Closing the Book on a Landmark

If Hollywood’s highest-profile denizens persistently nip, tuck and lift, why should its namesake boulevard be any different?

Or so have thought Los Angeles visionaries--from developers to policymakers--who for decades have attempted to gussy up this fading beauty until it bears little resemblance to its former self.

Anyone who keeps tabs on L.A. knows that the only true constant is change. There have long been incessant, puffed-up plans for resuscitating Hollywood. And until now, Mitch Siegel, manager of the family-owned Book City--a boulevard icon itself--has observed the comings and goings from a safe enough distance. Now, however, he is in the middle--or rather, on the wrong side--of the refurbishing and will soon be without his storefront.

Since Book City’s doors first opened in 1973, Siegel has watched uneasily as the very things that he thought lent Hollywood Boulevard its character and personality--nightclubs and quirky collectors’ shops--have been razed. So much of it is deemed outmoded, he says, or worse, an unsightly blemish. “I remember when there were 30 bookstores up and down here. Small family-owned businesses . . . record stores,” Siegel recalls, re-animating the old storefronts, one by one, by memory, from behind his cluttered desk in a windowed nook with a peekaboo-through-the-books view of the boulevard. Pickwick Books, Crown, and, of course, C.C. Brown’s ice cream parlor. “Now, with all these T-shirt stores, cheap electronics and souvenir shops, it looks like Waikiki.”

Siegel, compact and sinewy, looks like he’d be up for a good fight. And over the years, he, along with his parents, Alan and Frances, have weathered many tough spots, from lingering Red Line construction to a minefield of parking restrictions. To increase business at their used-book store, they’ve added a Hollywood collectibles annex and have beefed up their fine-arts stock. But despite their creativity and tenacity, the Siegels now have real reason to worry: If they don’t quickly find a suitable new location, they will be out of business as early as the end of the month. Siegel says he has been told that demolition of the building at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Avenue is set to begin in January.

Over the years, Book City, which specializes in cinema and art, has been a treasure trove for discerning, specialty shoppers--from Hollywood’s set designers and art directors to general-interest bibliophiles--looking for the impossible-to-find. A destination for tourists from as far off as Europe and Japan, the shop counts as regulars Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Jackson and, of course, Hollywood’s honorary mayor, Johnny Grant.

The Siegels (who also own a second Book City in Burbank) have leased their 15,000-square-foot space month to month for the last seven years. Their worries began, says Siegel, when CIM Management announced plans in 1999 to raze much of the block for a retail project to include a six-screen Laemmle theater complex and a sushi bar. “Who needs another multiplex theater?” Siegel says, shrugging. CIM did not return repeated calls for comment.

Siegel says he’s been offered a smaller space in the new complex, but at a starting price almost twice the $4,500 rent that he now pays monthly. “The rents in the neighborhood have gone up like crazy.”

Hard Times for

Local Mainstays

“It’s like this old New Yorker cartoon,” says Hollywood entrepreneur Aaron Epstein, son of Louis Epstein, the founder of the granddaddy of independent West Coast bookstores, Pickwick, which ruled the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and McCadden Place from 1938 to 1967. “You’ve got this elderly lady, poorly dressed, in the office of this movie producer, and the caption reads, ‘I know all that, mother, but what have you done for me lately?’ ”

“That’s what’s happening to Book City. They’ve been a faithful tenant. They stayed when many other merchants left--through the Rodney King riots, through the earthquake. They continued to draw people to Hollywood. They are quality people, not just another cheap tourist shop.”

Instead of being rewarded, the shop has essentially been shown the door, says Robert W. Nudelman, president of Hollywood Heritage, a local preservationist organization. “Book City is an asset,” he says. “It serves the community. It has a better film collection than the Hollywood library. This was a writers’ corridor. The Writers Guild was there. That’s where all the bookstores were. It’s right down the street from Musso & Frank . . . and its old, famous writers room in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Book City is part of the fabric. It’s all that’s left of that spirit.”

Roxana Tynan, Hollywood economic development deputy for City Council member Jackie Goldberg’s office, sees things differently. She says that “CIM did offer Book City a below-market deal to stay in the new project. [It was] above what they are paying now, but that’s the nature of capitalism. There’s only so much you can do to control tenant prices. But CIM did offer them a good deal. I think Mitch . . . just doesn’t accept that it’s a good deal.”

Tynan says representatives of Goldberg have shown Siegel several alternative spaces. “Mitch has turned them down for one reason or another. But we’re currently working on a really exciting option in TrizecHahn development (the $567-million entertainment complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue) which Mitch seems to be excited about, too.”

He was, he says, until he crunched the numbers. Price, says Siegel, is an issue. As is visibility and space enough for the 100,000 titles that jam the store’s shelves, counters, floors and any other flat surface available.

For Siegel, there’s also the what’s-going-to-happen-next soap opera of Hollywood Boulevard.

“They’ve been telling us for years that it’s going to get better. ‘Hang in there,’ ” says Siegel, 45, a native New Yorker, echoes of Brooklyn still looming in his voice. His parents, five uncles, an aunt and a cousin or two are all in the book business, and he too found himself following the family tradition. Truth be told, he says, it’s difficult to just up and quit. “I’m looking down the street and thinking, ‘Uh . . . no, I don’t see any more people.’ Now they’re saying that thing on Highland [the Trizec Hahn project] is going to bring more people . . . .”

Though there have been big strides made on the boulevard, from the reglorified Pantages Theatre on the eastern end to the resurrected El Capitan Theatre near the western end, the crowds and their pocketbooks don’t often make it to Book City’s block, midway between the two theaters.

“The last time we saw a lot of foot traffic around here was when they were offering free rides on the Red Line [the weekend the subway opened in mid-1999]. “

Moreover, even discussing the “beautification” of Hollywood splinters consensus about not just what Hollywood should be, but what Hollywood is to begin with. Considering the “improvements”--which to Siegel’s mind have merely translated as years of scaffolding and torn up streets and rusting-shuttered storefronts--has gotten him wondering. “Beautification,” just like the word it is derived from, is such a subjective thing.

In truth, he says, doing business on the boulevard in the last three decades has been like trying to get around on a broken heel--nothing glamorous about it. “I mean, the whole area is culturally going down,” Siegel says. “This place used to be the capital of culture.”

Area Improvement

Is a Fluid Concept

Understanding that Hollywood Boulevard has been, and always will be, a great many things--a film capital; a shopping corridor; a restaurant row; an explosion of not just cinematic but also musical self-expression--is a key to its future. It’s a destination haunted by all of its ghosts--simultaneously. To wrap your imagination around Hollywood, says Epstein, who owns Artisans’ Patio--a courtyard of diverse merchants and craftsmen to whom he leases space--is to confront the fact Hollywood Boulevard is “eclectic and an enigma,” and that its incongruities have for years been part of the charm.

One person’s idea of improvement is another person’s there-goes-the-neighborhood nightmare. “People are coming to Hollywood for its history,” says Nudelman. “Not minimally it’s to see where Clark Gable or Tom Cruise or Madonna went. If it’s not there, there’s no reason to. The history is the building.”

Some developers, says Jack Kyser, chief economist for the L.A. County Economic Development Corp., don’t quite grasp the enduring value of the brand. “[They] don’t understand that Hollywood is an international name. But what do tourists see when they get there? They see it and make no plans to return.”

One of the biggest challenges is filling in the hodgepodge of the strip where Book City is housed. “The middle part of the boulevard is a no-man’s-land. You’ve got a strange assortment of retail shops . . . souvenirs . . . and things I like to call ‘steel-wool-wig shops,’ ” says Kyser.

Kyser and Nudelman both reach back to the land-grabbing 1980s as one of the major sources of Hollywood’s ills. “Some people,” says Kyser, “have very strange ideas about real estate.”

At that time, speculators bought up scads of land, waiting for a payoff--the day that Hollywood rises gloriously from its ashes. But later, the TrizecHahn project and the success of the El Capitan fueled the frenzy. Problem is, whatever the dream was, it’s still far from realized. But in the interim, says Nudelman, “it’s forced the rents up without rhyme or reason.” Consequently, property owners wait. “They think if something happens, having that property equates with them having something more valuable. So they won’t rent it out because they aren’t getting enough money.”

“That,” adds Epstein, “is why you have all of these tattoo and cheap electronic shops. You ask these owners why they rent space to them, they say, hey, I’ve got a big mortgage to make.”

It’s been many decades since Hollywood Boulevard was what Johnny Grant remembers as a “walking vaudeville”: a thoroughfare tangled with contract players and ingenues taking a lunch break in the sun. “There were not so many commissaries then. So the tourists would come to see priests and hookers and cowboys and Keystone Kops walking down the boulevard going to lunch. That’s the kind of show we’re missing on the boulevard. That’s the kind of showmanship we need.”

Grant would like to see Sid Grauman-style entrepreneurs with a flair for theatrics. “I’ve been telling people for 25 years that Hollywood is coming back! And people were laughing at me. But the day I knew that it was going to happen was when David Malmuth, [executive vice president of TrizecHahn] announced that the Academy Awards were coming back home [in 2002],” Grant recalls.

But in order for wholesale refurbishing to take, suggests Kyser, “you have to go through and examine the bones.

“In the late ‘30s, it was a glamorous shopping village full of high-end retail. It would really be nice to bring that back. . . . It means you have to step back and take a more global view. . . . You have to have a clear vision and do something that will last.”

An Era Destined

to Pass Away

As the holiday shopping season sets in, and film reel and celluloid holiday decorations arc the boulevard, the Siegels haven’t bothered to decorate at all. The 10-employee store is as it always is--floor-to-ceiling books. Sections are labeled in hand letters--”Spies,” “Disasters,” “Food,” “Jazz,” “Fashion,” “Voyages”--and of course, Radio, TV and Film.

Aside from, “Where are the Marilyn Monroe biographies?” Mitch and his staff are fielding variations on the theme of one persistent question--”How did this happen?” “Where will you go?” “What will happen to all of the books?”

He can answer none of them in any definitive way, except that he plans some sort of sale toward the end of the month.

“Every city in the world wants Hollywood, except Los Angeles,” says Nudelman, who blames Book City’s plight on city officials, for failing to do enough to discern and preserve a Hollywood keepsake. “Saying you’re going to build a project just isn’t enough.”

Development deputy Tynan says she understands Siegel’s frustrations, and still hopes the city can find a way to keep Book City in Hollywood.

Hollywood Boulevard will “never return to the way it was in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” says Artisans’ Patio owner Epstein. “And anyone who believes that--they are just frustrating themselves.”

Yet somehow, despite the swing of the wrecking ball and the chiseling drills, the allure at heart endures. “I get calls every six months wanting to know if I want to sell the property,” says Epstein. “But I tell them no. I hope to be able to give it to my grandchildren.”