Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
20
And a visionary coach builder named Har-
ley Earl was busy in his shop on S outh
Main Street, building special v ehicles for
the mo vies—the B en H ur racing chari-
ots—and designing flambo yant custom
cars for w ealthy mo vie stars. Earl would
later be r ecruited b y G eneral M otors,
bringing along with him from Hollywood
to D etroit an obsession with style o
Meanwhile, businesses in to wn built
signs in an attempt to catch the ey e of the
driving customer; as the cars got faster, the
signs got larger and brighter. A look at the
gargantuan billboards on the S unset Strip
shows where that trend ended up. Another
scourge of the modern landscape, the
minimall, actually star ted innocently
enough in 1927 with the first “ supermar-
ket.” The term was coined by Hattem's (at
the corner of Western Ave. and 43r d St.),
where several grocers lined up side by side,
set back from the street to provide plenti-
ful parking and one-stop conv enience for
their customers.
But perhaps the most enduring featur e
to arise from the phenomenon of the auto-
mobile is the drive-up, drive-in, and drive-
through business. I
ver
substance that would culminate in the
legendary tail fins of the 1950s.
As mo vie dir ector Cecil B. D eMille
once said, both cars and mo vies captur e
Americans' love of motion and speed. Car
culture as it was depicted in motion pic-
tures continued to set the pace for the
country. In
Rebel Without a C ause,
James
Dean's troubled teenager and his hot-r od-
ding buddies asser t their independence
through their jalopies in scenes filmed on
the roads around the Griffith Observatory
in the H ollywood H ills. As authorities
cracked down on danger ous street racing,
locally based
Hot R od M agazine
helped
spawn the mo vement to cr eate legal drag
strips, and the spor t of pr ofessional drag
racing was born. The ar t of auto-body
customizing also came into being her e,
pioneered by George Barns, the “King of
Kustomizers.”
The world watched S outhern Califor-
nia's physical landscape change to accom-
modate the four-wheeled r esident. I n
postwar suburban tracts, the garage, which
had traditionally been a separate shed,
grew attached to the house and became
the family 's main entrance. The Arr oyo
Seco P arkway (no w the P asadena Fwy .)
opened in 1940; its curvaceous lanes mod-
eled after the landscaped par kways of the
New York City metr opolitan ar ea, each
turn placed to open up a series of scenic
vistas for the driv er. (Later L.A. fr eeways,
reflecting a gr eater concern with speed,
were modeled after the straight, efficient
autobahns of Europe.)
n the mid-1920s,
someone thought to punch thr ough their
outer wall in or der to ser ve the motoring
customer. By the next decade, Los Angeles
boasted the world 's largest collection of
establishments that y ou could patr onize
from the privacy and comfort of your car.
There were drive-up bank-teller windows,
drive-through florists and dr y cleaners,
drive-through dairies (Alta D ena still
maintains sev eral in the S outhland), and
drive-up r estaurants. These w eren't the
impersonal fast-food joints of today , but
real restaurants (like the popular D olores
Drive-In chain) with cheer ful carhops
bringing y our fr eshly made or der to y ou
on a window tray.
Perhaps the most popular of these drive-
in landmar ks ar e the mo vie theaters. Los
Angeles had the second one built in the
country (at the corner of P ico and West-
wood boulev ards). Long established as a
teenage make-out hav
2
en, one theater
gained popularity in a mor e spiritual way
when Reverend Robert Schuller began to
deliver S unday-morning sermons to a
comfortably par ked audience at the
Orange County D rive-In. H is slogan:
“Come as you are, in the family car.”
