Down These Mean Streets a Tribute Is Found

It was getting hot outside now, as Philip Marlowe would put it.

The rushing sound of traffic mixed with that tired, start-of-the-day smell of dust, automobile exhaust, sunlight rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell of food in a thousand restaurants and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills above Hollywood--in his words--a touch of that peculiar tomcat smell that eucalyptus trees give off in warm weather.

I was making my second swing Monday morning down Hollywood Boulevard, looking for something I wasn’t even sure existed. Somewhere out here, the man in the striped shirt had told me, there was a place called Raymond Chandler Square.

City functionaries in pressed suits and official sedans were supposed to be gathered at the square at 9 o’clock to pull plastic coverings off a pair of signs bolted to the sides of one of those new street lights whose sickly glow makes the toughest Hollywood hustler look like a passenger in the coroner’s wagon.

As stagy as it sounded, the idea was to honor the legendary novelist and short story writer responsible for making Los Angeles famous in his stories about detective Philip Marlowe between 1939 and 1958. Trouble is, the man in the striped shirt didn’t know where to find Raymond Chandler Square. And City Hall offices--where somebody would have the address if anybody did--are as empty as a studio starlet’s head early on a Monday morning.

Suddenly, I was feeling a little like Philip Marlowe myself.

I rolled up the window and switched on the A.C. as I turned off Vine Street and flipped open the book in my lap with the faded orange cover, “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles.” It’s a 1987 guidebook designed to lead Marlowe fans past what he called flyblown restaurants, cheap apartment houses, past the ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register, to the boulevards and alleyways portrayed in Chandler’s seven novels.

The tourists milling like extras in a DeMille epic outside the Chinese Theatre didn’t look up from their concrete footprints as I passed by. A few blocks farther, down where the tour buses hang a left and turn onto La Brea, traffic officers with the granite faces and unwavering eyes chronicled by Marlowe waved me past a broken traffic signal.

There was no sign of Raymond Chandler Square there. I traveled slowly west and looked things over: Tawdry storefronts had given way to apartments in a neighborhood that didn’t have the look of having been excited about anything in the immediate past.

Hollywood Boulevard ended abruptly at one of those winding canyon roads lined with millionaires’ houses--behind the 12-foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges that Marlowe said hid those noise-proof containers erected just for the upper classes. No Raymond Chandler Square here.

I doubled back and then headed for the office. A call to City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg turned up the square’s location: the intersection of Hollywood and Cahuenga boulevards.

“We’re trying to relate to the history of Hollywood,” said Goldberg--who acknowledged that only a few passersby were there when the Raymond Chandler Square signs were unveiled. “We’re trying to say that there’s a little Raymond Chandler in Hollywood even today.”

The designation was proposed by a Raymond Chandler fan named Jess Bravin of West Los Angeles, Goldberg said. Bravin, a 30-year-old law student, hadn’t made it in time for the unveiling, either.

Raymond Chandler Square was six hours old at midafternoon Monday when Bravin stopped to admire the signs. They are across the street from the old Security Pacific Bank building--the site in Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” called the Cahuenga Building, where Marlowe is supposed to have maintained his seedy, sixth-floor office.

“I hope you guys write about this,” Bravin said. “After all, there’s not a week that goes by that you either quote Chandler or try--badly--to imitate his style.”

I cringed at that. Suddenly, as Chandler put it, I felt like a pearl onion on a banana split.