Like East Los Angeles’ El Mercado, built around the same time to create an authentic Chicano space, the French Market was one of the first gay-themed and community-focused places occupied by small businesses. Why would anybody want to eat outdoors on a busy L.A. This was a novel approach in L.A., as few restaurants at the time offered outdoor street seating, and especially in West Hollywood, then a car-centric community where walking was not a preferred mode of transportation. The French Market Place attempted to recreate the street life of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street in West Hollywood by building outdoor seating along Santa Monica Boulevard. The scale of the interior decorations reminds me of Disneyland’s it’s a small world its decadence of Pirates of the Caribbean.
In the middle of the courtyard stood a gazebo with a fountain. The cramped space opened up to a courtyard, which was surrounded by two stories of fake and real small store fronts and spaces for kiosks. The French Market’s designers transformed the shell of an old market into New Orleans’ French Quarter. Instead, the creators of the French Market turned to design. Diners like Arthur Jays were already popular among the gay community, and West Hollywood was not a foodie place, so gourmet food would not necessarily attract gay patrons. As a dining establishment, the French Market faced several challenges. | Pat Rocco / ONE ArchivesĪnd then there was the French Market – one the most outrageous of these places that was not a dance club. Photo by Pat Rocco, courtesy of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. New York’s Studio 54 became, in Los Angeles, Studio One.ĭancing at Studio One in West Hollywood. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin became the Cabaret Disco on La Cienega. West Hollywood’s cheap land, easy construction, and lack of urban design codes made possible its transformation into a gay utopia.įor design inspiration, these new gay-owned establishments turned to the famous decadent places of Europe and the eastern United States. Dance clubs appeared virtually overnight, transforming warehouses, storefronts, and tiny bars – the places from which emerged the city’s DJ culture.īecause the gays and lesbians of West Hollywood – like the Latinos of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles – were not then a particularly wealthy community, they had to work with the existing landscapes they inherited.
Nothing brought the LGBTQ community together like dancing – especially among African-American and Latino gays and lesbians – and L.A. While Latinos transformed East Los Angeles by painting murals (among other design interventions), gays and lesbians transformed West Hollywood by opening bars, clubs, discos, and bathhouses – gathering places critical to this fledgling community. In L.A., that place was West Hollywood – until 1984 an island of unincorporated county jurisdiction between the municipalities of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, and already home to entertainment establishments dating from the heyday of the Sunset Strip. The early gay-rights movement took advantage of this phenomenon, finding a place in urban America to establish itself by merging civil rights activism with place-making. In American cities like Los Angeles, “white flight” had cleared older areas for gays and lesbians, creating cheap land and more tolerant zoning. During this time, the LGBTQ community was transitioning from an ephemeral underground life of tearooms, parks, alleys, and private homes to brick-and-mortar establishments. Like hippies, Chicanos, and African-Americans in the 1960s and ‘70s, gays and lesbians needed places to connect and gather. Other communities across Los Angeles similarly repurposed their urban surroundings as places to enact newly won freedoms.īut now one such placemaking tradition – Gay Urbanism – might be coming to an end, a fate signaled by the recent closures of Jewel’s Catch One on Pico and the French Market Place in West Hollywood, among dozens of other historic gay establishments. I’ve devoted much of my career to researching and writing about Latino Urbanism – one way historically marginalized communities in Los Angeles adapted the built environment they inherited to better reflect their emboldended sense of cultural identity. They also transformed the very urban fabric of American cities. The civil rights protests of the 1960s-70s – from the marches of Martin Luther King to the walkouts of the Chicano movement – were powerful forces for social change across America.