Hollywood (Pa.): Ready for its close-up?

Hollywood looks like it should - street after street of Mission-style bungalows colored tan and beige and, occasionally, pink. It's the pine trees that seem out of place.

This isn't that Hollywood, with stars and suntans and smog. This Hollywood is one of the region's quirkiest communities, a small-scale re-creation of Southern California in a pocket of Abington Township.

Cruise the main drag, Los Angeles Avenue, and you pass streets named Pasadena, San Gabriel and Berkeley.

"It's a kooky neighborhood," said John Costello, a photographer whose artistic eye drew him to Hollywood about eight years ago. "I was fascinated."

Now, some township officials and residents say, it's time Hollywood stepped into the spotlight. They're talking about trying to obtain historic certification to preserve the neighborhood's vintage charms.

A survey identified two Abington sites that might be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, Township Commissioner Michael O'Connor said. One was the YMCA, opened in 1917. The other was Hollywood, 174 houses on 10 not-so-square blocks, built in the late 1920s.

The neighborhood's odds of success? About a snowball's chance in Southern California.

Many homes have been altered, their doors and windows replaced. Others have suffered in harsh East Coast weather.

Yet for every example of faded glamour there's a house that has been perfectly maintained. Philip and Deborah Schneider's brown two-story looks as if it belongs in Sunset Boulevard. Ring the doorbell and you half expect Norma Desmond to answer. Similar properties dot the neighborhood.

"It really does have a little history," said Philip Schneider, who has lived in Hollywood nearly all his 65 years. And, as with its namesake, not all of the history is happy.

Like so many Tinseltown legends, the story starts with a love affair. But the passage of years makes it impossible to tell what's true, what's probable, and what's pure embellishment.

It's certain that in 1928, a California builder named Gustav Weber filed plans with the township to erect a development on the southeast edge of Abington. In a triangular plot he built rows of flat-roofed homes in sun-kissed pastels. He laid sidewalks of Moravian tile, and decorated lawns with Western plants and, supposedly, palm trees.

The plants are long gone. The sidewalk tile - slick as ice in the rain - cracked and broke from continuous freeze and thaw. Today the walkways are concrete, though if you search you can find short stretches of tile, the same style Weber used to trim the fireplaces he put in each of the mostly three-bedroom homes.

The story goes that Weber built this ersatz Hollywood not for himself, but for his wife, some years his junior, who was homesick for her native Southern California. But Weber's Xanadu couldn't hold her. She ran off - with Weber's son, people say. Brokenhearted, Weber ceased work on Hollywood.

That's the complete truth. Or total fiction.

In another telling, Weber's wife departed with his brother. In a third, she wasn't from California, merely infatuated with the place.

Other people say this Hollywood tale is not nearly so tabloid. Weber's work was stilled not by the ache of a failed marriage, they say, but by a more practical force: the stock market crash of 1929. In this version, when the banks went broke, they took Weber and his project with them.

Today Hollywood is one of 16 neighborhoods squeezed into the 15 square miles of Abington. Hollywood sits north of Elkins Park and south of Huntingdon Valley, and contains a mix of residents, some there for decades, others just moved in. Homes in good shape that first cost $4,000 or $5,000 now fetch between $160,000 and $200,000. Last year, a large place on Los Angeles Avenue sold for $220,000.

The neighborhood "has so much character," said Marguerite Sexton, who leads the recently formed Hollywood Civic Association. The group is thinking of holding events timed to the Academy Awards, or maybe a "Hollywood Goes to the Movies" night at the newly restored Hiway Theatre in Jenkintown.

Many renovations were done of necessity. Weber didn't merely build Spanish-style houses to look as if they belonged in California. He built them as if they were in California. None had insulation. The gorgeous single-pane, diamond-pattern lead-glass windows proved poor defense against the cold. The blue and green stucco discolored. The flat roofs leaked.

Houses have been made hardier, or bigger, outfitted with siding, sloped roofs, or second stories. Some have been so extensively remodeled that they're unrecognizable.

The neighborhood's best-known landmark, at Fox Chase Road and Huntingdon Pike, is the Hollywood Tavern, its logo evoking the famous hillside sign in Los Angeles. A half-century ago the tavern served as a model home.

Commissioner O'Connor said the township wanted to upgrade its entrance corridors, including one near the tavern. It would be great if Hollywood could play off its California connection, he said. Plainly the neighbors like the theme.

"To be attracted to the homes," said longtime resident Donnamarie Bakuckas, "you have to have a little bit of oddity in you. They're not your average person's dream home."