Building Hollywood
LEVIN, MARTIN
Building Hollywood The vanished architecture of Southern California. BY MARTIN LEVIN I was a small boy in Santa Monica, California, back when the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair ran for...
...As for the Lakeside Car Wash, according to a tourist guide: "It's the best one in Southern California, a study in lava rock and wood...
...Like Silver, Wallace uses architecture as a springboard for memory, as when he discusses a celebrated hotel named The Garden of Alla, after its owner, the silent film star Alla Naz-imova...
...A subsequent proprietor changed the spelling to "Allah," to Naz-imova's everlasting annoyance...
...Alla's Garden was not in the same architectural league as New York's great lost monuments like the Ritz or the Astor...
...BY MARTIN LEVIN I was a small boy in Santa Monica, California, back when the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor against Republican Frank Merriam (the roadside billboards read: "A Vote for Merriam Is a Vote For God...
...It's certainly a pity that the landmark police were not mobilized in time to save the likes of Ocean House...
...A lively chunk of Hollywood's lost places consisted of its restaurants...
...No matter how tacky it may be...
...One culture hero was Aimee Semple McPherson, a wildly popular evangelist, faith healer, and entrepreneur whose Angelus Temple is still one of the largest churches in America...
...According to Wallace, he had a self-deprecating sense of humor...
...On Vine Street they grew grapes," recollects the director Mack Sennett...
...The venality prize for destroying irreplaceable architecture has got to be a tie: One winner is the Metropolitan Opera Association, which ordered the demolition of its historic 39th Street Opera House, lest it be used to compete with the association's new plant at Lincoln Center...
...The other winner is the president of Martin Levin is a writer in New York...
...The Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission has gone to bat for the Cinerama Dome, a concrete igloo built in 1963...
...And when it closed, a generation later, she gave a party for 350, at which more than a thousand materialized...
...The place featured one of the first swimming pools to be lit underwater...
...Women adored him, but most men despised him...
...the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, who supplied an epitaph to the destruction of Penn Station when he wrote a letter to the New York Times asking, "Does it make sense to preserve a building merely as a 'monument...
...The brown bowler is now entombed in a shopping center...
...But going to bat for a car wash does deliver a message to the demolition community...
...It was an instant success, so much so that, by 1937, the club's publicists were proud to announce that it had been the scene of 126 celebrity fights...
...Valentino could often be seen in jodhpurs, walking his dogs (two mastiffs and a Doberman) along the narrow streets of a terraced development known as Whitley Heights...
...But by the 1920s, the town had developed a cosmopolitan ambience...
...He installed them in a ballroom as big as an airplane hangar...
...At the beginning of its silent film period, Hollywood was still a rural backwater...
...coffee shop with an in-your-face fagade designed to capture drive-by attention...
...Hollywood structures are skimpier, like the electrical sign atop a hill known as Cahuenga Peak...
...Conservancy, a private preservationist group dedicated to "preserving the city's architectural heritage...
...But you're not expected to remember the culture of yesteryear unless it's exhumed by someone like Ken Burns...
...Sounds reasonable...
...They ranged from the whimsical—like a bistro in the shape of a hat (the Brown Derby)—to nightclubs where the stars went to be seen...
...When Nazimova opened her hotel, she threw "a gigantic eighteen-hour party...
...As well as one of its most generous...
...What can compare to the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, a heroic masterpiece that required a great deal of excavation...
...The Conservancy has blocked the remodeling of the Angelus Temple, which would have obliterated a spectacular 40-foot mural over the proscenium...
...From which Tallulah Bankhead is said to have emerged in the buff, to be offered a martini by Robert Benchley, a long-time habitue...
...Valentino may have gotten a bum rap as a shallow gigolo type...
...This includes the Hanna-Barbera building, birthplace of the Flintstones and Yogi Bear...
...But, with one exception, the clubs were disappointingly intimate...
...But it couldn't survive the scandal that ensued when the evangelist went AWOL for a month...
...So Lost Hollywood focuses less on topography than on celebrity...
...It was born when the Grove's host bought a thicket of fake palm trees, left over from the set of Valentino's The Sheik...
...His mystique was even greater than Elvis's...
...Silver's book is a jaw-dropping look at the city's vanished landmarks...
...The exception was the Coconut Grove, a vast nightspot in the Ambassador Hotel...
...Davies' lover and landlord, William Randolph Hearst, objected to her drinking...
...Tourists visited the cabarets on the Sunset Strip, expecting to find a glitzy expanse like something out of Fred and Ginger's Flying Down to Rio...
...That's how it got its name...
...Aimee's organization included a radio station, several choirs, and an orchestra in which Anthony Quinn played the saxophone...
...So she cached her gin in a toilet tank in one of the mansion's fifty-five bathrooms and couldn't remember which one...
...When Winston Churchill wanted a drink, Marion Davies took him on a tour of the facilities...
...Others on the list of endangered landmarks are the Hollywood Bowl and the Lakeside Car Wash...
...His funeral drew 100,000 mourners...
...Namely: that it makes good sense to preserve a structure "merely as a monument...
...When the last four letters disintegrated, the sign survived as a civic attention-getter...
...Our town was where Will Rogers owned a private polo field and Marion Davies relaxed in a vast beach house down on the Pacific Palisades...
...And it saved the Brown Derby from demolition...
...Sightseeing buses were showing tourists the homes of internationally known film stars like Francis X. Bushman ("America's handsomest man"), Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and the megastar Rudolph Valentino...
...Between galas, the Garden of Alla(h) gave food and lodging to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Sullavan, Carole Lombard, Humphrey Bogart, William Powell, and a celebrity register of thousands...
...But when it turned out that she had been spending a naughty interlude with a married employee, the ridicule was overwhelming...
...It was intended to promote a real estate development called Hollywoodland...
...The vacant lots were abloom with orange poppies...
...Painted a revolting green, the Han-na-Barbera studio qualifies as "Googie" architecture, named after Googies, a vanished L.A...
...It's the only surviving theater from the short-lived Cinerama mode, which employed a curved screen for a "surround" effect...
...She claimed to have been kidnapped by Mexican bandits...
...What's left of Whitley Heights is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places...
...It's a treasury of Hollywood memorabilia along the lines of Nathan Silver's recently reissued Lost New York...
...According to David Wallace, author of Lost Hollywood, the Davies character in the movie is a nasty caricature of "one of Hollywood's least mean-spirited personalities...
...Which is where Wallace's nostalgia adventure comes in...
...Then there's the L.A...
...Wallace's fetching Hollywood eulogy emits vibrations that tell you all is not lost...
...At Ocean House there was an extra hurdle...
...During Prohibition, having an aperitif could be complicated...
...It consisted of two dozen stucco bungalows surrounding an eight room house at the end of Sunset Boulevard...
...It featured tiled roofs and wrought iron hardware in a Mediterranean style that became a Hollywood trademark...
...What was noteworthy was not the layout, but the residents...
...William Faulkner wanted to stay there while doing time as a screenwriter...
...Hollywood's lost landmarks have generated a vigorous rearguard action...
...Alan Hess, architecture critic of the San Jose Mercury News, anatomized this roadside wrinkle in his 1986 book Googie...
...But he couldn't afford it...
...Unless you're a Citizen Kane fan, you can't be counted on to remember Marion Davies or the rest of this crowd...
...It's not Wallace's fault that what was lost in Hollywood is flimsier than what was trashed in Manhattan...
...It has shored up the audience-friendly but acoustically archaic amphitheatre, the Hollywood Bowl...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 30
