HOLLYWOOD — By noon on Wednesday the thermometer outside a Hollywood Boulevard souvenir shop read 103, and the sidewalk that on a normal August day would be thick with tourists had thinned to a scatter of people moving fast between patches of shade.
A heat wave settling over the region this week has pushed temperatures past 100 for several days running, and the businesses that depend on people walking by have felt it at once. Foot traffic falls when the pavement bakes. The tourists who do venture out move with purpose, ducking from one air-conditioned lobby to the next, in no mood to browse a rack.
For a fruit vendor named Efraín Bustos, who pushes a cart of sliced mango and cucumber along the Boulevard, the heat is both threat and opportunity. Sales of cold fruit and colder water climb when it is like this. So does the difficulty of the work. He has taken to moving his cart with the shade, chasing the shifting shadow of the buildings across the day, and trimming his hours at both ends to avoid the worst of the afternoon.
“When it’s like this, everybody wants what’s cold and nobody wants to stand in the sun to buy it,” Bustos said, wiping down his cart in a sliver of shade. “So I go where the shade is. In the morning it’s one side of the street. By four it’s the other. I follow it.”
The brick-and-mortar shops have their own tactics. A juice bar has dragged a misting fan to its doorway. A clothing boutique reported its best stretch of the week not in the morning but at dusk, once the sun dropped behind the buildings and people came back out. A theater box office let a line form inside its lobby rather than on the sidewalk, an accommodation the staff said they would happily repeat.
City and county officials have taken the standard precautions, opening cooling centers at libraries and recreation centers and urging people to check on elderly neighbors, the ones most at risk when the nights stay warm. The Boulevard’s unhoused residents, with the fewest ways to escape the heat, are among the most exposed, and outreach workers have been handing out water along the corridor.
Not every business suffers equally. The bars and restaurants with real air-conditioning have seen customers linger, nursing a second drink to stay out of the heat a while longer. A movie theater manager said matinee attendance had jumped, the cool dark of an afternoon show doing what it has always done in a hot city.
The forecast promised a break by the weekend, a few degrees off the peak, enough to bring the browsers back. Until then the Boulevard was running on its hot-weather rhythm: slow middays, busy evenings, and a man with a fruit cart tracking the shadow of the buildings around the block as the afternoon wore on.