Boulevard of Dreams : To know L.A. you need to know Wilshire, its uniquely Angeleno mix of grandeur and sheer trashiness. All 16 miles of it.

One hundred years ago, when the eccentric socialist millionaire Henry Gaylord Wilshire gave his name to the beginnings of the boulevard that has become Los Angeles’ main urban thoroughfare, he envisaged a grand avenue that would confirm the young city’s ambition to become the capital of the West.

“With the increasing comfort and speed of transportation, California is fast becoming a winter playground of the leisure class of Americans,” he declared. “I have no doubt that . . . Southern California will be the most thickly settled part of the American continent.”

A century later, Wilshire’s vision has been confirmed by the prime status of his street among L.A.’s many competing boulevards. Today his grand avenue is the living mirror of contemporary Los Angeles in all its manifestations.

To know Los Angeles you need to know Wilshire Boulevard. You need to know its uniquely Angeleno mix of architectural grandeur and sheer trashiness, its often ignored civic landmarks and treasured pop-historical details, its positive identity and absent presence. Above all, you have to grasp its air of simultaneously succeeding and failing, just like Los Angeles itself. What better time to reconsider it than during its centennial year?

In the opinion of some urbanists, the boulevard’s most crucial overall failure is its lack of continuity along its 16-mile length.

“I think that today Wilshire is more a kind of urban clothesline than a real grand avenue--a line with good and bad, elegant and trashy elements hanging from it,” said Ron Altoon, an architect who’s been involved in several efforts to preserve and develop the street’s architectural heritage. It has its extraordinary moments, Altoon emphasized, but the links between its various sections are often weak.

“As a whole, Wilshire just doesn’t hang together now,” agreed architect Scott Johnson, whose office faces the old May Co. building at Fairfax. “And some of the newer buildings--such as the Wilshire Courtyard complex down the road--follow an inappropriate suburban model in their design, detracting from the street’s urban continuity.”

Johnson blames a mixture of social change and economic decline for the absence of any real visual cohesion along Wilshire. “The income levels of the newer immigrants that have settled along eastern and central Wilshire are low, and so the economic engine for regeneration just isn’t functioning there right now,” he said. “It’s a sad fact that Mid-Wilshire now has the highest commercial vacancy rate of any comparable part of the city.”

On the other hand, Johnson said, the boulevard has scored some vital successes. He points to the burgeoning Museum District he can see from his office window, including the expanded L.A. County Museum of Art, the recently renovated Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Page Museum beside the La Brea Tar Pits and the Petersen Automobile Museum. The once-abandoned 1939 May Co. store across the way, now owned by LACMA, will become the new premises for the Otis Art Institute next year.

At the same time, Otis’ planned move from its current location on the edge of MacArthur Park underscores the continuing westward shift of the city’s cultural and commercial heartland.

Santa Monica’s popular Third Street Promenade is a prime symbol of this westward migration. The promenade’s busy but tranquil urban scene contrasts with the tense, crime-ridden street life of the mainly Latino districts bordering MacArthur Park at the eastern end of Wilshire.

Thus, the Westside’s old links with Downtown and Wilshire’s historic core have been further loosened, increasing the boulevard’s resemblance to a disjointed urban clothesline.

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Because it so graphically renders the city’s condition, Wilshire Boulevard is a wide-screen movie of our urban life. It’s a film fusing past and present, a cinematic panorama seen through the windshield of a car traveling from Downtown to the Pacific.

The action begins at the eastern end of Wilshire, where it springs from Downtown’s Grand Avenue. This section of the boulevard was originally named Orange Street. Wilshire slips unobtrusively above the Harbor Freeway and cuts through one of L.A.’s oldest districts.

The area, once known as Crown Hill, was a proud place during the 1880s’ land boom. Many fine houses were built here, including the 1889 Lewis House on nearby Miramar Street, designed by Joseph Cather Newsom.

Today, however, this district is one of the most densely populated, high-crime sections of Los Angeles. Drug dealers and fake-document sellers haunt the alleys at the edges of bustling sidewalks where street vendors peddle their wares.

This stretch of Wilshire was the last piece to be formally added to its story. In 1934 a road was cut through Westlake (now MacArthur) Park, linking the districts to the east and west. At the dedication of the causeway that runs beside the water, Mayor Frank Shaw declared that Wilshire was now “California’s most famous thoroughfare.”

MacArthur Park itself was swampland until 1885, when Mayor William Workman planted trees and shrubbery and created an artificial lake. The lake soon became a popular meeting place, filled with picnickers, strollers, lovers, hucksters, snake-oil pitchmen, political ranters and other colorful urban fauna. Charlie Chaplin shot several of his silent comedies beside the lake.

The section of Wilshire west of MacArthur Park is where the notion of a grand avenue was born. In 1895, Gaylord Wilshire subdivided the tract between 6th and 7th streets from Park View Street to Benton Way and cut a 120-foot-wide street through its middle.

A flamboyant self-promoter, Wilshire ran for office as a socialist in Los Angeles, New York and Britain and founded a radical paper, the Weekly Nationalist. He made several fortunes, married money and inherited money, but died nearly broke. “I classify all men into two great classes--fools and socialists,” declared the bold entrepreneur, whose last venture was the sale, in the early 1920s, of an electric health belt named the “I-on-a-co”--obviously meant for fools.

In the early decades of the 20th Century, the boulevard, pushing west to Western Avenue, was the city’s most fashionable residential section. Among the first residents were Col. Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Edwin T. Earl, editor of the rival Los Angeles Express, both of whom built splendid mansions overlooking Westlake Park. Neither of these grand houses has survived.

In the 1920s, Joseph Schenck, president of United Artists, built the Talmadge Apartments for his wife, silent movie star Norma Talmadge, at 3278 Wilshire. Private mansions and fashionable apartment houses jostled edifices like the 1927 Elks club (now the Park Plaza Hotel), and grand hotels, including the famous Ambassador Hotel, completed in 1921.

The Ambassador, designed by Myron Hunt, who also created the Caltech campus in Pasadena, has been in its time the venue for assignation and assassination, for fun and games and political tragedy. Errol Flynn cavorted with his lovers in the hotel’s bungalows and the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the 1940s, and Robert Kennedy was gunned down near the hotel’s kitchens in 1968.

“This is where we all came to meet one another, to be seen, to be coddled, amused and entertained,” wrote veteran Hollywood journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, remembering the hotel’s heyday. “The Cocoanut Grove was a party every night.”

The Ambassador’s fate is still in limbo. After the hotel closed in 1987, it was the victim of a noisy battle between the Los Angeles Unified School District, which coveted the site for a school, and Manhattan mega-developer Donald Trump, who said he wanted to construct the world’s tallest skyscraper. In the end, neither developed the site.

But the now-struggling area’s most touching symbolic loss involves the Brown Derby restaurant, opposite the Ambassador. Opened in 1926, the Derby was a prime marker of Los Angeles’ vivid, rowdy chic. Damaged by an aborted demolition attempt in the early 1980s, the hat-shaped eatery, painted a gaudy silver, has landed on the roof of a strip mall on its former site--tossed there by the winds of change.

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In the late 1920s and early ‘30s, several of L.A.’s most enduring architectural landmarks were erected in this stretch of the boulevard in Mid-Wilshire. These included Bullocks Wilshire and the Pellissier Building, housing the Wiltern Theatre. Designed in the Art Deco mannerism later dubbed Zigzag Moderne, these buildings are a pair of mini-skyscrapers with strong vertical lines. Copper-coated parapets, colorful terra cotta tile and elaborate ornament on the exterior, and extravagant murals, rich tile work, intricate bronze and ironwork and Egyptian motifs in the interior make this pair a continuing delight.

The 1985 renovation of the Pellissier Building and its Wiltern Theatre was a major achievement in the ongoing struggle to preserve L.A.’s architectural heritage. Developer Wayne Ratkovich and architect Brenda Levin lovingly rescued and restored this landmark, despite having to battle rigid building codes, which have since been updated.

“The restoration of the Wiltern marked the birth of serious architectural conservation,” said Christy McAvoy, co-principal of the Historic Resources Group, a conservation firm based in Hollywood. “The Wiltern’s renovation galvanized us all, and it remains the very best thing we’ve done as a community in this regard.”

However, this section of Wilshire had a more profound originality than its architecture alone. This is where the world’s first modern “linear downtown” was created. Bullocks was the first big department store to orient its main entrance to the parking lot rather than the sidewalk. At a time when the intersection of Wilshire and Western was the busiest in the United States, John Bullock attracted shoppers from Downtown department stores by offering them a vital amenity--easy parking.

Bullocks’ new owners, R.H. Macy & Co., closed the store in 1993 and started to strip the building of its Art Deco fixtures and furnishings. Following a wave of protests, the historic department store, designed by John Parkinson and Donald B. Parkinson, was saved from Macy’s depredations and a threatened demolition. In 1994 the landmark was purchased by Southwestern University Law School, which is converting it for use as a library and offices, planned for completion in 1999.

The booming car culture also fostered the invention of the drive-in store and restaurant. By 1949 there were 43 drive-ins along Wilshire, ranging from markets and diners to shoe-repair shops. Among them was Bob’s Airmail Service, a gas station set under the wings of a twin-engined airplane at the corner of Cochran Avenue.

Interestingly, given the current maddening lack of coordination of the boulevard’s traffic lights, Wilshire was the first street in Los Angeles to install a synchronized traffic light system, in 1930, between Westlake Park and Fairfax Avenue.

In the past few years this richly historic section of Wilshire has been disrupted by the Metro subway under construction from MacArthur Park to Western Avenue. Central Wilshire pins much of its hopes for revitalization on the Metro. However, the subway’s proposed westward extension from Western Avenue along Pico rather than Wilshire has undercut much of the hope that the boulevard will re-establish its vital connections with the Westside.

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After Henry Gaylord Wilshire, the second big player in the Wilshire Boulevard saga was developer A.W. Ross. In the early 1920s, when bean fields still stretched to the horizon from La Brea Avenue westward, and Charlie Chaplin and Cecil B. DeMille owned private airports near Fairfax and Wilshire, Ross bought 18 acres on Wilshire from La Brea to Fairfax to create a car-oriented shopping district. First named Wilshire Boulevard Center, it was later called Miracle Mile and followed the route of the old Camino Viejo of Spanish colonial times.

(This connection between the central L.A. Basin and the sea dates back to the Pleistocene era, when the mammoths whose bones are preserved in the La Brea Tar Pits ambled down this way. In pre-conquest times Shoshones traveled the trail to fetch tar for caulking, or continued on to their seaside fishing villages.)

Ross’ commercial district was planned with spacious sidewalks and a central median lined with fine buildings in Zigzag and Streamline Moderne style. The strip from La Brea to Burnside Avenue, which still boasts 19 of these buildings, is in the process of being declared a historic district by the National Register of Historic Places.

The Miracle Mile’s western gateway is guarded by the May Co. store’s bravura golden cylinder. Across from the May Co. is Johnie’s, a wonderful example of the 1950s’ coffee shop style known as “Googie.”

Designed in 1955 by the firm of Armet and Davis, Johnie’s began life as Romeo Times Square, conceived as a tent-like pavilion in a desert garden with stone columns supporting a roof line of perforated copper panels decked with huge blinking neon signs.

The Googie style epitomized the fusion of verve and high trash that is a vital Angeleno value. Unencumbered by taste, it yet achieved a kind of innocent cheerfulness that’s since been celebrated in films such as “American Graffiti.” “We don’t just need buildings with good taste,” architectural historian Alan Hess said in his book on ‘50s coffee shop design. “We need buildings that taste good.”

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In the early 1920s the then-undeveloped length of Wilshire between the Miracle Mile and Beverly Hills was crowded with billboards, which must have seemed like a series of flash cards to motorists traveling down the dusty dirt road on their weekend excursions to the seaside.

Beverly Hills, founded in 1906, began, as most of these small towns did, as a land development, spurred by the 1912 construction of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle, bordering on Wilshire, is today what central Wilshire was in the first decades of this century--a sophisticated shopping district with an international reputation for glamour.

Two modern buildings stand out here, one for its lightness and skill, the other for its pretensions. The fluid, curving glass Modernist tower of the 1973 Manufacturers Bank Building on the northwest corner of Roxbury Drive is a fine piece of commercial street architecture, designed by Anthony Lumsden. On the other hand, the Creative Artists Agency headquarters, at Wilshire and “Little” Santa Monica boulevards, was contrived by I.M. Pei as an overwrought exercise in a Hollywood corporate style.

However, in general, Beverly Hills’ boulevard architecture can’t quite measure up to the grandeur and sophisticated opulence of that earlier era. Perhaps that’s because Beverly Hills, for all its wealth and show-biz dazzle, has a suburban heart.

To the west, following a pleasant breathing space provided by the greenery of the Los Angeles Country Club, is the urban village of Westwood, laid out in the 1920s. Its developer, the Janss Investment Co., had the inspiration to offer a cheap site for the UCLA campus at the edge of the village, thus increasing the sale value of the surrounding lots.

Today the phalanx of high-rise condos lining Wilshire from Comstock Avenue onward runs seamlessly into the series of office towers bordering the village.

Opinions on the condo-fication of Wilshire vary from a grudging appreciation to downright hostility. UCLA architectural historian Thomas Hines, who lives in Westwood, said the condos “add a certain urbanity to the boulevard, rare in Los Angeles.”

On the edge of Westwood, Wilshire intersects with the high-speed, mega-scale of the San Diego Freeway. The contrast between the two kinds of roadway is rather like watching a film suddenly overrun by the wham-bam razzle-dazzle of a video game. Freeways speak to a different scale and purpose than an urban boulevard. They have no connection with the fabric of the city, few diverting sights and sounds to distract your eye from the way ahead.

It’s fitting, then, that the section of Wilshire between Veteran Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard is a visual wasteland filled with grim federal buildings and the Veterans Administration hospital and its cemetery. Opened in 1888 to care for disabled Civil War vets, the original Victorian Stick and Shingle-style barracks were demolished in the late 1940s.

The only survivor of this earlier and more attractive architecture is the charming Sawtelle Veterans Chapel on the grounds of the Veterans Administration. Built in 1900, the chapel’s white-painted clapboard, ornate scrollwork, steep Gothic gables and witch’s hat bell tower now have the air of a lonely Brontesque church lost on a blasted heath.

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The last four miles or so of Wilshire, is, despite its commercial vigor, one of the least distinctive sections of the boulevard. In its disordered mixture of low- and high-rise buildings, billboards, nondescript office towers and strip shopping, it could be any stretch of any L.A. boulevard.

Along the way there are some pleasures, however. There’s a 1969 Home Savings and Loan building on the southeast corner of 26th Street designed by Millard Sheets, the architect who created a number of these Egyptian tomb-like small buildings covered with big, vivid mosaic murals. Farther along, on the south corner of 17th Street, is a 1928 Packard (now Mercedes) showroom in a cavernous Spanish Colonial Revival style with a giant Moorish archway entry.

The Pacific end of Wilshire is marked by a graceful white concrete tower designed by Cesar Pelli in 1973 in a kind of Modernist Streamline Moderne manner. General Telephone serves almost as Wilshire’s shoreline marker.

The section of Wilshire near the sea is actually the oldest part of the long street. In 1875, when John Jones, U.S. senator from Nevada, laid out Santa Monica’s street grid, he named one of the main thoroughfares Nevada Avenue. The former Nevada Avenue is now Wilshire’s last mile.

Today, despite its stretches of visual boredom and its patches of urban blight, its often disrupted continuity, Wilshire Boulevard manages to retain some kind of presence along its 16 miles. This is all the more surprising when you consider that, apart from Gaylord Wilshire’s first few blocks and A.W. Ross’ Miracle Mile, little of the boulevard has ever been planned.

Architect Douglas Suisman, author of a recent study of the L.A. boulevard system, noted that Wilshire has at times been an urban parkway, a connecting road between Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica and a focus for development for the agricultural fields of these three cities. “That such a powerful urban structure could emerge without the benefit of an overall plan or public leadership is a remarkable emblem of Los Angeles urbanism,” he wrote, “both in its achievement and its unfulfilled promise.”

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Celebrating the Boulevard’s 100th

Wilshire Boulevard’s centennial will be celebrated with a series of public events, including:

* A bicycle tour along the entire length of Wilshire led by Mayor Richard Riordan, on Sept. 23.

* A community-wide centennial street festival on Wilshire from Serrano to Western avenues on Oct. 14. This will include a vintage-car parade, from the Ambassador Hotel to Harvard Avenue and a historical photography exhibit in booths along the boulevard.

For further information on these events, contact the Wilshire Chamber of Commerce, (213) 386-8224.