MTA Plan to Replace Walk of Fame Is Voted Down

Hollywood history buffs won a victory Wednesday when a Los Angeles city agency unanimously voted against a sidewalk repair plan that would replace the pink and black settings of 122 stars on the Walk of Fame.

“It’s true that by Eastern standards the Walk of Fame hasn’t been there very long. But we have to take what we have and it’s awfully important to Hollywood and all the Los Angeles area,” Thomas Hunter Russell, vice president of the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission, said of the tourist attraction established in 1960.

The commission, which oversees city landmarks, voted 3-0 to deny permission for a repair plan proposed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as part of its subway construction project below the walk on Hollywood Boulevard. The repairs are needed because of buckling sidewalks that critics have blamed on subway tunneling.

The MTA sought to keep the original brass nameplates and industry medallions of the 122 stars but demolish their pink settings and black sidewalk squares. The letterings and medallions--the little movie cameras, televisions and recording symbols--of such famous entertainers as Bob Hope, Johnny Weissmuller, Martha Raye and Duke Ellington would then have been set inside new terrazzo panels designed to be as similar as possible to the originals.

The MTA estimated that such a method would save about $159,0000 compared to a process previously used to remove and restore 320 stars from the walk. The earlier method involved slicing entire terrazzo panels from the sidewalks near the Vine Street and Highland Avenue subway station and safeguarding those weighty squares for reinstallation starting later this year.

The MTA and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which administers the walk, said new terrazzo--a polished mixture of marble and concrete--would also ensure the smoothest and cleanest appearance. That procedure has been used many times for repairs unrelated to the subway project, they said. But preservationists complained that the latest MTA and chamber plan would distort reality and strip away chunks of Hollywood history.

The work would have affected eight groupings of stars over five blocks west of Vine to near Whitley Avenue, including plaques for Danny Kaye, Maureen O’Sullivan, D.W. Griffith, the Smothers Brothers and Jose Feliciano. Some of the 122 were among the 1,558 installed en masse in the walk’s first year. With subsequent additions, the sidewalk stars now total 2,095.

Robert Nudelman, an activist with Hollywood Heritage, cited international news coverage of the issue as recent proof that tourists want to see and touch the star panels in their original sidewalk settings.

A Hollywood Walk of Fame with new terrazzo “will look just like the one in Orlando, Fla. now--only the one in Orlando, Fla. will be older,” Nudelman told the Cultural Heritage Commission Wednesday. (The walk has been re-created at the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando.)

Perhaps most important, the state’s historic preservation officer, Cherilyn Widell warned in a letter to the MTA that any change in the way the stars are removed would require special review by her office and federal authorities. Widell described the MTA’s new plan as “a substantial departure” from the 1993 agreement on the 320 stars already in storage. Special attention to historic preservation is required in federally funded construction projects such as the subway.

Cultural Heritage Commission Vice President Russell said that such a review and possible lawsuits would cause costly delays that, in turn, would eat up any savings the MTA expected.

“In reality, isn’t it ultimately going to be more expensive for the taxpayers and the MTA if we do what the MTA wants us to do now?” Russell asked just before the vote.

After the meeting, James Sowell, the MTA’s manager of environmental compliance, said his agency needed a month or so to decide whether to appeal to the City Council. The MTA has never conceded responsibility for the cracking sidewalks but has nonetheless agreed to fund the repairs.

Leron Gubler, executive director of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, expressed disappointment with the commission’s vote. “I think they’ve lost sight of the issue here. The Hollywood Walk of Fame was created as a tourist attraction, not a historical monument,” he said in an interview.