November/December 1923 construction date, the September 1924 issue of Practical Electrics provided me by another historian describes what it calls “the mammoth Hollywoodland Electric Sign” in detail, noting its eight months of display. The article employs some creative hyperbole to state that “the sign is over one-sixth of a mile long, and nearly 4,000 lamps are required to light it.”

It reports that the billboard is visible at a distance of more than twelve miles, supported by a framework of telephone poles 60 to 80 feet high. “Two by six inch timbers, placed 16 to 24 inches between centers, are the horizontal elements of the frame. To this the letters, made of galvanized iron, are nailed. Each stroke of a letter is 13 feet wide. To illuminate the 13 great letters 3,700 10-watt lamps are used, placed along the edge of each stroke….There are 55 outlets to each circuit and the wiring is all open on the back of the structure. Everything centers in a junction box near the center of the sign…Taken on a straight line, the sign is 975 feet long and the letters are 45 feet high.” While the letters were 45 feet high, it’s very doubtful the sign was that long.

While erroneously reported to have been constructed in July 1923, thanks to these discoveries, we now know that the Hollywoodland Sign was constructed in November/early December 1923, and illuminated for the first time on Saturday, December 8, 1923. Paraphrasing Electrical Products Corporation President Paul Howse, Hollywoodland not only conceived the largest electrical sign in the world in 1923, but one that now serves as the iconic representation of Hollywood and its film industry while also reigning as Los Angeles’ most popular tourist attraction today