To those who care, Hollywood Boulevard conjures up a slew of contrasting images, from seedy to glamorous. The seriously uninitiated believe that Hollywood’s stars promenade up and down the starred sidewalks. Others, equally uninitiated, believe it’s a place too scary to visit, day or night. Well, with 35 years of ongoing experience, I can tell you it’s neither.
Living in Hollywood with a single mom who was trying to support herself and her three kids was hard; especially with all of the kids in school and a mother that was, by necessity, not home much of the time. Lucky for us, and due to our close residential proximity to Hollywood Boulevard, Uncle Mann really came in handy. Uncle Mann must have been a rich guy, after all he owned the 2 biggest, coolest theaters on the Boulevard. I assumed he must have owned all the rest too, the ones we passed daily walking back and forth to school.
My sister worked for him; so you could say that’s how we got in good. We spent hours on end, sometimes in a single day, fixated while Uncle Mann regaled us with Historical Dramas and Science fiction and Fantasy.
When the Oscar’s come around I always think about how different that area used to be when I lived there. The Kodak Theater is the site of the Oscar Awards and has been for 10 or so years. A visit back there 3 years ago was surprising for me because the only thing I remembered was the Chinese Theater (the core of which is largely the same).
It’s become a hoary cliché that New York tears itself down continually, disrespectful of its past (i.e. Penn Station), but this 2-block segment in Hollywood did the same thing; in this case maybe it was a good idea.
Boarded up building, parking lot, theater, parking lot; no wait…