HOLLYWOOD HISTORY

Long before it was the home of red carpets, movie premieres, and star footprints in the sidewalk, Hollywood Boulevard was just another shopping street trying to find its niche. In the late 1920s, when the movie business was flourishing and retail development was struggling to keep up, local merchants needed a reason to attract holiday shoppers. Their answer was as whimsical as it was ambitious: Turn a section of the boulevard into a winter fantasyland, dubbed Santa Claus Lane.

Before the boulevards were lined with parades of balloons and marching bands, and long before televised football became a Thanksgiving tradition, Hollywood found its own way to give thanks. In the 1930s and ’40s, amid the klieg lights and commissary chatter, the studios of Los Angeles transformed the humble American holiday into something uniquely their own — a feast of glamour, gratitude, and carefully staged sincerity.

Before there were klieg lights, studio gates, or scores of hopeful extras waiting on Hollywood Boulevard, the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street held a far humbler landmark: a shuttered roadside bar known as the Blondeau Tavern. When filmmaker David Horsley arrived in Los Angeles in 1911, this deserted watering hole—closed, quiet, and gathering dust—was hardly an obvious birthplace for an empire. Yet it was here that Hollywood would take its very first bow.

Edward C. Hurd (often styled “E. C. Hurd”) arrived in Southern California during a period of great transition. According to historical records, Hurd amassed his early fortune in Colorado mines and then turned his attention westward, recognizing in the Los Angeles region an opportunity for transformation. 

In February 1932, Los Angeles was aglow in a new and strange kind of light — half sunlight, half stardust. Into this shining came a man who had changed the way the world saw light, the world saw time, the world itself. Albert Einstein was no film star, yet this was a town that measured celebrities in marquee letters. It treated him as such.