Hollywood Boulevard: Third Time’s a Charm

Jill's Journal: After twice heading to Hollywood Boulevard only to find it shut down for a movie premiere, we finally made it on a “normal” day. (I use that term loosely, as there’s nothing normal about Hollywood Blvd. or Tinseltown!)

By the way, this is what the very famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre looks like with a red carpet laid out for a premiere. The movie set to premiere on that particular day was “This Means War.” If we’d wanted to stake out a spot, we could have waited and seen Reese Witherspoon and her co-stars walk down that red carpet just a little after we were there. Nah. That might be fun for us adults to do once, but we’re not going to put our little kids through that madness.

Here’s Grauman’s on a regular day. Right on Hollywood Blvd., this iconic landmark has been here since 1927. Built by Sid Grauman, the man who is credited with “inventing” movie premieres, this theatre was the home of the Academy Awards a few times in the 1940s. In addition to premieres and other big events, it’s still a regular theatre.

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is built to look like a giant Chinese pagoda. Looking up, it’s easy to be taken by the unique exterior. But it’s in looking down that one sees the theatre’s enduring legacy: the 200+ celebrities whose handprints and footprints are immortalized in concrete in the forecourt.

It didn’t take long for the girls to find one of the three horse hoofprints also in the concrete. This one was Roy Rogers’ Trigger.

George Burns along with his cigar.

Marilyn Monroe, with Jane Russell immediately to the left. Monroe wanted to add her famous derriere and Russell wanted to add her equally famous bosom, but both were deemed a little too risqué for the time.

His and Hers: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Star Wars (the premiere was one of the many held at Grauman’s over the years).

Tom Hanks. I’m not sure if he has really small feet or if Erika has really big feet!

Will Smith (with Matt Damon just below). “Parents just don’t understand.” (Does that age me?)

George Clooney. Swoon.

Jack Nicholson. “You can’t handle the truth!”

Robin Williams. Carpe diem.

Harrison Ford. Indy!

The only thing on Hollywood Blvd. more famous than Grauman’s might be the Walk of Fame. There’s over 2,400 stars emblazoned in the sidewalk on both sides of the street. They cover 15 blocks, plus a few side streets. This sculpture, featuring starlets of the past (that’s Mae West in the front), marks the head of the Walk of Fame, which began in 1960.

These may not have been the first stars laid in the sidewalk, but they’re the very first two stars one sees from the westernmost start of the Walk of Fame: Elvis Presley and The Beatles, side by side.

The girls love Elvis. :)

And I love this picture of little Victoria, with her strong personality and little 4-year-old baby tummy, telling her sisters off about something. And they’re taking it! She is going to rule the world someday. Aren’t third children supposed to be easy going? She blows all birth order theories out of the water. Happily, when she’s not mad, she is the sweetest, most loving little thing in the world. But, boy oh boy, does she have a temper (and a stubborn streak).

Mickey Mouse! Oh my, how the girls are looking forward to Disneyland. Soon.

But we have raised these girls right. They were more excited about running across Jerry Moss’ star than Mickey Mouse’s! How many little kids even know who Moss is? (For that matter, how many adults outside of the music or Thoroughbred industry do?) Moss is the “M” in A&M Records, who helped launch the recording careers of acts like Sting and The Police. He also happens to own one of the greatest fillies of all time, the 2010 Horse of the Year Zenyatta (who was, incidentally, named after a The Police album). The magnificent Zenyatta…that’s why the girls were so excited. :)

Speaking of Sting…!

Also on Hollywood, just steps from Grauman’s, is the Kodak Theatre. This is where the Academy Awards are held these days.

Here’s the view from Hollywood and Highland and our last glimpse of the Hollywood sign. It’s a fitting farewell to our time in Los Angeles.

More L.A. Times

Jill's Journal: How many movies has this Farmers Market tower appeared in? The Los Angeles Farmers Market, an institution since 1934, is not your average farmers market found in big cities and small towns all over the country with weekend vendors selling wares off their tailgates. Oh, no. This is different. Far different.

The Los Angeles version is open seven days a week and has a massive amount of vendors in permanent structures. There’s meats and produce, of course, as well as vintage goods, shoe repair, a barber shop, and so many ethnic foods your mouth waters. Looking for Brazilian, Korean, or Armenian fare? Without getting on a plane, this is the best place to find it.

“Meet me at Third and Fairfax,” the location of the Farmers Market, is said to be the most enduring expression in L.A.

One thing we’ve learned about L.A. is that no matter what you do (like a simple weekend lunch at the Farmers Market, for instance), it turns into an almost-all-day affair. There’s at least two reasons for this. First, other major cities are so much more compact and it’s easy to pack several things into one day because everything is relatively close. Not so in L.A. This is such a massive, sprawling city that few of the major things to see and do are anywhere close to each other. It’s got to be the most spread-out city in the U.S. Drive time (with traffic) to and from anywhere increases each event by at least an hour each way. And second, the amount of people here is just unbelievable. There’s traffic -- always slowed down, sometimes stop-and-go -- no matter what time of the day you might be out: early, late, and especially in between. And whether you need to make a left-hand turn or find a parking space or simply check out of the grocery store, there’s a line. Usually a long one. Everyone here is in a hurry, but nothing is ever quick.

One of the world famous streets in L.A. (and one of the most fun to drive and gawk) is Sunset Boulevard. This 24-mile long street starts in downtown Los Angeles and passes through or right next to Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Pacific Palisades on its way to the Pacific Coast Highway at the Pacific Ocean. It was on Sunset that Hugh Grant famously picked up prostitute Divine Brown several years back.

The most exciting section of this iconic street is the Sunset Strip, one of L.A.’s most famous neighborhoods which stretches between Doheny Drive and Crescent Heights Boulevard. This has been the home of rock and roll decadence and hard partying for decades. Among the legendary clubs here (like The Roxy, where John Belushi partied before overdosing, and the Whisky a Go Go, where The Doors were the house band) is The Viper Room, which was started by Johnny Depp and is the spot where River Phoenix died of an overdose on the sidewalk.

Yet another famed Sunset landmark is the Rainbow Bar & Grill. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio met here on a blind date. And since then, every musician from John Lennon to Elvis Presley to Alice Cooper to Billy Idol to the members of Motley Crue and Led Zeppelin has been a regular.

The girls and I noticed this pink Corvette when it turned in front of us, while Rob recognized the occupant. Does anyone remember Angelyne? The model and actress is probably most famous for appearing scantily-clad on billboards all over L.A. and Hollywood over the last 30 years. One of her slogans is, “Barbie wishes she were me.” She’ll appear in two movies coming out this year. One of them (a Tom Cruise movie) appropriately features her in a billboard.

The pink Corvette stood out only because of its color, as we’ve seen an obscene amount of Lamborghinis and Ferraris and other over-the-top cars. Rob is endlessly entertained by this.

Maybe it's because they spend so much time in their cars and maybe it's because a nice car seems to equal status here, but people seem to place an extra-high importance on their vehicles in L.A. Here’s the parking lot of a grocery store we frequent: at least half of the cars in the lot are always Mercedes with a number of BMWs thrown in and a heck of a lot of Porsches and Audis for good measure. I’m more entertained by the people found inside the store who are attached to the cars outside: the amount of make-up and plastic surgery and expensive clothing (not to mention shoes) and little dogs in purses is truly extraordinary. L.A. is definitely the home of the beautiful people, but a lot of them have the attitudes to match their high-maintenance outward appearance. I don’t mean that as a criticism; it’s more of an observance.

We’ve passed through Beverly Hills so many times on our way to other places that I had a chance to get a better snapshot of the sign. I never get tired of seeing it. In spite of the traffic and the smog, the Los Angeles area has so much to love about it (not the least of which are year-round gorgeous weather and sunshine).

UCLA: how much fun would it be to go to school here? Oh, the opportunities at a place like this. I often wonder where our girls will go to college someday…one could certainly do a lot worse than UCLA.

Only in Hollywood (I think)

Jill's Journal: Only on Hollywood Boulevard does one pass Barney, Woody, Spiderman, and Dora the Explorer, not to mention Tinkerbell, a man dressed in a bathrobe, and people with blue, pink, and rainbow hair. The girls are completely delighted by the strange sights on Hollywood Blvd. Victoria has always wanted rainbow hair (it’s been a birthday request since she was two), so she is particularly impressed.

More on Hollywood soon. We seem to have a knack for showing up to see the sights just as everything is being closed down for a movie premier. This has happened to us twice…how many premieres can there be at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre? (Obviously that’s a rhetorical question, as it appears the answer is "a lot.") Hopefully our third trip there will be a charm.

Apparently We’re That Old

Jill's Journal: When we pointed out the landmark Capitol Records building at the legendary intersection of Hollywood and Vine, I made the mistake of saying to the girls, “Doesn’t it look like a stack of records?”

First we were met with blank stares. Then one of them piped up with what all three of them were undoubtedly thinking, “What’s a record?”

Ouch.

The Tar Pits and Pink’s

Jill's Journal: There’s a small lake in Los Angeles which may cause a passerby to do a double-take: a family of life-sized Columbian mammoths is helplessly watching one of their members meet an untimely end in the lake. The mammoths may be models, but they tell a true story at the La Brea Tar Pits.

In the 1800s, asphalt was mined from the area where the lake appears today. Rain and groundwater soon filled the quarry to form this lake. Oil slicks of asphalt are visible on the top, as are constant large bubbles composed of methane escaping from fissures beneath the lake. About a hundred years ago, it was discovered there was much more than tar to be found here.

The mammoths are showing how an animal might get trapped in the tar while either unknowingly walking across a thin layer of leaves and dirt or simply trying to get a drink of water. Herd members would be powerless to help. Predators, like saber-toothed cats or dire wolves, would attack and then become trapped in the tar themselves. These “death traps” account for the massive amount of fossils found and preserved in the tar. Over 100 tons of bones have been recovered from the tar pits over the last century. Most are from the Ice Age. Interestingly, one human – a Native American woman believed to be a few thousand years old – was also found.

We headed inside the adjacent George C. Page Museum to see several of the fossils recovered from the tar pits.

The girls’ favorite part was probably learning first-hand how hard it is to pull something out of sticky tar.

The paleontology lab is called “the fishbowl” because visitors are welcome to watch the ongoing work.

One of the projects they’re currently working on is uncovering Zed’s skull. Zed is a Columbian mammoth and parts of him are on display all over the museum.

Here’s an intact Columbian mammoth. Look how big these guys were compared to Victoria standing there! They are different from wooly mammoths and were apparently very common to this area, as were camels, bison, ground sloths, and many others we don’t think of as North American animals.

Check out the fangs on a saber-toothed cat! A large number of these muscular, vicious predators have been found in the tar pits. We learned very quickly they’re officially called cats and not tigers.

Over 1,600 dire wolves (similar to today’s timber wolves) have been found to date in the tar pits; here’s just over 400 of their skulls.

This was a mother and baby American mastodon (ancestor of today’s elephant) who were trapped together in the tar pits.

An observation pit is nearby.

The most prolific of the La Brea Tar Pits has been Pit 91. Excavation of Pit 91 was started in 1969 and is still ongoing. Thus far, the excavation has gone 12 feet deep and has recovered over 50,000 fossils, including rodents, plants, and insects.

Tools of the trade.

After leaving the tar pits, we walked out to find a parking ticket had just been placed on our car – only the second one ever for either Rob or me! We’d paid the parking meter, but it would only accept money until 4:00pm and it was just after that time. We’d seen a sign that the meter was invalid after 4:00pm and we mistakenly thought that meant free. What we quickly learned the hard way is that no parking is allowed on major streets in L.A. after that time…first they ticket you and then they tow you! Apparently we’d missed the memo. We were mightily annoyed until we saw two cars just up the street, parked like us, getting towed. We thanked our lucky stars we “just” got the annoying ticket instead of a tow as well.

We decided to drown our sorrows with a visit to the original Pink’s, the most famous hot dog stand in Los Angeles and arguably the country. The Hollywood landmark is located at Melrose on La Brea and has been in the same spot since 1939, when it started as a pushcart with 10-cent chili dogs during the depression. Paul Pink, the founder, built the small building in 1946 and it’s still family-owned.

Pink’s now has several other locations throughout Southern California and even Las Vegas, but this is where it all began. Very little has changed here in the last 73 years.

The walls are covered with autographed photos of what has to be hundreds of celebrities who have visited.

Humorously, only two of our family members even like hot dogs (and I’m not one of them), but when in Rome…!