Hollywood Face Lift Hopes to Reclaim a Building and an Era

Maybe it was her own experience with time’s downward tug that compelled the woman to comment as she pushed her shopping cart of bottles and cans down a Hollywood alley.

“This used to be a beautiful building at one time,” she volunteered, nodding toward four stories of brick and stucco at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.

For years, the Hollywood-Western building has been a ruined reminder of what Hollywood used to be, rather like a ravaged beauty with good cheekbones.

One only had to look above the first floor at the winged Mercuries and classically stylized semi-nudes prancing on the cast-stone fire escapes to realize the past had been much, much grander than the present. Clearly 5500-5510 Hollywood Blvd. had not always housed a cheesy bargain store specializing in the plastic and tasteless.

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When the building was dedicated 70 years ago, people showed up in tuxedos and furs for a ceremony that could have been mistaken for a movie premiere. Actress Norma Shearer slipped a golden key into the front door and souvenirs were passed out by MGM’s “baby stars,” asrecounted in Maggie Valentine’s book “The Show Starts on the Sidewalk.”

Commissioned by movie moguls Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (Shearer’s husband), the landmark was designed by architect S. Charles Lee with decorative themes that Valentine described as a celebration of cinema’s marriage of art and business.

The elevator cabs were outfitted with mahogany and gold leaf, the lobby with Bottecino marble and bronze.

Cast-stone figures representing producers and the motion picture arts gazed down from the upper facade. The balcony friezes of scantily clad figures illustrated movie making.

The address had immediate cachet, attracting some of the most powerful people and organizations in Hollywood.

The quick-tempered Mayer cut deals in a corner office, while elsewhere in the building, Central Casting decided the fate of thousands of wannabe extras and film industry censors toiled to safeguard the nation’s morals.

They worked only a few yards from scenes of bare flesh they never would have allowed on screen. Decades later architect Lee joked that the balcony art “was the first porno work in Hollywood.”

This being a Hollywood story, the glory on the corner of course didn’t last.

As the entertainment industry scattered and the neighborhood slid into slumhood, so did the building. It was declared a city historic monument in 1988, but by the middle of this decade the only major deal-making behind its doors involved drugs.

The Northridge earthquake seemed to be the final blow, damaging the building so extensively that it was red-tagged. Squatters took over, scrawling obscene messages on the walls, patrolling the halls with baseball bats and burying the terrazzo and wooden floors under 6-foot mounds of debris.

But today the script is being rewritten.

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The nudes have been cleaned up, the ground-floor bargain store will be gone by the end of the month and the garbage has been shoveled off the floors.

Private passion and public money are rescuing the building--or at least attempting to, since ultimately only a revived neighborhood and appreciative tenants will keep it alive.

The 1994 earthquake that nearly destroyed the building shook loose the government funds to fix it: a $2.3-million earthquake rehabilitation loan from the Community Redevelopment Agency, along with a $1-million city housing loan to renovate an adjacent apartment building that in its early days reputedly housed the mistresses of studio executives.

The quake “was a mixed blessing in a sense,” said Mirta Ocana, a deputy for City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. “We just didn’t have the funds to do it, and now we got the money.”

The private push has been supplied by Matthew Lesniak, an architecture buff and former mime who made the building’s salvation something of a personal crusade after learning of the landmark’s bleak post-earthquake state.

He approached two elderly sisters who had owned the property since the late 1970s and started to work with them, helping to get the financing to keep the Hollywood-Western building off the shamefully long list of lost Los Angeles architectural gems.

“I’ve always been driven by passion. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad,” mused Lesniak, 44. “This building was a passion, and I realize that.”

After the project got off the ground, he was hired by the renovation architect, Jai Pal Khalsa, as a liaison with the owners, sisters Charlotte Reed and Natalie Robin.

Robin, a clarinet and saxophone player who appeared in movies and television shows in the 1940s and ‘50s, died last spring. It was she, the story goes, who spied the building while shopping with Reed for commercial properties in the area and announced, “I want that one.”

The renovation kitty is not large enough to replace or fully restore all the rich adornment that was stolen or trashed over the years--the elevator cabs and bronze doors are long gone.

“It’s not a restoration,” Lesniak said. “It’s a rehabilitation.”

But the good bones are there, along with a design that suffuses the interior spaces with light and a sense of openness. The upper-floor windows look out on the Hollywood Hills, diverting eyes from the slowly improving but still seedy streetscape below.

Despite the unsavoriness of the immediate neighborhood, the building’s lineage has elicited leasing inquiries from the arts and entertainment community. One prospective tenant with a funky sense of urban decor even talked about keeping the graffiti on the walls.

“They know about the area; they want the building,” Lesniak said, hopefully.