Hollywood Hotel

Anybody who drives around Hollywood is familiar with the Hollywood & Highland intersection. Today it is home to a huge complex that includes the Kodak Theatre and failed actors who dress up as their favorite super heroes. What people may not know is that it was the site of the first hotel in Hollywood.

HJ Whitely build the first section of the hotel in 1902 to house people he hoped to sell residential land to. None of the streets were paved & Hollywood Blvd did not yet exist (though the hookers did). Whitely continued to expand the hotel and within years it became a lush & extravagant resort with 125 guest rooms, occupying 3 acres.

Millionaire spinster (lesbian with social status) Mira Parker Hershey visited the hotel soon after completion, fell in love and eventually bought the place. In 1911, the first movie studio opened in Hollywood and the floodgates of mid-west high school fame-seeking dropouts opened. Everybody who was anybody (to those that cared) at that time were guests of the Hollywood Hotel. Every Thursday night the hotel hosted a ball & it was considered the place to be & be seen (everybody spoke to each other with cue-cards as sound had not yet been invented). Rudolph Valentino lived in room 264. He met his wife at the hotel & in 1919 was married there & had their honeymoon there too (lots of explicit cue-cards that night).

Mira Hershey died in 1930 & The Good Hope company (a merger between the Fair & Satisfactory Hope companies) bought the hotel. In the 1940's, World War II delayed their plan to demolish the hotel & redevelop the block. In 1956 it was razed & became home to the First Federal Savings & Loan Association of Hollywood office building until 2001 when the current facility was built, providing large sidewalks for homeless break-dancing crews to battle it out.