Gateway to Hollywood to Serve as Beacon and Beautification Project

The Los Angeles Board of Public Works on Monday gave the final go-ahead for a beautification project that is to act as a Gateway to Hollywood: a 30-foot-high glass tower and a large fountain on the median where Franklin and Wilcox avenues meet Cahuenga Boulevard.

Supporters say the Gateway project, to cost an estimated $658,000 in private and public money, will help that portion of Hollywood continue its winning battle against prostitution and drug dealing.

“We’re turning the area around,” said Merle Singer, president of the Yucca Corridor Coalition, a group of area property owners and others who have led the effort to clean up the streets and curb the crime there.

Two years ago, coalition members approached the late John Ferraro, the longtime councilman who represented that part of Hollywood, about the project. To enhance the drab concrete median where the three streets meet, they proposed a three-sided glass tower lighted from within, with water running down its sides into a fountain, plus landscaping and other amenities.

The word “Hollywood” is to run down the tower’s three sides in illuminated letters inside.

The tower is designed to “look like a beacon” to visitors, especially those who enter Hollywood from the Cahuenga offramp of the Hollywood Freeway, said Jeanine Centuori of UrbanRock Design in Lincoln Heights. She and partner Russell Rock designed the project.

The bulk of the funds raised for the work came from a range of community-based organizations. The project also qualified for some city funding under the Adopt a Median program.

Although Monday’s action by the public works board was a foregone conclusion, an array of Hollywood boosters, led by newly elected City Councilman Tom LaBonge, urged the five-member panel to give the final go-ahead for the project by waiving public works-related city fees.

LaBonge referred to the newly opened $615-million commercial and retail project at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue as the brainchild of city planners and developers. In contrast, LaBonge told the commission, the Gateway tower is an example of “redevelopment from the bottom up.”

The project will include new bus stop benches, a garden of native plants and street lights.

Singer and project supporters said work could begin within a week and be completed in about six months.

In the early 1990s, the Yucca Corridor area had problems with drug dealing, run-down buildings and business flight.

Singer, with the help of then-City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg and others, organized citizen patrols to monitor the neighborhood and eventually helped form the Yucca Corridor Coalition.

Officers from the LAPD’s Hollywood Division schooled residents and merchants on how to report crime and other problems. Three remote cameras were installed on Yucca Street to record suspicious activity. Anti-graffiti efforts were organized. Residents railed against trouble-prone bars.

By some accounts, crime in the corridor has dropped an estimated 50% over the past three years.