Gower Gulch

Gower Gulch was the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Hollywood attracted many newcomers in the 1930s hoping for a career in film, and a lot of them came here. It was also called Poverty Row, illustrating that dreams of success would remain only dreams for most of them.

As early as before the First World War, there was a film studio here, and later on in the Depression the nearby studios of Paramount, Columbia, Republic and RKO made the spot the focus of real cowboys trying for parts in B-westerns, with would-be actors coming right off the ranch.

Gower Gulch has been parodied in a few films, and has a special tribute in the 1951 Warner Brothers cartoon “Drip-Along Daffy” where Daffy Duck plays a “western-type hero” whose noble white horse has an exaggerated mane, and Porky Pig plays his “comedy relief” sidekick looking less heroic on a tiny burro. As they ride along what appears to be a cartoon version of Monument Valley, Porky strums a guitar and sings a cowboy song about Minerva, the “Flower of Gower Gulch,” who is a cowpuncher’s sweetheart true even though “her looks don’t amount to much, ‘cause one of her eyes is blue/She’s got skin just like prairie dog leather. She cooks nothin’ but chuck wagon stew….”

You probably know the rest.

There is a shopping plaza in Gower Gulch now, with a western town façade, but if you want to see traces of what was, mosey on up to the Autry Museum of the American West up in Griffith Park. A terrific exhibit of Southwest history is on display, and in a corner of the impressive reality of the West, there is a small tribute to the movie cowboy and the poignant legacy of imagination and heart, and even parody, he has left to us.

Hollywood Sign

A recent fire in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles, dramatically close to the Hollywood Sign, brings to mind what an odd history the Sign has in the land of make believe.

Originally constructed as HOLLYWOODLAND, the sign was built in 1923 to advertise a real estate development in the hills above LA. Though it was intended to be temporary, by the Great Depression the Sign was still there and had morphed into a kind of Los Angeles marquee for the glitzy company town. It came to represent dreams, not as illusion but as a road to success. For some, it came to represent the despair of failure when dreams die, especially perhaps for the poor soul who committed suicide in 1932 by leaping off the “H.”

The sign stood neglected for many years and by World War II had gotten pretty vandalized, yet there was something there in the promise of the Sign tantalizing enough for the Chamber of Commerce to repair it and take it over.

By 1973 it had reached landmark status even as most of the Hollywood movie studios were leaving town.

It remains today in a revitalized Hollywood, and if fire may occasionally threaten it, the Sign, like the dreams of success that built it and sustained it through many difficult decades, seems to endure pretty well. It has become one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world.