Los Angeles is notoriously quick to reinvent itself. Buildings disappear, neighborhoods change, and people who once shaped the city can vanish from public memory surprisingly fast. For more than four decades, however, the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles has made it its business to remember—not only the architecture of the Art Deco era, but the artists, designers, filmmakers, civic leaders and personalities who gave Los Angeles much of its character.

Stretching across Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s northwestern flank are long, quiet halls that most guests will likely never visit. It’s easy to overlook them, as they sit alongside the Cathedral Mausoleum and the lake, staring out over monuments and celebrity graves visited by thousands every year. Yet the Corridor Mausoleums are some of the cemetery’s uniquely atmospheric holdovers from an earlier era. When they opened nearly a century ago, their builders imagined them as part of a dramatic overhaul of Hollywood Cemetery and its burial practices. They might even have changed the way Americans approached death itself.

Hollywood has always been a place of monuments, both real and imagined. Some are cast in bronze, stone, and concrete. Others remain sketches, proposals and dreams. One of the most intriguing of the latter was an ambitious plan during the 1980s to erect an enormous memorial to James Dean inside Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery—today Hollywood Forever.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Hollywood Forever Cemetery will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of screen legend Rudolph Valentino with the 99th Annual Valentino Memorial Service and a special centennial screening of Valentino’s final film, The Son of the Sheik (1926) on Sunday, August 23, 2026.

For almost fifty years after her death, Hattie McDaniel’s final wish was not granted. She was the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award and hoped to be buried among Hollywood’s stars. However, the cemetery she chose turned her away because of her race. It was a painful irony that someone so celebrated was denied a resting place alongside her peers.

Karie Bible did not come to Hollywood Forever Cemetery looking for a job. She came looking for history—and found a calling. Long before she ever guided her first tour, her life had already been shaped by a love of the past. “I fell in love with the Universal horror movies of the 1930s,” she says, calling them her “gateway drug to film history.” At the same time, her parents’ fascination with the Civil War meant childhood trips to cemeteries and battlefields, places where stories lingered in the ground itself. “I’ve always loved living history and film history,” she explains.

At Hollywood Forever Cemetery by sunset, when the gates are closed and sunlight streams down its peaceful pathways, celebrities sleep amongst legends from film, television, music, theater and more. Right there with them should be the memory of Homer Alba. Homer died on May 14, 2025, at age 79. He served Hollywood Forever as Senior Vice President for 38 years, then Vice President Emeritus. After his retirement, Homer continued to contribute in any way possible. He loved Hollywood Forever beyond words.

Just another tick of time in a city built on marble and memory, one of Hollywood Forever's most understated memorials arrived on Memorial Day, 1930. Located just outside of the Corridor Mausoleums and rising from a pair of Mediterranean Revival arches, the Edward J. Connelly Tower Clock makes no showy entrance. It simply reminds visitors, in measured restraint, that every road eventually leads past the same time.

HOLLYWOOD - Each year on November 15, as soft autumn light settles over Hollywood Forever Cemetery, a quiet pilgrimage takes place. Admirers, historians, and devoted fans gather to honor Tyrone Power—a man whose charm and artistry bridged the Golden Age of Hollywood and whose sudden death in 1958 left an ache that time has never fully erased. What began decades ago as a simple tribute has evolved into one of the cemetery’s most enduring annual traditions, a testament to how deeply Power’s legacy continues to resonate.

HOLLYWOOD - On the south side of Santa Monica Boulevard, where the palms sway above the resting places of Hollywood’s pioneers, a bold new structure rises skyward. It is the Gower Court Mausoleum, a five-story, 100-foot-tall monument of light, stone, and remembrance — the latest addition to Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which has been a sanctuary of memory since 1899.