It takes but a squint at history to see the cycle. Until the hippies & teeny-boppers ruined things w/ their free love & overpriced drugs in the 1960s physical Hollywood (minus the show biz laid over it) had been an ordinary working to middle class chunk of Loss Angle-eeze not unlike maybe Long Beach or Burbank except incorporated into the City of L.A. By the time this reporter arrived to stay (40 yrs. ago this or last mo. Damn.) Hywd. was no place for squares to be after sundown, the shining new buildings of the '20s & '30s were 40+ yrs. old & seedy, & coffee was 35¢ a cup.
This was followed by several decades of "re"-development & sad reflections on the failure of all attempts to clean up (let alone revitalize). Things were so bad that much of the tourist T-shirt trade moved to Melrose Ave., a previously dull thoroughfare which had no show bidnis (or any other) cachet.
We were more than a little surprised (disappointed, too) when redevelopment actually took; we'd assumed Hollywood would never be clean again, but miracles do happen sometimes, & the secret to success w/ native-born Yankee tourists was eventually discovered: A mall featuring stores from the same fucking chains found in every other American mall, & a Hooters across the street. Where there's an Abercrombie & Fitch visitors know they're safe from seeing anything actually new or different.
A fifteen-ish story office building was demolished for the Mall of Hollywood, so we're also disappointed (we always have such high expectations) that the big-ass towers are going where there's been nothing but parking lots for the 40 yrs. we've been aimlessly wandering those streets. (Except the building on the opposite corner of the block from the Palladium, which once housed a film-processor & is now home to Ametron.*)
What will the big-ass towers & the other crap sprouting along Sunset be in 40 yrs.? Remodeled for senior tenement housing & chock-ful of aged fucking hipsters, assuming any of them had jobs, & were be allowed to retire therefrom before hitting 85.
And if the splotches & blobs in the niches on the renderings are greenery (Good job, artiste!) we can imagine overgrown gardens of Babylon trailing down the sides of the towers. An excellent environment for rats & squirrels!
This all assumes anything is ever built, of course. Anything can happen or not-happen.
*Which probably won't be able to find an affordable new location & will go out of business, forcing us to pay suggested retail for cables, blank media, yada at Best Buy or Office Despot. Except for the stuff now available only at Ametron, which we won't be able to get anywhere.
1 comment:
Ametron is my "go to" place for VHS videotape, of which I seem to be the last consumer in the known universe.
...........Peabody
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