The Kitty Packard Pictorial

So it was a little over 80 years ago (like, 80 years, one month and a couple hours) that Howard Hughes’ wartime epic Hell’s Angels premiered to a thronging crowd at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. (It also catapulted Jean Harlow to stardom, but that’s another post.) The glittering premier was the grandest such event Hollywood had ever seen, up to that time. Hollywood was about to enter its prime, its legendary golden age, and the precipice it stood upon that glowing neon night in 1930 is powerfully obvious in the following archival footage:

(The archival footage from this re-release trailer of the comes courtesy of Twitter’s LA History group.)

So indelible are those images of the Boulevard that it rather of got me thinking about the inescapable fact that the infamous Boulevard of Broken Dreams as a part of this city’s living history and its truly fascinating metamorphosis over the decades.

From the quiet, pepper tree-lined Prospect Avenue of turn-of-the-century farm town Hollywood to the glittering, glamorous ground-zero of all things Tinseltown, to  a bitter and moth-eaten has-been, to a sleazy sex-shop porn-o-vard, to its current mutation of squeaky clean, sterile shopping centers and panhandling superheroes …. Hollywood Blvd is like the cockroach that refuses to die.

Or perhaps, more appropriately, a true survivor that refuses to throw in the towel.

Prospect Avenue (soon to be Hollywood Boulevard) c. 1905

Hollywood Blvd from the top of Lookout Mountain, c. 1919

The Hells Angels premiere on Hollywood Blvd, 1930

Christmastime, mid 1940s

Hollywood and Vine, 1947

Hollywood Blvd. in 1955

Hollywood and Highland in the 1950s

Hollywood at Cahuenga in 1956

Hollywood Blvd. in 1965

The Chinese Theatre in 1977

On the Blvd circa 1980