So I snapped this picture when I was walking around Western and Wilshire Blvd. It's kinda at the top of a hill, if I remember correctly. Once you crest it you head down towards MacArthur Park and into downtown Los Angeles. This section of LA is referred to as Wilshire Center. I dug up some great reference on this area, from trusty ole google and wikipedia. It's quite an interesting place, with tons of history. The infamous Brown Derby restaurant was nearby (built in 1926) as well as the Ambassador Hotel and the Cocoanut Grove.Here's a link to a webpage that sheds some light on the area and it's history, particularly this building, as well as others I've featured or have yet to feature on this blog. Scroll down a little past the listings and you'll see a great article written about the area.
here's one quote about the building above, "Wilshire Boulevard got its name from Henry Gaylord Wilshire-Gaylord apartments bear his name, as well-a politically active millionaire who bought a plot in the Westlake district and turned a city dump into Westlake Park, now MacArthur Park. Popular lore says that when city planners proposed building a street that would bisect his property, he told them that he would allow the street only if it bore his name." (taken from the Wilshire Center link below)
"Gaylord Wilshire built the 14-story Gaylord Apartment Hotel the same year. The entire area near the Ambassador Hotel became the site of New York-style apartment buildings, and many film stars lived in these elegant high rises such as the Asbury, the Langham, the Fox Normandie, the Picadilly and the Windsor." (taken from the wikipedia article linked below)
Wilshire Center
Pretty awesome stuff. But what really blew my mind was the wikipedia entry on Wilshire center. It's got TONS of great facts about the area. I could go on and on.
"If Sunset Boulevard was, in its heyday, the center of the world's dream making, it was to that stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Hoover and Wilton (called Wilshire Center since the mid-fifties) that generations of Angelenos went to find their own dreams."
(taken from the wikipedia article linked below)
Wikipedia Entry
That wikipedia entry also has some info on a building I had posted a few months ago.
The Los Altos Apts.
" They may have lived in The Talmadge, built for silent film star Norma Talmadge by her husband, United Artists president Joseph Schenck, or in the nearby Los Altos, where publishing czar William Randolph Hearst ensconced his vivacious mistress Marion Davies in a huge apartment neighboring that of the "it" girl of the era, Clara Bow, and, later, Judy Garland, Bette Davis and Loretta Young. Wilshire Center was, as many called it, L.A.'s "Golden Hub." (taken from the wikipedia article linked above)
The thing that gets me is that I was walking thru all of this and had no clue about the significance of these buildings and that area. It's amazing how much such an unassuming area(at least to me, when I first went there) can hold so much history and stories.
Great stuff.
G
