The Boulevard of the Stars
We have a few more boxes to pack as we wrap things up here in LA on our way to our
new home - Chicago. As we say goodbye to the City of Angels, we took one last stroll through our neighborhood.
We live in Hollywood, not the concept, but the actual community. The area started out as
a town on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which was eventually swallowed up by the growing metropolis. When the brand new entertainment medium, known as the motion picture, arrived here 98 years ago, the movie business became synonymous with the name of the small community of farmers and orange groves.
& Artwork: designslinger]
Although most of the major studios are located outside the borders of the streets of
Hollywood, the boulevard itself has attracted millions of tourists hoping to see a famous movie star. Millions of aspiring actors and actresses have come with hopes of finding stardom by moving to the hub of the film industry. When Sid Grauman was getting ready to open the Chinese Theatre in 1927, a major star of the era Norma Talmadge stopped by to see the almost completed building. According to legend, as she got out of her limousine, she stepped in the wet concrete of a newly poured sidewalk, and one of the most ingenious marketing ideas in history was born. The theater's forecourt is constantly jam-packed with visitors, and placing your foot into the footprint of a Hollywood legend is about as close as you will ever get to your favorite star, or stardom.
There isn't really much of "Hollywood" along the boulevard. There are the occasional
movie premieres, and the annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Kodak Theatre, but other than that, the street is mostly filled with cheesy, souvenir/tee-shirt shops. The majority of the stars are found underfoot in the terrazzo sidewalk, begun as another marketing campaign in the 1950s to attract tourists to an area that was in decline.
For us, the street was a place to get groceries at Fresh & Easy, a direct walking route to
the local branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, as well as the Sunday Hollywood Farmers' Market. And, if you go to southwest corner of Hollywood and Vine, adjacent to the Plaza Hotel on Vine Street, you will see a parking lot with a grove of tall palm trees in the middle of it. Those trees once surrounded a large house that stood in the middle of an orange grove, when Hollywood was a small town on the outskirts of a small city called Los Angeles.
I have enjoyed this brief explanation of what Hollywood was and is nowadays. The way in which you dismiss the myth and tell us what we should expect to see here has been really helpful. I was one of those that thought Hollywood was always full of stars. It never occurred to me it was full of T-shirt shops :)This is the kind of explanation I would like to get before wasting money in the wrong side of the city.
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