Tuesday, July 24, 2007 – Hollywood Gothic

Paris has Notre Dame, looking down on everything from the center of everything (see Matt's shots here), but Hollywood has the Hollywood First National Bank (6777 Hollywood Boulevard, at Highland).  The building went up in 1927 - Meyer and Holler, the architects, also designed the famous Chinese Theater one block west.  It's not exactly a gothic cathedral – we get lots of eagles and few gargoyles – but it will do. Notre Dame may be a physical exaltation in stone and glass of God and faith, or more narrowly of the Catholic Church and Catholicism, be we here in America worship other things – commerce and wealth.  This is a bank in Hollywood from the late twenties. That says it all.  Babbitt was first published five years earlier.

In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of gates, doors, doorways, beginnings, and endings.  Now we have his namesakes, the month of January and the caretaker of doors and halls: Janitor.

Janus - used to symbolize change and transitions, the progression of future to past, of one condition to another, of one vision to another, the growing up of young people, and of one universe to another. He was also known as the figure representing time because he could see into the past with one face and into the future with the other – and he's the representative of the middle ground between barbarity and civilization, rural country and urban cities, and youth and adulthood.

Also see Diprosopus, a rare craniofacial duplication condition. It's congenital.

If you wish to use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me. And should you choose to download any of these images and use them invoking the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, please provide credit, and, on the web, a link back this site.

Technical Note:

Most of these photographs were shot with a Nikon D70 - using lens (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300mm telephoto, or after 5 June 2006, (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. They were modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  Earlier photography was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik