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All summer long, sometime after nine in the evening, you hear the distant booms and rumbles – fireworks at the Hollywood Bowl – just over the hill. It's been there since 1922, in what used to be Daisy Dell. Some people only know it from the 1949 Chuck Jones cartoon, Long-Haired Hare – Bugs Bunny in a white wig and tuxedo as Leopold Stokowski, at the Bowl podium, ending with the shell cracking and crashing to the ground. But the Bowl is still there. Everyone has played the Bowl – Sinatra, Pavarotti, Streisand, Stravinsky, the Beatles, Mickey Rooney, Fonteyn and Nureyev, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, Simon and Garfunkel, and Abbott and Costello. Baryshnikov has danced there, as has Fred Astaire. The all-time attendance record of 26,410 paid admissions was set on August 7, 1936, for a performance by the French opera star, Lily Pons. Go figure.
But the coolest thing there is the Streamline Moderne-style fountain at the Highland Avenue entrance roads - George Stanley, who designed the Academy Awards' Oscar statue, had been commissioned in 1937 to design the fountain by the Hollywood Bowl Association and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The feds paid for it out of those WPA Arts funds ($125,000 back then) and, as the owner of the bowl, the county paid about a thousand to get things going. It was completed in 1940 and it depicts the muses of music, dance and drama. Yeah, it's just concrete covered with a bit of decorative granite quarried locally near Victorville, and it's no more than a retaining wall that keeps the steep hillside north of the entry drive in place. But it is cool. And in 2006, Rios Clementi Hale Studios of Hollywood oversaw the four-month renovation that cost almost two million dollars.
It was time for another visit.
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