Gower Street (Hollywood)
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Gower Street is a street in Hollywood, California, which marks the start of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which runs east to west on Hollywood Boulevard. The road runs north-south through the municipality of Hollywood, and many of the original Hollywood movie studios were based on or near it; the Paramount Pictures lot sits on the corner of Gower Street and Melrose Avenue, and further north, the Sunset-Gower Studios (formerly the Columbia Pictures lot) sit on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower.
In the years when Hollywood was an independent city starting around 1890, a farming settler from Hawaii brought in the area's first harvesting equipment and built his home near this street. His name was John T. Gower. After Hollywood became part of the city of Los Angeles about 1910, this street was named after him. At the same time, to preserve the name of the city, the main street which was called "Prospect Avenue" was renamed "Hollywood Blvd." so the area would retain it's original name.
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 south-east 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 juvenille movie stars. The drugstore was also home to an outdoor magazine and newspaper vendor where many celebrities bought their "home town" newspapers.
During the 1930s through the 1950s, Gower Street was nicknamed "Gower Gultch" due to the many movie cowboy "extras" 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 St. south of Sunset Boulevard. Today, a strip mall built to look like a ghost town sits on the south-west corner and is called "Gower Gultch" in tribute to those days. The mall sign 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's 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 by Michael 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 a North 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.
Gower Street has always been a predominantly a residential street except for the studios and businesses near Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards. The street ends by 1st Street and Larchmont in Hancock Park.
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