Growing up in the late 1930s & early 1940s in Los Angeles, the neighborhoods around Beverly & Fairfax were magic. If you stood on that corner with your back to the Sonntag Drug Store, later an Owl/Rexall and the Fairfax Theatre, and stretched your arms there would be something special in every direction.
You could walk south down Fairfax Avenue two blocks down to the Farmer’s Market and enjoy hotcakes at Du Par’s that cost only $.45 and wander through the small shops and kiosks where you could watch cashew butter and fudge being made or puppies playing. To get there you’d walk past Gilmore Stadium, a huge wooden open area that was home to both midget car racing and semi-pro football’s LA Bulldogs. Eventually it was all torn down to become CBS – Television City. Across the street you’d pass Billy Gray’s Band Box, a small trendy nightclub and Kelbo’s, famous for their Hawaiian ribs.
Along Beverly Blvd, just east of the Stadium was Gilmore Field, home to the Hollywood Stars baseball team, a Triple-A property of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Names now long gone entranced us with their hitting and pitching, especially while enjoying a hot dog from the Centerfield Bleachers. Once the war started the team would play occasional charity games against actual movie stars…and, if you caught a ball that went over the fence, they’d let you in free to see the game.
Just east of that was a miniature golf course and the Pan-Pacific Auditorium with its beautiful art deco front that still stands today. Then it was home to a semi-professional hockey team and the more famous Ice Capades.
At that same corner, a block north up Fairfax, you found yourself near the Esquire (now Canter’s deli) movie theatre that showed risqué foreign movies as well as the last silent movie theater in the city. You were near Fairfax High School, a public school so predominantly Jewish that it closed for the High Holidays. A little further down, now trendy Melrose, you’d find Pink’s for hot dogs, now more than a half-century old with waiting lines long into the wee morning hours.
Once the war started, we were all recruited to collect newspapers and bacon grease for the war effort. Our parents had ration books for meat and sugar and stickers on the car windows, code for how much gasoline you were allowed.
All neighborhoods change during time…new trends, new families, but a few, like Beverly & Fairfax, are burned into the memories of an entire generation.