HOLLYWOOD — The tourists still come. That was never the question the merchants along Hollywood Boulevard were asking this summer. What they have been watching, receipt by receipt, is how long the visitors stay and how much they spend once they get here, and the answers this season have run a shade below the ones they had hoped for.
“The sidewalk is full. The register is not as full as the sidewalk,” said Priya Ranganathan, who runs a souvenir shop that sells shirts, magnets and small brass replicas of the sign. “People walk the stars, they take the photo, and a good number of them keep moving. In a strong summer they’d have wandered in. This summer more of them wander past.”
Several shopkeepers pointed to the repaving fencing as one culprit, if a complicated one. The panel-by-panel replacement of the terrazzo has closed short stretches of sidewalk at a time, steering foot traffic to the far curb and, on the fenced blocks, past storefront windows rather than in front of them. Nobody interviewed wanted the work stopped. Most simply wished it were finished, and suspected the plywood was costing them the browsers who turn into buyers.
Others were less sure the fencing deserved the blame, or the credit. Tour operators reported steady bookings — the walking tours, the open-top buses, the star-map sellers all said business held up — but described visitors who arrived more budget-minded than in past years, quicker to skip the paid add-ons and the sit-down lunch.
“They’ll pay for the tour. They think twice about the souvenir photo and the upgrade,” said Devon Achterberg, who leads a walking tour that starts near the Boulevard most mornings. “Nobody’s staying home. They’re just counting their money on the way up the street, and you feel it in the extras.”
The heat has not helped. A run of hot days pushed afternoon crowds into the air-conditioned lobbies and thinned the sidewalks when the sun was highest, concentrating trade into the mornings and the cooler evenings. Ranganathan said her best hours had shifted noticeably earlier and later, with a dead stretch in the middle when the pavement radiated.
For the businesses that depend on the walk, the summer has been less a crisis than a slow leak — nothing that closes a door, but enough to notice on a spreadsheet. Achterberg said he had learned not to read too much into a single season, having watched Hollywood’s crowds swell and shrink for reasons no one could ever quite name.
“Every year somebody tells me the tourists have changed,” he said. “Then a good weekend comes along and the whole street feels rich again. I stopped predicting it. I just show up and count heads.”
By evening, when the pavement cools and the marquees come on, the crowds thicken again, and for a few hours the Boulevard looks as busy as its reputation. Whether the wallets thicken with them is the part the merchants will not know until the summer’s receipts are tallied.