Historic Hollywood

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The Egyptian Theater became the
most important movie premiere venue
in Los Angeles when it opened in 1922
and continued to host premieres into
the 1970s. The Pig ’n Whistle was a
chain of restaurants on the west coast,
with this one opening in 1927. A
popular café, soda fountain, and
candy store it remained open until
1953. The Pig ’n Whistle was reborn
in 2001 at this site and is once again a
popular restaurant and club.
Paramount was one of the first motion picture
studios to activate their television unit, W6XYZ,
the forerunner of KTLA next to the Paramount
lot on Marathon Street. ABC purchased the old
Vitagraph and later Warner Brothers East
Hollywood annex for television production,
while NBC started up their own television
studios along with the Don Lee network in the
heart of Hollywood.
The immediate postwar era created
substantial changes in Hollywood. Thousands
of servicemen and women returning from
World War II had visited USO facilities, trained
or were stationed in the Los Angeles area,
and now knew of Hollywood’s attributes.
They returned looking for affordable housing,
creating an apartment-building boom for
several years that changed many neighborhoods
of single-family homes into ones of highdensity
apartments.
This began to alter residential planning and
demographics, resulting in changes to traffic,
shopping, and business patterns as Hollywood
lost its exclusivity and became more urban.
Many of the celebrity clientele moved their
residences, businesses, and shopping to the
west side of Los Angeles, including Beverly
Hills, or to the then-wide open spaces of the
San Fernando Valley.
To counter this loss in the late 1940s, the
city and the chamber of commerce pushed
for the 101 Freeway to come through Hollywood
so as to connect the valley with downtown Los
Angeles. After the freeway opened in 1954, the
plan backfired as the freeway allowed for people
to speed through Hollywood to go elsewhere,
thus avoiding it altogether. Commuters used
Hollywood’s streets to get to the freeway, adding
congestion and discouraging those who wanted
to shop or do business there. The freeway also
split the community, dividing the hillside homes
from the new flatlands apartments and the
shopping/business districts of Hollywood. All
of this helped to create a downward
socioeconomic spiral that is still being dealt with
almost sixty years later.
26 ✦ HISTORIC HOLLYWOOD