Hollywood Would Be City of Great Extremes

On a recent weekday morning at the base of the Hollywood Hills, Tatiana Zaza, 27, lounged at a table outside the Bourgeois Pig cafe on Franklin Avenue, chatting into her powder-blue cell phone.

On this block is an eclectic mix of shops and restaurants--a newsstand called the Daily Planet, a theater called the Tamarind, a used book store called Counterpoint and a French restaurant called La Poubelle (translation: the Trash Can).

“It’s like a mini-Greenwich Village,” said Zaza, an aspiring actress who recently moved back to Los Angeles from Manhattan. “It’s artsy. It’s young. It’s where all the hipsters are.”

Hollywood has long been a magnet for the young and hip. But it is a place of extremes, and the community trying to secede from Los Angeles looks quite different viewed up close.

From celebrity castles in the hills to homeless on the rough streets below, Hollywood is divided by geography and income, a collection of rich and poor neighborhoods, of bars and restaurants, tourist traps and post-production studios.

To the world it is synonymous with movies and glamour, history and popular culture--images at least as enduring as that of Los Angeles itself.

On Nov. 5, voters will decide whether to let Hollywood leave Los Angeles and become a new city of about 180,000. The Hollywood secession measure is on the same ballot as one for the San Fernando Valley.

A few blocks north of the Bourgeois Pig, where narrow streets wind their way up into the Hollywood Hills, residents of the old Spanish-style mansions, cozy English cottages and modern glass-walled boxes walk their dogs toward the trails of nearby Griffith Park.

A few blocks to the south, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Bronson Avenue, a prostitute in a teensy hot-pink halter dress and foot-high glittery silver pumps teeters wearily toward a pay phone at a gas station. The windows on the small houses in the surrounding streets all have burglar bars.

Hollywood became its own city in 1903, and joined Los Angeles in 1910 to share in the bigger city’s water supply.

It was founded in the late 19th century by wealthy Midwesterners looking to create a Christian utopia, one where bars were banned and liquor sales prohibited.

At first, it attracted retirees, who settled in Victorian and Craftsman-style homes along what is now Hollywood Boulevard.

By 1917, about 30 studios had made Hollywood their home, said historian Marc Wanamaker. With the studios came wealthy movie stars and moguls.

The economy of a modern-day city of Hollywood would still center on entertainment, along with tourism and health care, said Leron Gubler, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

But a new Hollywood city would be a much more diverse place: about 42% white, 36% Latino, 10% Asian and 4% black, according to the latest census figures.

The largely Democratic city would be full of apartment complexes, many run-down. Renters outnumber homeowners 3 to 1.

As for the homeowners, roughly half of their houses have property values of more than $500,000, according to a study prepared for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce last year using slightly different borders for the area. Many homes in the Hollywood Hills are worth millions.

A Hollywood city would be eagle-shaped, covering about 15 square miles from Melrose Avenue north to Griffith Park, and from the neighborhood around Vermont Avenue west to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. It would own the Hollywood sign.

Hollywood’s population would be little more than one-seventh of the Valley’s and about 5% of Los Angeles’. It would be quite a bit bigger than Burbank, but a little smaller than Glendale.

A Hollywood city government would consist of five council members, who would select a mayor from their ranks. Hollywood would contract with Los Angeles for most services, at least initially.

Secessionists say that smaller is better. They like comparisons to Glendale and Burbank, but there’s a fundamental difference between those cities and Hollywood. In Hollywood, “there’s only a very small middle class,” Gubler said.

In 2001, the area’s estimated median household income was just over $34,000, compared with about $46,000 for all of Los Angeles, according to chamber figures and the census.

The disparity of wealth in Hollywood is partly the result of the role it plays in drawing immigrants from around the world.

While it is home to some of Los Angeles’ most wealthy people, it also is a magnet for those fleeing other countries, often arriving here with very little.

“Because everyone’s heard of Hollywood, when there’s a crisis in another country, they tend to come here,” said Dick Rippey, assistant principal of Hollywood High School on Sunset Boulevard at La Brea Avenue.

On Fountain Avenue, Jessy Losana, 35, stands in front of his apartment building, tinkering under the hood of his aged Acura before heading to work at an auto parts shop downtown.

Born in El Salvador, he’s lived in Hollywood since he was a teenager. It’s gotten rougher, he said, even though his neighbors--working-class and poor Armenians, Guatemalans, Mexicans and Salvadorans--generally get along.

“Now if I don’t got no car, I just don’t go outside at night,” Losana said. “At 2 o’clock in the morning on Santa Monica, you can see a lot of prostitution and gangs.”

Asked if he considered the Hollywood Hills part of his community, Losana shook his head no.

At Hollywood High, where the sports teams are called the Sheiks, growing divisions in the area have been very evident, said Rippey, who has been at the famous high school for 36 years.

Founded in 1903 at a bakery shop, it originally had 54 students--and over the years educated many, including Lana Turner and Carol Burnett, who went on to be famous.

Today, the aging and cramped year-round school has 3,000 students and ranks at the bottom of state rankings in standardized test scores. Spanish is the most commonly spoken language, followed by Armenian. English comes in third. Three-fourths of the student body receive free lunches, an indication of poverty.

They’re not the children of the entertainment bigwigs who live north of Franklin.

“We don’t get the Hollywood Hills kids anymore,” Rippey said. “They usually go to private schools.”

The entertainment industry employs about 10,000 people in the area, Gubler said, not just at Paramount and in independent studios such as Sunset Gower and Raleigh, but in many small pre- and post-production companies.

In the early days, entertainment helped the area weather even the Depression better than other places. When studios began leaving for the Valley and Culver City, Hollywood’s elegant hotels, restaurants and shops still thrived.

Celebrities were part of its lore and lure.

Even at the height of its glory, Hollywood considered leaving Los Angeles.

A secession campaign took center stage in 1937, after the Culver City Chamber of Commerce announced plans to take the name Hollywood, saying it now contributed more to the film industry than Hollywood itself. Actors backed the movement to preserve their community’s famous moniker by making the area independent.

The movement lost its momentum a few months later, when Culver City and Hollywood stopped feuding, deciding to focus instead on making movies.

To celebrate, community leaders literally buried a hatchet into a slab of wet concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

By the 1960s, however, stars were becoming scarce. The Knickerbocker Hotel closed. So did the Brown Derby and the Broadway department store. No trace is left of some landmarks. Others are remembered only by their old signs.

The Hollywood Hills always remained separate and serene. But in the flats, new landlords failed to maintain buildings and rented to transients. Boarded-up homes and burnt-out cars lined the streets.

The high-end Garden Court Apartments, with its European architecture, became known as “Hotel Hell” because of the drug addicts, prostitutes, runaways and homeless who squatted there, said Wanamaker, the historian.

For decades, developers, homeowners and preservationists have tried to revitalize Hollywood.

Very active in the effort has been the Church of Scientology, one of the top property owners in Hollywood. The church has restored old buildings on Hollywood Boulevard; one once co-owned by Charlie Chaplin is now the L. Ron Hubbard Museum.

Some Hollywood residents are optimistic about the future of new developments on the boulevard, including the nearly $1-billion Hollywood & Highland mall. That mall is the new home of the Oscars, and the ceremony’s return to Hollywood cheers its neighbors.

They also are pleased that the subway now carries visitors to the spruced-up Pantages, El Capitan and Egyptian theaters, as well as the area’s trendy bar scene.

Still, many people are waiting to see if this round of improvements actually sticks. The mall already is struggling to hold tenants, and Hollywood revitalization has failed before too.

“It’s been an up and down process,” Wanamaker said.

That would be a worry for a new city, said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

In good times, entertainment and another Hollywood mainstay, tourism, could be very lucrative.

But recent history has shown how vulnerable tourism and entertainment can be to the whims of the national economy.

Consider, Kyser said, where a new city would have been with the labor disputes that rattled the entertainment industry last year and the huge drop-off in international tourism since Sept. 11.

Even today, Hollywood Boulevard remains home largely to trinket shops and T-shirt stores, but the down-at-the-heels Hollywood doesn’t faze A.C. Lyles, 84, a Hollywood office boy turned producer. He said he will always love the place.

With two loaves of bread, two jars of peanut butter and a sack of apples, Lyles took a four-day train trip from Jacksonville, Fla., and turned up at Paramount Studio’s towering iron gates on July 17, 1936.

“I was so happy to be here that I knew I’d never leave,” said Lyles, who has worked at Paramount ever since and now has his own Walk of Fame star, as well as a studio building named after him and scores of famous friends.

“Hollywood is still the most magical name in the world,” Lyles said from his fourth-floor window office once occupied by Fred Astaire.

“More people know of Hollywood than L.A.”