- Gower Street (Hollywood)
Gower Street is a street in
Los Angeles, California , which begins at the corner of First Street in the Hancock Park district as a residential street, becomes primarily industrial and then commercial as it bisects theHollywood district, becomes residential again north of Franklin Avenue, and terminates in Beachwood Canyon at Beachwood Drive near theHollywood Sign . Gower Street, though not nearly as well known as its neighborVine Street , has played an important (if anonymous) role in Hollywood. Many of the original Hollywoodmovie studio s were located on or near Gower Street; theParamount Pictures lot sits on the corner of Gower Street andMelrose Avenue , and further north, theSunset Gower Studios (formerly theColumbia Pictures lot) sit on the corner ofSunset Boulevard and Gower. TheHollywood Walk of Fame (which runs east to west onHollywood Boulevard ) begins at the corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Gower Street. Gower Street also marks the western boundary of theHollywood Forever Cemetery just south ofSanta Monica Boulevard .In the years when Hollywood was an independent city, starting around 1890, a farming settler named John T. Gower from Hawaii brought in the area's first harvesting equipment and built his home near this street. After Hollywood became part of the city of Los Angeles about 1910, this street was named after him.
Gower Street was the location of the first motion picture studio built in Hollywood. It was founded by Al Christie in 1911. This was to begin the association of Hollywood with motion pictures. The Christie Studios occupied a building at the southeast corner of Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard. Later, this same location was home to the Columbia Drugstore, famous for a soda fountain, frequented by many young movie stars. The drugstore was also home to an outdoor magazine and newspaper vendor where many celebrities bought their hometown newspapers. At the same intersection was the studio of
The Oz Film Manufacturing Company , which was later bought by Paramount.Beginning in the 1930s, Gower Street earned the nickname "
Gower Gulch " because of the many extras inWesterns who would dress in their cowboy costumes at home, then walk south to Paramount, Republic and RKO studios, which were all located just off Gower Street south ofSunset Boulevard . Today, a strip mall named "Gower Gulch," built to resemble a Western set, sits on the southwest corner of Sunset and Gower as a reminder of that era. The phrase "Gower Gulch" is painted on an actual chuck wagon which sits on the site of the old "Copper Skillet" coffee shop, where the cowboys used to have their breakfast.The street became very well known to wartime movie audiences in the film "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943) when Dennis Morgan and Joan Leslie visit "Gower Gulch." They hear Spike Jones and His City Slickers at the movie colony village situated at the northern end of Gower Street in the Hollywood Hills. Although the scene is a set built in the studio, it is a faithful replica of the actual village that stood there built from discarded movie sets.
Later, the street was the subject of a comic song heard in a 1951
Warner Bros. "Daffy Duck " cartoon called "Drip-Along Daffy". The song is called "The Flower of Gower Gulch" and was written byMichael Maltese (1908-1981), though he is uncredited in the actual short.In the
Warren Zevon song "Desperados Under the Eaves ," the street is immortalized as "Gower Avenue." As the protagonist sits in aNorth Hollywood motel nursing a hangover,the Gentlemen Boys sing the refrain "Look away down Gower Avenue" repeatedly over an orchestral imitation of the noise made by an air conditioner.
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