HOLLYWOOD — The holiday parade came down the Boulevard the Sunday after Thanksgiving, as it has since the 1920s, and by the following week Hollywood had done what it does every December: strung itself with lights and gone on with business among the construction cones.
The stretch between Highland and Vine is at its best this time of year, when the theater marquees, the shop windows and the streetlamps all compete to be seen. Garland went up along the older facades. A few merchants ran strings of bulbs across their doorways. The effect, from the middle of the street on a clear evening, is genuinely pretty, and the tourists photographing it are not wrong to.
They are also stepping around fencing. The repaving project that has occupied parts of the Boulevard since the spring is still under way, and while crews pulled back some barriers before the holidays, others remain, forcing pedestrians into narrow channels along the busiest blocks.
“It’s beautiful and it’s an obstacle course, both at once,” said Reyna Villalpando, who was walking the Boulevard with two visiting cousins. “We took the pictures. We also nearly walked into a plywood wall to take them.”
For the businesses, the season is a chance to remind the city that the Boulevard is more than a construction zone. Shopkeepers who spent the fall grumbling about foot traffic have turned briefly hopeful, watching the crowds thicken on weekend nights.
“December forgives a lot,” said Marcus Pettibone, who manages a souvenir shop and has worked the Boulevard for fifteen holiday seasons. “People are in a spending mood, they’re bundled up, they linger. A good three weeks can carry a small place halfway to spring.”
The neighborhood’s holiday texture is its own. The star-shaped decorations that go up on the lampposts share the sidewalk with the Walk of Fame stars underfoot, some of them fenced off mid-repair. Carolers turn up on the corners some weekends. So do the costumed characters who work the Boulevard year-round, several of whom had added Santa hats to their usual getups.
Not everyone is charmed. Residents of the blocks just off the Boulevard report the seasonal mix of blocked driveways, late-night noise and nowhere to park, the annual tax of living beside a destination. “I love that people come,” said Halvard Ibsen, who has rented an apartment a block north for years. “I love it a little less at one in the morning when they’re looking for their car under my window.”
By the second week of December the rhythm had set in. The lights come on at dusk, the crowds build through the evening, the shops stay open late, and the crews return in the morning to a Boulevard littered with the day’s foot traffic and the night’s. Rain is forecast before the month is out, which the merchants are trying not to think about, and the visitors, for now, are not thinking about at all.