Could It Be Magic--Again?

On a recent Sunday night, as hordes spill out of Mann’s legendary Chinese Theatre, a young Dutch couple ask a stranger to snap their picture. They stretch out on the grimy sidewalk alongside Elton John’s pink star in the Walk of Fame, oblivious to the aimless mob around them. It is a typical scene of tourists searching for a fix of Hollywood glamour. Inevitably, the search fizzles into disillusion.

That is all about to change. Sniffing profit in those dazed tourists, developers are smitten with Hollywood Boulevard again. A proposal is in the works for a massive entertainment complex next door to the Chinese Theatre that would include as many as 14 theaters, a hotel, a ballroom and a new home for the Academy Awards, at a projected total cost of more than $300 million--three times the cost of Universal CityWalk. Nearby, a nightclub modeled as a mock Eden paradise opened last month, there are budding plans for another hotel, and a cluster of abandoned theaters and ancient office buildings are getting their facades nipped and tucked.

All are the product of a desire to recapture the glamour and glitz of old Hollywood, to create a fashionable district that will draw both tourists and local shoppers. The intent is to blend the flashy energy of CityWalk-like projects with a more tasteful historical fabric.

CON KEYES / Los Angeles Times

BOULEVARD OF TODAY: The TrizecHahn complex would transform an area that includes Mann’s Chinese, foreground, and a Holiday Inn.

Unfortunately, glamour alone will not be enough to resurrect the place. In its heyday from the late teens through the early 1950s, the boulevard was a complex fusion of the machinery of desire and the sleepiness of Main Street. Go to a premiere. Browse dusty books. It was all the same. The gaze of the aspiring starlet and the gaze of the shopper were interchangeable. And it was the interchangeability of those desires--of big dreams and small ones--that was Hollywood’s unique urban legacy.

That complexity, of course, was lost in part when the bulk of film and television studios fled for quieter suburbs in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Unlike, say, New York’s Times Square--the redevelopment project that has been most touted as a model for the boulevard’s revival--Hollywood today has no raison d’e^tre, no real connection to the urban fabric around it. Times Square is a theater of congestion: Its massive bus terminal and underground subways--New York’s busiest--spew out millions of commuters daily. Broadway’s lights still flicker brightly. Hollywood, by comparison, has only its lost tourists. The community that sustained it has faded away.

The mission for city planners is to revive that urban complexity. Angelenos are starved for that kind of authentic street life. We leap at the opportunity to make contact, to rub shoulders, however fleetingly, with one another. We want to satisfy our voyeuristic cravings. Witness the success of such mediocrities as the Third Street Promenade. And what better place to create a true urban forum than the Main Street of glamour? The potential is there. What’s missing in the plans so far is the imagination necessary to accomplish it.

Hollywood Boulevard’s mythic past dates to the 1920s, when it was the site of glamorous movie houses, posh hotels, quirky bookshops and seedy liquor stores--all surrounded by a loose clutter of studios. Little of it was high architecture. Its architectural significance, instead, is as critical mass of sometimes grand, sometimes gaudy structures. Here, high and low aspirations cozily coexisted.

Even the best of it was coated with a superficial glaze. When Sid Grauman first broke ground on a new movie house at Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue in 1922, he wanted a Moorish palace. Months later, an English archeologist discovered the steps leading down to Tutankhamen’s tomb. No matter. Grauman had his workers tear out the red tile roofs and replace them with huge Egyptian columns. Any fantasy would do. The point was to generate desire.

Yet the selling of illusion always came with a price. When failed actress Lillian Entwhistle threw herself from the top of the “Hollywood” sign in 1932, it seemed emblematic: Hollywood could just as easily tear you down as pull you up. Its beckoning finger often led nowhere. But that was part of the myth. Hollywood was always both: glamour and its dark underbelly.

The first blow came from the Hollywood Freeway. Completed in 1954, the freeway sliced diagonally across Whitley Terrace--once the nesting place of stars like Rudolph Valentino and Bette Davis--severing the residential hills from the boulevard. Highland Avenue became a major freeway access point, jammed with impatient commuters trying to work their way back to the Valley or into downtown.

Meanwhile, developers began tearing down old residential hotels to make way for bigger, cheaper structures. In 1956, the boulevard’s grandest landmark, the Hollywood Hotel, at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, was replaced by a banal office tower in a failed scheme to develop the block. Eventually, film and television studios fled for safer spots like Burbank.

The slide seemed irreversible. By the ‘80s, even generic stores like See’s Candy, Thom McAn and Florsheim were gone. Testy civic leaders and bitter local merchants began heaping scorn on the street’s “bums” and “creeps.” Abandoned storefronts. Pawnshops. Cheap lingerie. Gangs cruising in lowriders. In the public imagination, it was all part of the same urban wasteland, a once glamorous ideal gone bad.

The turning point, to many, occurred in 1989, when the Walt Disney Co. bought the 1926 El Capitan Theatre--a light and playful collage of Baroque, Tudor and mock East Indian styles that seemed the perfect metaphor for Disney’s own cheery vision of culture. City officials saw the grinning mouse’s squeaky-clean image as a boon to any urban renewal plans. If Disney was willing to set down amid sex shops and pizza parlors, the logic went, Hollywood must be good for the whole family.

But locals saw no visible change until nearly a year ago, when the California Highway Patrol began a sudden blitz against youths cruising the boulevard, seizing cars and arresting drinking drivers.

And by then, other restoration efforts had taken hold. A developer is polishing up the El Capitan’s ornate ‘20s office building. Around the corner, the Art Deco Max Factor Building will soon reopen as a movie costume museum. And the city is working on restoring 50 landmark neon signs in an effort to transform the street into a 24-hour event.

“There was always a lot of neon in Hollywood,” says Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, whose 13th District includes the area, “and most of the signs were never torn down. They were shut off, but never torn down. . . . We’ve been working on this for months and months and hope to light them all up by Christmastime.”

But the success of the street’s rehabilitation will ultimately hinge on new development. Two projects now in the works offer a peek into what the future could hold. One, a 1-million-square-foot retail and movie complex by TrizecHahn Corp., the developer of San Diego’s Horton Plaza, is now being prepared for public review; construction could begin as early as the summer. The other, dubbed Hollywood Spectacular and designed by the Hollywood Orange Land Development Group, is still in the early planning stages.

For those who have watched a movie at the Hollywood Galaxy, the ghoulishly lit cinema complex that opened on the boulevard in 1991, Hollywood Spectacular will seem familiar. The building, sited on the lot just west of the Chinese Theatre, is essentially a blank cube. Its main feature is a series of towering painted steel letters--cartoonish, multicolored cutouts--that spell out HOLLYWOOD along the street.

Even the crassest developments often show some cunning in their ability to disguise their true ambitions. Not here. The absurd facade--a cynical play on the “Hollywood” sign high up in the distance--does little to veil the hollowness at the project’s core. Its street-front entry--the dark, dingy spaces between the giant letters--is essentially an urban black hole. Projects like these will do nothing to add to the energy of the street. They will slowly suck it away.

By contrast, TrizecHahn’s project is more complex. The development extends more than 500 feet along the boulevard, from the Chinese Theatre to the corner of Highland. It will cover more than two-thirds of the block, reaching back up toward Franklin Avenue. In early October, TrizecHahn bought the nearby 23-story Holiday Inn for a reported $35 million. The plan is to create a large plaza entry along Highland for both the entertainment complex and a renovated version of the hotel. There are also plans to build a 3,300-seat auditorium that could someday host the Academy Awards.

The project--designed by the architecture firm Ehrenkrantz Echstut and Kuhn under the guidance of David Malmouth, a veteran of Disney’s Times Square crusade who now works for TrizecHahn--is an open-air shoppers paradise with up to 14 movie theaters, several restaurants, dozens of shops, a hotel and a ballroom. Conceptually, it is a gigantic, multilevel version of Via Rodeo--the themed, upscale shopping haven in Beverly Hills.

In the design, shops and theaters are wrapped around a large elliptical open-air rotunda. A sort of internal street cuts diagonally across the site, beginning as a series of grand stairs at Hollywood Boulevard and extending across the rotunda to the second entry at Highland. A pedestrian arcade will replace what is now Orchid Street.

The development team carefully divided the project into different components in order to meld it with the scale and context of nearby buildings. None of the structures is more than four stories tall, and the grand stair splays out dramatically to invite people in. In a familiar L.A. formula, parking is underground.

TrizecHahn gleefully predicts more than 9 million visitors a year. And the plan will obviously draw people in off the street. But once inside, will shoppers feel the need to leave this open-air sanctuary to explore the big world outside? Or will they remain sealed off, gliding from one sanitized bliss to another? In effect, TrizecHahn has privatized the public street. It has designed a cozily self-contained universe--one whose facade masks a more subtle homogeneity.

TrizecHahn seems vaguely aware of the dilemma. It is now one of several developers competing for the right to build on another Community Redevelopment Agency site on the south side of the block. But there--perhaps embarrassed by the scale of their ambitions--they are assembling a team of different architectural firms to design separate components for the proposal. And parking--according to the guidelines set by the agency--will have to be above ground.

To decry the “Hollywoodization” of Hollywood, of course, is to miss the point. The point is not to soften the glitz but to sharpen it, to make it real again. But to accomplish that, any development will have to focus relentlessly on the street itself. It must feed the curiosity of the urban walker.

“There have to be things that tempt you, that distract you, that prevent you from getting right back into your car,” says Robert A.M. Stern, the principal designer of Times Square’s 1992 urban guidelines. “For a city to work as an exciting urban experience, you have to run it like a play.”

So far, the most successful design in this regard is American Cinematheque’s renovation of the Egyptian Theatre. The design, by the firm Hodgetts + Fung, is a perfect fusion of old and new. The architects decided to preserve the theater while transforming it into a futuristic vision of contemporary Hollywood. The theater’s ornate, hulking shell will be restored. An abstracted, high-tech cage will be inserted inside. The project is a remarkably sophisticated take on the process of urban decay and regeneration. Forget nostalgia. Sweep away the sentimental slop. Reveal the messy layers that give the city its depth.

But the project also works as an urban object. By restoring the theater’s forecourt, the architects have fused the building and the street while creating a dynamic urban event. Like the Chinese Theatre’s, the forecourt is an urban cliche that works--a blend of indoor and out that brings the glamour of the movie palace right out onto the street. The Egyptian’s will perform the same function with even greater elegance: It will include a small book kiosk and twin rows of tall, swaying palms. These simple spaces are brilliant social condensers. As such, they begin to suggest a pattern for the boulevard’s future.

Other key battles have been won. A misguided Metropolitan Transportation Authority proposal to create an entry plaza for one of two Hollywood Boulevard Metro Rail stops was squashed. The city may switch on its antique neon signs as early as next month. And, who knows, the best of the restored theaters and the new street patrols might eventually lure some neighbors from their hilltop perches--gads!--on foot.

These are all clues to how the street could become a true urban event. They suggest a more complex formula for an active street life--one in which the public itself is part of the spectacle. And they suggest an urban vision that is rooted in the actual identity of Hollywood, both as an epicenter of world glamour and as a unique place in the fabric of the city.

As urban activist Jane Jacobs once mischievously put it: “Cities are full of people with whom . . . a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable, but you do not want them in your hair.” Yet Jacobs understood that cities cannot thrive without that casual contact. Her version of the public realm--where people leave their house keys at the local grocer and borrow a buck from the newsstand man--is slowly vanishing. But a place where people can mix is still as essential in a healthy democracy as the need for the occasional anonymous spaces where the unconscious can wander.

But why stop there? Why not engage the world’s most prominent urban thinkers too? Even themuch-touted revival of Times Square is littered with missed opportunities. In a 1995 competition for a new hotel at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, London-based architect Zaha Hadid designed a dynamic urban tower whose elevated glass lobby and massive ramps feed off the frenzied pedestrian traffic. Her proposal lost out to a less visionary design. But it is clear that Hadid has a deep sensitivity for urban spectacle.

Closer to home, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas--who is currently designing a new headquarters building for Universal and plans to open an L.A. office next year--is known for his own obsessive study of the urban condition. His best work has radically compressed urban fragments into the scale of small buildings: Rooftop swimming pools float on axis with the Eiffel Tower, roads slice through gallery buildings. Los Angeles architect Frederick Fisher brilliantly exposes the layering of architectural history in his work--most recently at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. Architects such as these should be part of the mix.

For that, Hollywood needs a powerful cultural voice. In August, the local Community Redevelopment Agency invited New York planners to Hollywood to share the secrets of their success in Times Square. The parallels were easy enough to make. During the ‘70s, Times Square had undergone a similar--even more publicized--fade into a wasteland of porn and strip clubs. Later, it was Disney that anchored its much-touted restoration by first promising to renovate the New Amsterdam Theatre and later winning a bid to be part of a deal to build a hotel at the other end of the block. (Disney has since withdrawn from the hotel scheme.) Using the 1992 guidelines, planners turned the street into a collage of restored old theaters, seductive billboards and flashing lights--a giant mouthpiece for what Koolhaas once called “the culture of congestion.”

But New York’s Empire State Development Corp., founded by former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a legendary autocrat, has unheard-of authority for a redevelopment agency. The agency could not only restrict planning and design proposals that it deemed unfit, it could also impose any rules that it believed were necessary to fulfill the project’s urban promise. Further, it was able to buy much of the Times Square property outright, which allowed it to pick and choose developers.

The Community Redevelopment Agency has no such powers. It has little influence over developers who are not seeking public assistance. And although it commissioned a set of guidelines for the district in 1987 at a cost of more than $2 million, those guidelines were never approved by the City Council.

“The only guidelines that exist right now is if you want me to look at it, it has to say ‘Hollywood.’ If it looks like it could be in any suburb in any part of America, that’s not what we’re looking for here,” Councilwoman Goldberg says. Her office is now putting together a new plan with the input of local architects and planners. But she is less clear about what the guidelines might include.

For now, Hollywood’s main attraction is embedded in the sidewalk: a series of pink stars often with vaguely recognizable names--a children’s board game on an urban scale. But true urban dreamers can hope for a more complex mix than the standard tourist fare, where locals could leaf through books and magazines, catch a movie and ogle the occasional star while tourists marvel at the epicenter of the Los Angeles of their dreams. For that, the street must become more than a chain of haphazard developments, no matter how well-conceived. It needs a clear vision.