Universal Boulevard: Real Hollywood Hidden in Universal Studios Hollywood
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On this episode, we will be covering a few more details found at Universal Studios Hollywood in California.
Revisiting Universal Boulevard
The last entry in this series was back in September, when we continued our walk down the entrance corridor of Universal Studios Hollywood, telling you the history behind the design for the Universal Studios Store, including information on the Victoria Station Restaurant and how that location changed over time. We then explained why there is a Jack Pierce Makeup Studio facade, with a brief history of Jack Pierce.
Since we recorded that episode, we have learned that there is an invisible line across the walkway just before that Jack Pierce location and the Hollywood & Dine eatery that separates the Hollywood section of the park with the Universal Plaza section. I'm not sure if the maps had that distinction back when we recorded our episode in September, but it's on the map now. We also discovered that when this walkway first opened, it was referred to as Universal Boulevard, according to a post from March 2016 over at Inside Universal.
Also, we had mentioned that the first reference we could find for Jack Pierce working on makeup was for 1926's The Monkey Talks, but his IMDB page lists 1925's The Wanderer as his first movie as a makeup artist, which would explain the Established 1925 plaque at this location. Also, we have found some real-life locations in Hollywood that may have inspired some of the details found on the Makeup Studio building that we did not mention last time. Kevin and I took a trip to the real Hollywood, just down the road from Universal Studios, to find real-life locations for buildings found at Universal Studios Florida, Disney's Hollywood Studios, and Disney California Adventure, and, as usual, we found ourselves taking photos of all the interesting details we came across. That post on Inside Universal that I just mentioned describes these new facades as featuring Art Deco architecture based on landmark buildings found across the Los Angeles area, so we started going through our photos to see if anything looked similar.
Real Hollywood Inspiration: Art Deco in the Park
The first location we found is the current home of Hollywood Toys & Costumes at 6600 Hollywood Boulevard, which has gold accents, but also includes a similar blue with a hint of green paint on vertical piers that look very close to this facade. On the second floor of those piers are checkerboard vertical rectangles that are in a shape like the purple and orange tilework on this building in the park, complete with a notch protruding out of the bottom-center. To be clear, the Hollywood location does not have checkerboard tiles; it's a three-dimensional ornamentation that looks like a checkboard pattern.
This Art Deco building is from 1928, and according to all sources we could find, it was designed by architects at the J.J. Newberry Company, which was a five-and-dime store company that had locations throughout the United States. We've gone through archives of photos of their other locations, and none look like this one, which makes us question whether or not this design was really by their in-house architects.
We mentioned that skepticism because there is also the Bullocks Wilshire Building, which is a much larger Art Deco building located at 3050 Wilshire Boulevard, a little over five miles away, that has a similar ornamentation. This larger building is painted beige with green accents, but has vertical piers with a similar shape rectangle with a bottom center notch. This building was designed by John and Donald Parkinson, and it opened the following year in 1929. We scoured through several photos of art deco buildings around the world and have not seen this pattern in any other locations, so we don't think it's a coincidence.
As I said, we were in the real Hollywood looking for buildings at other theme parks, and both of those buildings were the inspirations for locations found at Disney's Hollywood Studios and Disney California Adventure, where interestingly, both include a rectangular ornamentation, but neither includes that bottom-center protruding notch. You know we love these details and noticing the similarities and differences.
But yeah, back on our September episode, we ended by saying that in the future we will be explaining the Laemmle Hollywood Apartments and the rest of the street, so we hope we have given you enough time to get ready for this, because here we go.
Laemmle Hollywood Apartments: “No Actors Please”
Like Jack Pierce, there are more people from Universal Studios' past that show up on this 2016 park addition. I will start by describing the buildings, and then next week, we'll go into who those people are.
So, immediately after the Jack Pierce Makeup Studio is that facade for Laemmle Hollywood Apartments. Like the makeup studio, the building behind this facade is also the section of the Universal Studios Store that was opened in the former location of the Victoria Station Restaurant building, which had more recently housed haunted walk-thru attractions like The Mummy Returns: Chamber of Doom and Van Helsing: Fortress Dracula. Something else that we didn't point out last time is that Comcast had finalized its purchase of NBCUniversal in 2013, and by 2015 this area at the front of the park was under construction at the same time that the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was being built, and the area near the Simpsons ride was being rethemed to Springfield U.S.A. as part of a massive overhaul of Universal Studios Hollywood.
As for this building, we know this is the Laemmle Apartment building because it has its name on a sign hanging sideways up on the second floor. At the bottom of the sign, it reads: Rooms to Let / No Actors Please. In one window is a blue sign for "Drama Lessons" which reads: "You too can be a Star! All ages welcome" and has classic drama masks underneath it. And in another window, there is a light beige sign for "Actors Headshots" with instructions to "Please ring bell for Apartment 3C." It has some clipart of an old-fashioned photographer with a dark cloth over his head.
Now, we couldn't find anything official as to what the inspiration for this location is, but it does seem to loosely resemble the Hillview Apartments located on Hollywood Boulevard with its Mediterranean style, including small windows with awnings, a red-tile roof, and a similarly positioned sign, though theirs simply reads "Hillview" written vertically, whereas the version in the park has the word "Apartments" written that way. The real location's current sign has a small "APTS" with a pink arrow pointing to the building, where the park version mentions "No Actors Please."
Also, where the location in the park has three large windows looking into the Universal Studios Store on the bottom floor, the apartments in Hollywood have large windows as well as large doors leading into various businesses that are under those apartments.
The real apartment building was designed by the Tifal Brothers and was opened in 1917. The Hollywood Historic Trust put a sign up at the location, (which is historic site number 12 for those following along at home). This sign explains that during the time period when it was built, many landlords viewed actors as unreliable tenants, and that some boardinghouses had signs declaring, "No actors, no dogs." The Hillview, though, did not actually have that rule and was home to a number of famous actors. The historical sign specifically mentions Mae Busch, whose IMDB page shows 131 acting roles between 1912 and 1946, and the sign states that she was famous for her role in Laurel and Hardy films. Her Wikipedia page mentions that her "best opportunity" was her starring role in Universal's 1927 drama Perch of the Devil, which included a flood sequence that would later be reused in other Universal movies for more than a decade.
Vase Details, Schwabs & Subtle Nods
Back at the park, as for the other unique elements of this building, it does have four large vase-like ornamentations along the roofline... The closest thing we could find are reliefs of vase-like ornamentations along the top of the first floor of 6358 Hollywood Boulevard, the current home of Ballet Next Chapter Night Club, which also has a couple of flower-shaped wall decorations of a similar look to metal wall panels found under the windows of the building in the park. This location was originally a Schwabs location that opened in 1926. Schwabs was a menswear shop, not to be confused with the chain of Schwab's Pharmacies that would begin to open starting in 1932. We did a deeper dive into Shwab's Pharmacy back in our Hooray for Hollywood Part 5 about the buildings at Universal Studios Florida.
Souvenir Shops & Art Deco Awnings
The facade to the right of the apartment facade is a taller Art Deco building with four large blue and yellow columns and three large flat rectangular purple awnings, with the center awning being larger, with the Universal Studios logo on it. Now, we haven't found anything that has a look too similar to those columns, with their ridges and painted accents. But, we did notice that all of the shops in Hollywood with large flat rectangular awnings like this are souvenir shops, though they are all colored red or blue, so combine them for purple, and here you have the ones at the park. Either way, inside this shop in the park is also a souvenir shop, so that connection does make sense.
Along the roofline of this building, there is a zig-zag pattern along the top with arches connecting them, which looks like an enlargement of a design along the roofline of the same Hollywood Toys & Costumes location that seems to have been the main inspiration for the Jack Pierce facade. In the park, that pattern has another unique design behind the zig zags and arches, but we found a photo from Inside Universal from when the building first opened, and that unique design wasn't present.
Thalberg Talent Agency & West Coast Casting
The next building facade has the address 678 on it, and there's a plaque that reads:
AUDITIONS
TUESDAYS
THURSDAYS
and then a name above a large display window that reads:
THALBERG TALENT AGENCY
That name is a nod to Irving Thalberg, who we'll cover in great length in next week's episode.
Above the business name is a metallic wall panel that has a bas-relief with birds on it that look similar to the birds found on several panels above the Playmate Shoes location at 6438 Hollywood Boulevard, also known as the Attie Building. This building was built by Henry A. Minton in 1931, and we couldn't find out too much else about it, other than that it was designed for commercial use, with retail space on the first floor, and office space on the second. It appeared in the video game LA Noire as a bookstore on the side facing Hollywood Boulevard, and a menswear shop on the other, but we couldn't find anything to confirm that it was ever actually used as either.
The Pantages Influence: Statues & Stage Legacy
Above that bas-relief, there is small window with text on it that reads West Coast Casting, and then above that is some ornamentation and a large sculpture of a large Mayan man in a headdress resting his fists on the roof the building. We'll go over how Thalberg and casting go together, but as for that guy up there, he's based on the six similar statues found on the Hollywood Pantages theater. Technically, with his location over a window and the more subtle ornamentation underneath him, he's based on one of the four statues that aren't directly above the entrance. The Pantages is a theater where you can watch Broadway-style performances today, but when it first opened in 1930, it was designed for vaudeville and movies. In the 1950s it would host the Academy Awards, but it mainly existed as a movie theater until 1977. But like I said, today they mostly show live entertainment, and is arguably the highest-tier location for musicals in the Los Angeles area. Universal Stage Productions, a division of Universal Studios, has had multiple shows that they have produced play at this theater, including Back to the Future: The Musical, Mean Girls, and most famously, Wicked.
Starbucks & Hello Kitty Shop: Spanish Colonial Revival
Continuing down to the end of the road, there is a Starbucks on the left and a Hello Kitty Store on the right, these locations are Spanish Baroque-style or Spanish Colonial Revival-style, depending on who you ask, instead of Art Deco, and they both feature some Churrigueresque decoration, which is found on multiple buildings on Hollywood Boulevard.
Most notably, the former Hollywood Playhouse, which is located around the corner from the Pantages on Vine Street, and the former Hollywood Studio building, which was once the home of that same Hollywood Toys that is now in the former five and dime location, which is literally the building next door.
There's also a fancy Taco Bell Cantina location with Churrigueresque decoration that is in a former Pickwick Bookshop further down Hollywood Boulevard. And there's also the Chapman Plaza, or Market, way over in Koreatown. The point, though, is that we couldn't find a one-for-one match, but the overall style of these buildings combined with the ornamentation, complete with plant-like squiggles mixed with shields, tells us that these buildings from the 1920s were their inspiration here.
The Animation Building & Illumination Entrance
That Hello Kitty shop, though, I should clarify... That location is technically the Animation Building, with three unique entrances. The Hello Kitty entrance is in the middle of the building facing the main corridor, or Universal Boulevard, while the other two are on the corners of the building. One is marked Animation Studio Store, while the other has large text with the word "ILLUMINATION" above the doorway, representing the Universal-owned animation studio famous for the Minion characters.
Laemmle Court & Carl Laemmle’s Beverly Hills Home
That Illumination doorway, and the rest of the building heading down the street, located across from the Hollywood and Dine eatery, has more of a Mission-style early California look to it. Immediately following that building is a courtyard that was added sometime between 2017 and 2018, and is named Laemmle Court. Yes, again with Laemmle. There is actually a plaque to the right of the arched entrance to this court dedicated to Carl Laemmle Sr. with a brief biography.
We believe the architectural style of this location, as well as the lack of Churrigueresque decoration facing this way on the animation building, have a similar feeling to Carl Laemmle's mansion home in Beverly Hills. It isn't a perfect match, at all, but it feels like an updated version of that location, which was built as Dias Dorados in 1921.
When he moved in six years later, Laemmle renamed it Casa Grande del Monte, but the name never really stuck. That building was designed by architect Roy Seldon Price, but was sadly torn down in the 1950s. Today, there are multiple houses and some streets on that property.
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Next Week: The Laemmles & Thalberg
Okay, so I believe I've caught every detail we could find about the buildings themselves, but if you know of anything we missed, please join our private Facebook group: Where In The Park Explorers and share with us!
Join us next week as we dive into who the Laemmles were and who Thalberg was, a why they're important to the Universal Studios story.
Until next time, we’ll see you, somewhere in the park. Bye for now!
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Articles Referenced:
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, and each is notated accordingly. If you click and make a purchase using these links, Where In The Park may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. These commissions are used to cover podcast operational costs. Thank you for your support!
- Blogspot-Half Pudding Half Sauce - “Dias Dorados” - A Country House in Early Californian Style
- Hollywood Historic Trust - Hillview Apartments
- IMDB - Mae Busch (1891-1946)
- Inside Universal - Springfield, Wizarding World West, Studio Tour and More!
- Inside Universal - Universal Boulevard Debut
- Martin Turnbull - Schwabs menswear store, 6358 Hollywood Boulevard.
- Martin Turnbull - Announcement of the opening of Schwabs men’s store
- Reddit - LANFEP Post #186: Attie Building
- The Hollywood Partnership - Classic Hollywood Buildings Refreshed for New Era
- The Hollywood Partnership - An Art Deco Treasure, a Famous Mural, and a New Development
- Wikipedia - Mae Busch
- Wikipedia - J. J. Newberry (Los Angeles, California)
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