Gold Diggers

Old Buildings and Rock n Roll in Hollywood

On a recent Saturday night a rock band playing in a small Hollywood club packed with people and alive with the energy of face-to-face live performance showed me what Jane Jacobs knew living in Greenwich Village circa 1961: “New ideas must use old buildings." The band was Idaho, one of the 1990s' best, masters of a kind of complex, emotional Indie rock that is partly grunge but also miraculously musical and subtle. Idaho has never been well known, but holds a cult following around the world, and has continued releasing music since its debut album in 1993. At the end of a short West Coast tour, on Saturday night the four-piece played tight, taut, intricate guitar rock, from their early 90s faves to numbers from last year’s album release.

The venue was Gold Diggers: inside a nondescript old masonry building, a dark room with a long bar on one side and a small, low stage next to the door, probably able to fit two hundred people maximum—if the fire department even allows that many. The band played feet from the audience, an intimacy that lent itself to easy banter between the stage and the floor. It could be described as a dive bar, complete with tattooed and eyelinered bartenders (of both sexes), but with better lighting, professionally-tuned sound, and about 50 kinds of mescal. All, this night, for a $22 ticket, stored on your phone.

But for the last two details, and the age of the lead singer—60—the night felt and sounded just like the ‘90s did in Hollywood, when small bands played small clubs every night of the week, stoking an intense and intertwined scene that produced some of the best music of its, or any, era. The band Idaho, despite the name, was actually born in Hollywood, gestating in various forms in 1991-92 in a garage off of Melrose Avenue, before finding its core lineup and name in ’93. Back then, the neighborhood had plenty of affordable housing, rehearsal spaces, bars to hang out in and clubs to play in, which made it the undisputed center of SoCal’s rock scene, nurturing all kinds of bands, some of which went on to wider fame, like Jane’s Addiction, Mazzy Starr, Beck, Guns n Roses, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to name a few.

I was struck by the continuity, and the continuing relevance of that era’s cultural contributions in our current mix. At once earnest, irreverent, and loose, post-punk-still-somewhat-political and thoroughly live and fun rock n roll, ‘90s culture was the antithesis of today’s solipsistic, digital, internet-imprisoned music production system. It was actually made in garages and played on real instruments on beat-up stages in dark bars in front of real, drinking and dancing people. Rock n roll is a messy, group activity.

Apropos of that necessary physicality—which shaped the music and scene and made them possible—I was also struck by the role that the building where the band played played, in the band playing at all.

Originally called the Greene Building, it was built in 1924, a three-story brick box fronting right on the sidewalk, to house an “inn above a tavern” (i.e. a hotel above a bar) to attract motorists on the original US Route 66—now Santa Monica Boulevard on the southeast fringes of Hollywood, just west of the 101 freeway (which divides Hollywood from East Hollywood, depending on who you ask). It happened to be the first establishment in Los Angeles to be granted an “inn above a tavern” license—a dull fact that nevertheless relates to its current incarnation. In the 1940s, a large space was built behind the original building: a single wooden room with a soaring bow-truss ceiling—the classic form of industrial spaces in early and mid-20th century California. Appropriate to its place, the space first hosted an acting school. Then, in the 1950s it became the soundstage and studio of the infamously bad low-budget film director Ed Wood, wildly misnamed Quality Studios, where he shot many of his campy, schlocky, low-quality sci-fi and sexploitation movies. Some later became cult classics because they were so terrible—including Jail Bait (1954), and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956). After Woods’ unraveling, the space was turned into Shamrock Studios, a series of rehearsal rooms rented by bands that made their bones playing on the Sunset Strip from the ‘60s to the ‘80s: supposedly The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Slayer, and Guns N’ Roses (in its early incarnation as Hollywood Rose). Following the neighborhood’s downward socioeconomic trajectory in those decades, the street-front bar, called The Gold-Diggers, began to feature bikini-clad dancers, and took up its next role as a local reprobate dive, its sign offering “Entertainment.”

A note on the moniker: “Gold Diggers” was borrowed from the 1933 Hollywood movie of the same name, which featured elaborate dance numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley and an appearance by Ginger Rogers. It was a remake of a 1923 silent film, itself based on a hit Broadway play that ran for 717 performances in 1919-20. It tells an old story: striving young showgirls trying to make it in entertainment and strike it rich, who end up, improbably and after many hijinks, marrying rich men—thus the happy irony of “gold diggers” dancing their way to the top.

Rundown and nearly-dead, its top two floors empty for four decades, the building was bought around 2015 by an entrepreneur looking to create a kind of rock n roll “campus,” with the bar, performance space, a revived hotel above, and a recording studio in the bow-truss building in back. After several million dollars of upgrades, the revived Gold Diggers began hosting musicians and bands in back, hotel guests upstairs, and showcasing music on its small stage.

The building is not obviously special. For starters, it’s ugly, with a crude slate-clad first floor facade painted black and stuccoed brick above painted dark green. In Hollywood alone, there are hundreds like it, and tens of thousands in the broader Los Angeles region, of all shapes and sizes. It is but one thread in the urban fabric. But that urban fabric is as responsible as any other factor for Idaho’s existence and for its show on this Saturday night, more than 30 years after its first, played not far away. The music is in some measure an urban story, and a story of urbanism. Hollywood, believe it or not, is an example of “good” urbanism, functional and diverse, if occasionally gritty. Its success as a neighborhood isn’t simple, nor unproblematic. The neighborhood has always has been famous/infamous for its mix of glamor and grime, “sunshine and noir,” the beautiful and the ugly, the lives of the rich, the poor, and the low-lives, stirred into one, very uneven loaf.

To begin urbanistically, Hollywood proper is a grid of streets. Its major boulevards and avenues running east-west are Hollywood, Sunset, Melrose, and Santa Monica; Fairfax, La Brea, Highland, Vine, and Western run north-south. On and between them is a collection of buildings unified only by their differences: an unruly jumble of different types, scales, and styles of architecture: diminutive 1920s Art Deco mini-towers, Spanish-style two-story storefronts, 1960s Modernist glass-and-steel office towers, drab postwar infill buildings, and increasingly, hulking new Big Box apartment blocks and corporate HQs, like the cantilevered shoebox stack of the Netflix building that looms over the Hollywood Freeway at Sunset Boulevard. In between are quiet residential streets lined with bungalows, duplexes, four-plexes, and apartment buildings of all kinds, all a mix of ages and sizes. An urban forest lines the streets and studs yards and parks with palms, ficus, jacarandas, and hundreds of other species.

The neighborhood checks all of the boxes of good urbanism: walkable, diverse both in building type, function and in population, both commercially busy and remarkably quiet and neighborhood-feeling. It has historical continuity rare in LA City and County, with the bones of the movie business past still humming along, like Paramount Studios at Melrose and Gower, or buried just under the surface: Gower Gulch, where the first film set was built in 1911, hosts a busy L-mall and a Denny’s; Warner Brothers studio, where The Jazz Singer, the first sound movie, was made in 1927, is now the KTLA TV station. The Hotel Knickerbocker, D.W. Griffith’s last home and where Elvis Presley wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” still stands. Some of the oldest restaurants in the state still thrive there: Musso & Frank’s Grill (opened 1919), El Coyote (1931), and Canter’s deli (1948).

Jane Jacobs, in her masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities (published in 1961), explained how functioning city neighborhoods work well because they have diversity—of all kinds, beginning and ending with different kinds of people, living and working, engaged in different activities at different times, whether going to school, making things, having dinner, or going to bars. What she called “generators of diversity” include the parts of the neighborhood’s physical environment: streets, sidewalks, parks, and buildings, in which those diverse people go about their diverse lives.

Here is an excerpt from Jacobs’ Chapter 10: The need for aged buildings:

Condition 3: The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones.

“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation—although these make fine ingredients—but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.

“If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. These costs of occupying new buildings may be levied in the form of rent, or they may be levied in the form of an owner’s interest and amortization payments on the capital costs of the construction. However the costs are paid off, they have to be paid off. And for this reason, enterprises that support the cost of new construction must be capable of paying a relatively high overhead—high in comparison to that necessarily required by old buildings. To support such high overheads, the enterprises must be either (a) high profit or (b) well subsidized.

“If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well-established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts—studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions—these go into old buildings. Perhaps more significant, hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the public life of streets and neighborhoods, and appreciated for their convenience and personal quality, can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction.

“As for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

Gold Diggers is such an old building, one with many lives, in each incarnation supporting new ideas, creativity, and independence by offering affordable room—rooms—that shelter and foster young people, outsiders, and renegades experimenting and making new stuff. There is a reason Indie rock was called that—it was independent. It happened in old buildings. (It’s also true, as Jacobs wrote, that experimentation can result in error—like Ed Woods’ movies. But failure is part of the creative process.)

Today, the stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard that Gold Diggers sits on is a decidedly gritty but nevertheless vibrant array of rundown apartment buildings and tattered strip malls filled with a kaleidoscopic variety of small businesses, selling everything: shoe repair, clothing, mufflers, window tinting, brakes, liquor, donuts, hair styling, accounting, immigration services—you name it. Immigrants are clearly the majority of the neighborhood’s residents. The diversity of their origins is attested to by its restaurants: Mexican, Salvadoran, Honduran, Korean, Armenian, Thai, to list just a handful.

Across the street though, an avatar of a new Hollywood is rising. On the site of a former Sears department store and its parking lots, taking up an entire, long block of Santa Monica, a development called Echelon Studios is under construction. Its press releases show a massive complex of more than 600,000 square feet of production facilities and office space, topped with luxury apartments, all sitting atop an enormous subterranean parking structure. It will probably cost north of half a billion dollars to construct. What ideas will pay that debt? All of it will be private, closed to the streets. It is typical of the huge new buildings being erected all over Hollywood, both apartments and offices, by multinational real estate investment companies.

If Jane Jacobs was right, these new buildings won’t generate new ideas—though they might host the rehashing of old ones. Maybe in a couple of years, some producers sitting in a new “creative suite” across the street from Gold Diggers will hit on the idea of making another remake of the movie: Gold Diggers, 2027?