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I HAVE BEFORE ME A PICTURE POSTCARD — really I do — dated
September 4, 1942. One of those old-fashioned cards, with bright basic
colors painted over a photograph to make the physical world seem even
better than it is. It shows Hollywood Boulevard, seen from the roof of the
Roosevelt Hotel (Spanish tiles visible at bottom), running eastward to a
vanishing point that hovers oddly, impossibly, poetically above the
horizon in a bank of cotton clouds. “Nice place,” wrote Peg to Marion,
back in Hartford, Conn., “but it is quite warm.” There is the Chinese
Theater in the foreground, the First National Bank building at Highland in
the middle distance, and occupying the block between them, settled in
among trees of unvarying perfect painted green, the fabled Hollywood
Hotel, which opened in 1903, when the south side of the street was all
strawberry fields. It was torn down 53 years later and replaced with an
office building, which was itself torn down not so long
ago.
What’s there now, as you have
surely seen or heard or know from the promotional mailing, is Hollywood
& Highland, a $615 million mall, or “complex” — let’s call it a mall —
which has come to train its big guns — Gap! Starbucks! Burger King! — on
the local economy. I do not hate it. (I might easily. I possibly should.)
Certainly it is better-made than the aging Galaxy mallplex, which buried
the Garden Court Apartments, and friendlier to the streetscape than the
massive mall-wall going up along Third by Farmers Market, at which I shake
my fist, biblically. (I would rend my garment, too, but I only have the
one.) I don’t know what to make of the wing collar they’re building around
the Cinerama Dome. But notwithstanding its fundamentally Vegas aesthetic
and scale, its Times Square Jr. signage — it is a structure constructed
for tourists, to give people the feeling they’ve been somewhere
and seen something — Hollywood & Highland pays respectable
homage to the actual old buildings of the street (in form, materials) and
to Hollywood itself (in the giant Babylonian elephant-god statues borrowed
from Intolerance). And the Chinese Theater, which the mall enfolds,
has been restored — almost as an apology, one feels — to something like
its original form, and signposted Grauman’s again; that “Mann’s” always
bothered me. It has become once more the theater on my post card.
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP OUT IN THE VALLEY, we would bus
into Hollywood to pity the tourists. Oh, such fun. We found them amusing;
we took photos. By their Bermuda shorts did we know them, and by the sad
disappointment writ so clear upon their faces; they had come so far to
find so little. (Because they were looking for the wrong things, man.)
They were after that “celebrated street of gala premieres, world fashions,
movie stars and extras, famous shops, hotels and theatres, where beauty,
gaiety and glamour reign supreme in a setting seen only in California,” as
it says here on this post card. Peg might have had some luck with that
back in ’42, but even then it was only partly true. The rest of it was
always a lie.
Hollywood’s antique charms
had nothing to do with us. (We were just on our way to the comic-book
store.) It’s only when you get old enough to reckon your place on the
unfolding ribbon of history that Old Junk becomes Cool Stuff, that you
fall sway to the romance of the unavailable past, which lies in the
opposite direction from your death. Pining for the details, the
craftsmanship, the materials of an earlier age — symbolizing as well, of
course, the luxury of time, of which it is believed there once was more —
that the parsimonious present finds it convenient to forgo: This is an
adult disease. When you’re young you incline naturally toward
novelty.
A new mall: heaven, long ago. I
remember as if it were yesterday my first glimpse of the kinetic “rain
forest” sculpture-thing that rose two stories in an atrium of Topanga
Plaza. I had to catch my breath. We went to the opening of Century City.
That was the future we were promised, back when the Year 2000 still
meant something: a nation of modern shopatoria, linked by automatic
bubble-car superhighways, with nothing but great green parks in between.
(I forget where the people were supposed to live.) It doesn’t sound quite
as good as it used to, now that I am grown and with a slight case of the
nostalgia, but in honor of my littler self I will give the New Mall some
time. How long will it be new, in any case? It is growing old already,
acquiring — as do all things except Japanese ceramics — quaintness.
Becoming real by use, by damage, by velveteen-rabbit love, even. Heading
for the day when the robot wrecking balls come to level it for some
bigger, better, brand-new atomic-powered mall. It will have its loving
defenders then, undoubtedly.
LATELY I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING THE VIEW across a vacant lot
at the northwest corner of Sunset and Vine. It was Wallichs Music City
once, then a strip mall, and now it is an absence, beyond which may be
seen purple hills tumbling down to Cahuenga Pass. It’s like a sudden
vision of the distant past, and the far future, perhaps — a time of
more general absence. A relief.
They’ll
fill that space soon, and I’ll care, then forget to care. From 1927 to
1932 the First National Bank, holding fast to its less-prestigious corner
of Hollywood and Highland, was the tallest building in town; but nobody
lives in that town now. The strawberry fields were not forever. Charlie
Chaplin thought the Hollywood Hotel “fifth-rate.” The new mall seems to
have been there for as long as I can remember; we are old friends now.
(Love those elephants!) Where have you gone, Peg and Marion? I have your
post card. |