Between Seasons on a Street That Won't Sit Still

HOLLYWOOD — There is a stretch of days in late November when the neighborhood sits between two versions of itself. The awards-season machinery has not yet started to grind. The holiday crowds have not yet come. For a few gray mornings, the Boulevard belongs mostly to the people who live beside it, and I like to walk it then.

I went out early this week, before the shops rolled up their grates. The construction fencing was still there, of course, threading the sidewalk into a single file it has held for the better part of a year. A street sweeper worked the gutter with the patience of a machine that expects to be back tomorrow. A man I know only by sight was setting out the sandwich board for his coffee counter, and he lifted his chin at me the way you do when you have seen a face often enough to trust it without ever learning the name behind it.

Past the fencing, the library’s reading room was dark, as it has been for a year, the notice on its door faded to the color of an old receipt. I have written about that room before and will again, because a closed public room is a small daily subtraction, the kind that never quite becomes a crisis and never quite stops mattering.

You cannot see the soundstages from the Boulevard, but you can feel their quiet in the businesses that lean on them. The lunch counters that used to fill at one o’clock. The bar that used to hum on a wrap night. This has been a thin year for the work that made this an industry town, and thin years show up first in the least glamorous places — a barstool, a lunch counter, a firehouse toy bin that fills more slowly than it used to.

I do not walk out at that hour to be gloomy about it. The opposite, really. The Boulevard at dawn is proof the place is still here: swept, unlocked, opening up, waiting for its crowds and its cameras to remember the way back. A neighborhood that puts its sandwich board out on a slow morning is a neighborhood betting on customers.

There is a long habit, at this paper, of watching this street through its lean spells and its fat ones, and the lesson of all that watching is dull but reliable. The Boulevard has been counted out before — by television, by the freeways, by every decade that decided Hollywood was finished. It keeps declining to be finished.

The sun came up orange over the rooftops behind Franklin, the way it does this time of year, and the first tour van of the day rolled by mostly empty. Its driver waved anyway. There are worse ways to open a season than a wave you did not earn, from a man with a long day of nearly nobody ahead of him.