Let's bring some closure for the time being, to this trip through Hollywood, with one final blast of
MISCELLANOUS!Hughes Market – at Highland and Franklin. Amazingly, many memories tied up with that store, my first L.A. supermarket. Likewise...
Lee Drugs – the angled doorway at the SW corner of Hollywood and Highland.
(Moving out there from Ohio, it was a thrill to find liquor departments in drugstores and supermarkets.)
Hollywood Piano and Organ (not sure about the name) – on Highland across from Max Factor. When they finally closed – I’m thinking roughly ten years ago – I happened to catch a small article about it on the L.A. Times web site, and I wrote a short note of remembrance and thanks which they ended up selecting for publication. I’d rented an old Steinway baby grand there for the apartment on Franklin, $40 per month. (I said $20 in my note but I think it was $40.)
Newberry’s – a classic five-and-dime, and there might have been another that I’m blanking on.
Frederick’s of Hollywood, of course -- opposite my corner.
Larry Edmunds – Thank you for the origianl “Psycho” one-sheet.
The Magic Store and the Army/Navy store.
The camera stores! Not sure of the name, but a large one (similar to Bel-Air in Westwood) where I bought my first good camera, a now-classic Olympus rangefinder. I so wish I’d kept that, but I traded it in a couple of years later on their new OM-1 which I bought at Mel Pierce Camera (farther east on Hollywood Blvd., closer to Western Ave.). This store ("Something" Photo and Sound) eventually moved into a larger space on Sunset near the Dome, but the original store was on Cahuenga (that later became an Alexander’s Stationers), down a little and across the street from:
Lloyd’s Camera Exchange. FASCINATING place. Dark, mysterious, piled to the rafters with all manner of stuff for rental. Before buying my own SLR I rented an old one from them and spent a couple of my pre-car days walking around Hollywood, even up a little ways into the hills, shooting slides. This place was a Hollywood classic.
The Broadway – RIP, old friend. I loved the classic department stores. Always will.
Oh, here’s a good one, on Sunset Blvd. – "Crossroads of the World" --
http://www.crossroadshollywood.com/One day I heard about something that sounded kind of interesting, and I went and sat in a little second-story office there with a couple dozen other people, listening to Al Kasha, who had just won the Oscar for the song “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure, chatting about that and various other things. I think that was my only time to go into this unique little arcade.
Which also brings to mind a thing called Sherwood Oaks Experimental College which sponsored a weekly series of seminars on Hitchcock. They were held in a second-story space in – I think – the building at the NW corner of Hollywood and Ivar. I sent in the outrageous sum of fifty bucks and enjoyed several very informal evenings with the likes of Bruce Dern, Tippi Hedren, Jimmy Stewart (who shared his 16mm print of Rear Window), Joseph Stefano, John Forsythe, and (get ready for it) Miklos Rozsa – whose chat I most remember for his relating of how many of his Biblical film scores had been destroyed or had otherwise disappeared, and they had to reconstruct them from the earlier soundtrack recordings and sketch scores for later recordings to be made. I need to dig out the pictures I took of these people.
That is all.
