Historic Hollywood

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Right: Located on Ivar Street just
north of Hollywood Boulevard, the
Hollywood Knickerbocker was
constructed in 1925 as a high-class
luxury hotel. The eleven-story
building in the Spanish Colonial Style
with hand-painted beam ceilings and
marble floors and columns became an
important venue for Hollywood
parties and guests from D. W. Griffith
to Elvis Presley. Today it is a
retirement home.
Below: The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
was built in 1927 by an investment
syndicate led by C. E. Toberman that
included such Hollywood notables as,
Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford,
Joseph Schenck, Sid Grauman, Louis
B. Mayer, and Marcus Loew. The
hotel’s Blossom Room and Cinegrill
were to be the entertainment and
dining hot spots for the Hollywood
film colony. The hotel continues to be
a popular filming location for
everything from the I Love Lucy
television show to Beverly Hills Cop
II to Almost Famous. The Blossom
Room also served as the first venue
for the Academy Awards (then called
“Awards of Merit”) in 1929. A
twenty-five-year-old Englishman
arrived in Hollywood in 1934, broke
and looking for movie extra work. He
came to the Roosevelt to see the
original site of the Academy Awards,
the Blossom Room, and a sympathetic
desk clerk gave him a room in the
servants’ quarters. Twenty-five years
later, that actor, David Niven,
received his own Academy Award for
“Best Actor” at the Pantages Theater
for Separate Tables (1958). The
electric light banner in the foreground
over Hollywood Boulevard was for the
movie Grand Hotel (1932), which
premiered at the Chinese Theater
across the street.
many Hollywood Premieres were taking place at
the Grauman’s Chinese Theater as well as the
others on the boulevard. One of the largest of
these premieres was for the Howard Hughes film,
Hell’s Angels, which attracted over fifty thousand
people to the streets to see the festivities.
18 ✦ HISTORIC HOLLYWOOD