Why Selma Avenue matters.
Selma Avenue is a storied corridor where Hollywood's entertainment character meets the birthplace of a major film studio, streetcar-era residential enclaves and an unusually compressed architectural record of the district's rise from foothill suburb to global production center.
Running through Hollywood between East Hollywood and the foothills below the Hollywood Hills, the urban corridor follows a predominantly east-west line across Western Avenue, Vine Street, Cahuenga Boulevard, Highland Avenue and La Brea Avenue, repeatedly slipping behind the heavier commercial frontage of Sunset and Hollywood boulevards. Eastern stretches retain pockets of early residential scale, where Craftsman houses, bungalow courts and mature trees occupy narrow streets shaped before the surrounding district reached metropolitan density. Traveling west brings apartment buildings, churches, production properties and commercial structures into increasingly close succession as Selma passes through the historic center of Hollywood. Beyond Highland Avenue, the street begins responding more strongly to foothill terrain, with curving alignments, rising grades and detached houses replacing the harder street walls around Vine and Cahuenga. The result is a corridor whose residential fragments, compact institutional blocks, production-era buildings and changing topography preserve Hollywood's physical evolution at a scale more intimate than the famous boulevards surrounding it.
What defines Selma Avenue.
Selma Avenue is best known for occupying one of the foundational sites in Hollywood film production, where a converted horse barn at Vine Street became the nucleus of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. The barn had been constructed in 1901 on property associated with Robert Northam and later acquired by real-estate entrepreneur Jacob Stern; Harry Revier and Louis Loss Burns were using the property for motion-picture production before Cecil B. DeMille arrived in Hollywood in 1913. DeMille, Jesse L. Lasky and Samuel Goldfish, later Samuel Goldwyn, established their production operation there and made The Squaw Man, released in 1914 after a production costing $15,000. The company expanded across the surrounding block as additional stages, workshops and production facilities converted the former semi-rural property into an increasingly integrated studio. Lasky's enterprise merged with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in 1916, and Paramount became part of the corporate combination that developed into one of the dominant American studios. Expansion continued along Selma after the merger, including a concrete film-processing building erected near Argyle Avenue in 1923 as part of the Famous Players-Lasky complex. The company transferred production to its Melrose Avenue property in 1926, carrying the original barn with it and ending Selma's period as the physical center of the enterprise. A street that had bordered orchards and scattered residences at the opening of the century had become embedded in the industrial organization of feature filmmaking within little more than a decade.
Residential construction created a separate architectural history along Selma as Hollywood's expanding entertainment economy generated demand for houses and apartments near studios and commercial streets. The Selma-La Brea residential area was formally subdivided from the Cielo Vista Terrace Tract by the prominent Harper family in 1921, though surviving houses there predate subdivision and reach back into Hollywood's independent-city period before annexation to Los Angeles in 1910. Development followed the expansion of electric transportation along Hollywood Boulevard and the Laurel Canyon trolley, producing a hillside district whose street pattern responded to the natural contours below the Hollywood Hills. The surviving Selma Avenue Residential Historic District contains 15 houses, 14 of them contributing properties, constructed between 1906 and 1929. Craftsman architecture dominates its earlier development, followed by Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean Revival houses as Hollywood embraced Period Revival design during the 1920s. Farther east, Selma accumulated denser housing, including a Craftsman fourplex dating to 1917, a multifamily Craftsman property from 1918 and a Spanish-style duplex built in 1921. The Selma-LaBaig district around the 6000 block retains another concentrated group of early residences, including surviving properties dating to 1911, 1912, 1914 and 1925. These successive housing forms preserve the other side of Hollywood's early growth, when the expanding film industry required an equally rapid transformation of nearby residential land.
How Selma Avenue fits.
Selma Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting an extravagant 1920s athletic club, Hollywood's pioneering movie palace and a Depression-era commercial complex conceived as an architectural trip around the world.
Begin at Hollywood Athletic Club, completed in 1924 as Hollywood's entertainment economy generated a new generation of private social institutions for the people building the film industry. Meyer & Holler designed the Italian Revival clubhouse with a nine-story hotel tower, and the project expanded dramatically from an early $30,000 concept to a completed building costing $800,000. Membership had climbed from 635 in April 1922 to 1,000 by opening day, and the building rose conspicuously above the low commercial structures surrounding Sunset Boulevard. Continue to The Egyptian Theatre, created by Sid Grauman and developer Charles Toberman as Hollywood's first movie palace. The theater opened in October 1922 and helped formalize the Hollywood premiere through red-carpet arrivals, klieg lights, news cameras and elaborate stage presentations preceding feature screenings. Its technological history kept pace with its theatrical ambition: the building received West Coast equipment for synchronized sound and music in 1926 and also became associated with early Technicolor exhibition. Conclude at Crossroads of the World, completed in 1936 as one of the country's earliest outdoor shopping centers. Architect Robert V. Derrah arranged the complex around a Streamline Moderne building shaped like a ship, then surrounded it with Cape Cod, French Revival, Italian Renaissance Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Moorish and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture intended to suggest an international commercial village. Conceived during the Great Depression and promoted with the theatricality of a movie premiere, the property later shifted from retail toward offices occupied by organizations including the Screen Actors Guild, Standard Oil and American Airlines before attracting music producers, screenwriters, costume designers and casting agencies. The progression moves from the private social architecture created for Hollywood's booming professional class through Grauman's conversion of film exhibition into public performance and culminates in Derrah's cinematic treatment of commercial architecture, tracing three ways the entertainment capital reshaped institutions far beyond the studio gate.
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