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Opposing C-D is the Gordon Group, a partnership composed mainly of Hungarian immigrants who have become successful in the construction business. They want to restore the building and convert it into a tourist attraction, including museums of early Hollywood. The partners see their manifest destiny as Americans in saving a piece of old Hollywood. Bill Gordon, sixtyish with sad, deep-set eyes, fled Hungary in 1956, crossing the Ferto Lake into Austria with his family in a rubber raft. He wrote his sister-in-law, then living in Los Angeles, asking, "How far do you live from Hollywood?" Gordon became entranced with the image of Hollywood when he saw his first Greta Garbo movie at age 15 in Hungary. He still remembers that movie well—it was called Queen Christina. Says Gordon, speaking in somewhat halting English: "Now, most of the world, they do not know about Los Angeles. But they do know about Hollywood. From outside, Hollywood always seemed really glamorous. If anyone is coming to this city, what can they see of Hollywood?"
He will get little argument on that score. It is not unusual nowadays to come upon a tourist in Hollywood, looking bewildered, wondering if he has been misdirected or, worse, rather cruelly misled.
"Yeah, it's changed a lot," muses Meltzer. "As recently as ten years ago, there was a cafeteria on Vine Street, next to a theater where there were a lot of these television shows. You'd see people like Danny Thomas and Milton Berle. But those are the people who wouldn't be caught dead around here any more."
The Gordons and those who want to save the Garden Court say it could be the center of a revitalized Hollywood. Others would prefer a shiny new office building to spruce up the neighborhood. Meanwhile the battle goes on, as the Gordon Group continues its legal fight that in the words of Bill Gordon's lawyer son Peter, "does justice to the building's façade—it's labyrinthine and byzantine." Says his weary father: "It's a nightmare. More than a nightmare."
Both sides, though, still appear to have plenty of energy. Police have been called in to guard the structure from demolition crews; preservationists have staged all-night vigils; private security guards have barred the Gordon Group from access to the grounds. City Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson, who led last year's fight to declare the Garden Court Historic-Cultural Monument 243, decided later that the building should go—a flip-flop that, she insists, has nothing to do with CD's $2,500 contribution to her campaign.
C-D achieved the distinction of becoming the first landlord in Los Angeles to ask the city to declare one of its buildings unsafe because it did not meet earthquake standards. Then its attorneys argued that the company wanted to remove the Garden Court because "the longer the building stays up, the riskier it is that somebody might get hurt." Replied an unconvinced Superior Court Judge Robert I. Weil: "Well, my God, there are 500 buildings in downtown Los Angeles that are subject to the same ordinance, and nobody is making them take those buildings down. So why should this one be any different?"