Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood courts, real estate promoters, and gasoline-stations. Westward, through twelve miles of almost continuously inhabited areas, we reached the sea, with its ten-mile front of imitation Coney Islands, hotel esplanades, and beach clubs ; southward for thirty miles the other incidents of small villa holdings were alternated with oil-wells and petroleumized desolation ; south-eastward, along the flank of the Sierra Madre, one could drive for almost sixty miles among raw towns and hotdog stalls. Even beyond the town limits advertisements on farms and houses showed the commercial spirit. Oranges — Figs — Home-made Soups — Rhode Island Red Chicks — Peppers — Puppies — Encino, Watch It Grow — Pruning and Tree-surgery — Eggs — Honey — Concord Grapes — See Movie Animal in Person — Cocoanut Ice — Mahjong Teacher — Voice Placement — Grape Juice — Prunes — and a petrol-station every five minutes without intermission. In fact, no one who had only an hour or two to spare could possibly shake himself free from the city, with its crude, eye-aching newness. Almost every valley, canyon, or hump within fifteen miles of the City Hall was placarded with real estate advertisements, and although in certain lights the golden hill-sides, dotted with their variegated and would-be art houses, sliced and contoured by their cement roads, had a certain picturesque quality, a painter's picturesqueness rather than one of charm, in the mind's eye we could only reflect on what this place would be like when the full flood of house-building had swept over and had buried them wholly two storeys deep. [66]