Hollywood: Boulevard of Dreams

Hollywood and Vine

The most famous intersection in Los Angeles, where the Walk of Fame begins and old Hollywood still echoes in the architecture.

You are standing at the corner that gave Hollywood its mythical address. The intersection itself is unremarkable in the way famous corners often are: a Metro station entrance, a crosswalk, a few palm trees. But look up. The Broadway Hollywood Building rises twelve stories above you, a 1927 Art Deco tower where Gloria Swanson kept offices and where the radio station that first broadcast the Academy Awards operated from the top floor.

Below your feet, the coral-pink terrazzo stars begin their march west. The very first star, laid in 1960, belongs to the director Stanley Kramer and sits just a few paces ahead at the northwest corner of Hollywood and Highland. Before you walk on, find it. The Walk of Fame runs 1.3 miles from here to La Brea, and you are about to follow it the whole way.

Capitol Records Building

The world's first circular office tower, designed to look like a stack of 45 rpm records, where Sinatra and Nat King Cole recorded.

Welton Becket, the architect, denies it. He says the round shape came from the need to fit the building onto a small triangular lot at Yucca and Vine. Everybody else looks at this 13-story cylinder with the spire on top and sees exactly what they are meant to: a stack of records on a turntable, the needle lifting skyward. Built in 1956, the Capitol Records Building housed the studio where Frank Sinatra cut his finest albums, where Nat King Cole recorded 'Unforgettable,' where the Beach Boys layered the harmonies of 'Pet Sounds.' The blinking red light at the top of the spire spells out 'Hollywood' in Morse code. It has been doing so since the building opened. The echo chambers for the studios are underground, forty feet below the sidewalk you are standing on, designed by the guitarist Les Paul himself.