Mansions and millionaires once populated this modest section of Hollywood Boulevard. Later, garden apartments provided homes and hideaways to glamorous up-and-comers waiting for big breaks -- and Beverly Hills compounds.
Cary Grant spent time here, as did Shelley Winters and Johnny Weismuller.
Johnny Grant, Hollywood's unofficial mayor and most famous booster, used to live across the street from Peyton Hall, the garden apartment complex. He remembers starlets and lines of limousines.
"This was Hollywood's first Peyton Place," he said.
Over the past century, the fabled property in the 7200 block was home to the Ralphs supermarket founder; the wealthy scion of the Cudahy meatpacking family; and producer Joseph M. Schenk and his then-wife, actress Norma Talmadge. Before that, in 1904, it was reputedly owned by Hollywood's first official mayor, George Dunlop.
Hollywood was born in 1887, when the "mother of Hollywood," prohibitionist Daeida Wilcox, subdivided 120 acres, plotted streets, planted pepper trees and offered free lots to any church community. Gambling halls, billiard dens and saloons were prohibited.
Hollywood incorporated in 1903, and Dunlop was elected mayor.
At first, Hollywood attracted retirees who settled in Victorian and Craftsman-style homes along what is now Hollywood Boulevard. Dunlop, who had lived in the area since the 1880s, reportedly bought a chunk of land at Hollywood Boulevard and what was later named Fuller Avenue. It's unclear whether Dunlop built a house there.
Ranchers herded sheep down the unpaved boulevard. Dunlop, weary of the dust, signed an ordinance in 1905 banning herds of more than 800 sheep from the boulevard, according to a 1931 Times story.
Hollywood became part of Los Angeles in 1910, lured by ample water supplies. Three years later, Ralphs founder George Albert Ralphs built a Mission Revival mansion with a red-tile roof and a tennis court on 3 pastoral acres at 7269 Hollywood Blvd.
"They had a small swimming pool in front which they emptied often to water the [citrus] orchard," Ralphs' great-granddaughter, Linda Ralphs of Rancho Santa Fe, said in an interview.
In 1914, Ralphs was killed during an excursion to Lake Arrowhead: A boulder he was standing on gave way and rolled down a canyon, carrying Ralphs with it.
The Ralphs family moved out. Their house was eventually sold or leased to John "Jack" Cudahy, scion of a meatpacking family. (The town of Cudahy was later named for the family.) The frontyard pool was filled in.
