A Hollywood myth, and reality too

EARLY ON, AFTER A

summer spent with my aunt in Southern California when I was very much younger, I got the courtyard fever. We drove the madding-crowd streets of L.A. and the tricky, sometimes vertiginous hills of Hollywood, going where tourists always go. I liked Grauman’s forecourt well enough, although handprints and footprints didn’t particularly fascinate me at that juncture of life, and I liked my aunt’s clever, silly notion of eating Chinese food after being at the Chinese theater, but what I liked most of all was looking at all the exotic, mystery-laden places where people lived.

If recollection serves, I saw only a couple of courtyard apartment buildings, but the minute I caught sight of the first one I felt at last I had arrived in the city of my Saturday matinee fantasy. What romance! We wandered into the interior, sweet with flowering plants, lyricized by the timbre of water hitting water in the fountain. Doors to a second-floor unit were flung wide open; from inside came the cheerful muffle of voices. A dark-haired man (so handsome I was embarrassed) came down the exuberantly tiled stairs and greeted us as though we belonged, we the trespassers with whole galaxies in our eyes. Or in mine, at least. My aunt was indulging me.

There was something operatic about the courtyard, although I couldn’t have been worldly or astute enough to define it that way at the time. But I must have felt the inescapable aura of the stage set there, like a scene created for the camera -- perhaps starring the tall, dark, handsome man who said hello.

In that way, the courtyards of Hollywood will always, for me, be Hollywoodish. Like no other building style in California, they have the power to suggest intrigue, invention, caprice, amor. The Garden of Eden.

Now that I live here, I know there are more layers to them. They’re landmarks in a confused and chaotic landscape, and they’re models for how beautifully -- how humanely -- one can live in a town of inherent isolation and intense privacy. Separate dwellings joined by a communal center: far preferable, one could argue, to linear apartment buildings where the only interaction takes place in the few seconds we’re uncomfortably traveling together in the elevator.

Courtyards, bungalows, Spanish revivals: We pretty much own these styles, when you come down to it. They’re immediately identifiable with L.A., and as such give us an architectural identity. To lose them is to lose one of the most compelling features of our town. From a purely cosmetic standpoint, it would be like Liz Taylor having her beauty mark surgically removed. Not just pointless, but tragic. From a pragmatic standpoint, they work. They’re appropriate. They don’t merely look right, they feel right.

Courtyards evoke not only an ineffable magic and a hint of forbidden delights, but also a sense of safety and stability. They’re connected to the outdoors by the central space and the foliage that attends every one, but they’re also circumspect, keeping a polite distance from the street. How much more in keeping with L.A.’s true nature does it get?

Not every structure from the past can -- or ought to be -- preserved. And not all preservationist rules make sense. That we’ve been remiss in saving some of our architectural treasures, and that, moreover, we’ve come to our senses rather late aren’t good enough excuses for restrictions that some say test the limits of sanity. One can understand the bitter squabbling over historic preservation overlay zones, and the anguishing six-of-one, half-a-dozen-of-another viewpoints when residents struggle to decide whether they want their neighborhoods protected by regulations, or whether they want the freedom to do as they choose.

But dollar demolition, razing for the sake of a buck, destroys something more than the individual structure -- it destroys a piece of our fragile heritage, our living history. And once gone, it never, ever comes back.

Barbara King, editor of the Home section, can be reached at [email protected].