ARCHITECTURE : Many Styles Happily Converge at Hollywood’s Crossroads of World

Before there were mini-malls, and before there was Postmodernism, there was Crossroads of the World, a ship full of styles sailing off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood into a world of streamlined fantasies.

Unlike its present-day followers, though, this deceptively large (almost 100,000 square feet) shopping center and office complex gives the street an exuberant image without sapping it with acres of parking. It encourages pedestrian exploration of its narrow outside paseos and offers a coherent, if eclectic, vision of a Los Angeles architecture.

The sunny disposition of Crossroads has a strangely murky past. It’s said you’ll meet the devil at the crossroads, and at this one you might at least meet a ghost.

Crossroads was built by the widow of Charlie Crawford, aka “the Wolf of Spring Street,” one of the city’s more notorious crime overlords (and a model for some of Raymond Chandler’s juicier villains), on the very site where Crawford was killed in 1931.

As if to expunge this gory heritage, Ella Crawford had architect Robert V. Derrah design a sunny collection of white-painted buildings that are Neo-Spanish, Neo-Colonial, Neo-Moorish and Neo-Modern all at the same time, with the emphasis on the neo, or “new,” part of the equation.

The buildings at 6671 Sunset Blvd. wear their styles loosely. Slightly protruding second stories under tile roofs and squat arches supporting lazy arches stand for the stuccoed glories of Mexican architecture, while the central pavilion speaks of the Machine Age with large plate-glass windows and sweeping metal door handles.

Only in the rear portion, separated from the front paseos or walkways by a parking lot, are the fantasies elaborated into half-timbered walls, steeply sloped roofs, wood beams and leaded-glass windows that call up a fairy-tale land somewhere on the Gallic side of the Old World.

The image that Crossroads keeps front and center, though, is an eight-foot globe rotating on top of an openwork tower visible up and down Sunset. This optimistic beacon, rising out of the slick curves of the central part of the complex, still has a clear relationship to the more historically minded parts of the complex.

Here you can recognize the hand of architect Derrah, a classically trained designer who is also known for his Coca-Cola bottling plant, a ship sailing through the downtown area, and for his Streamline Moderne Southern California Gas Co. building.

Derrah’s style, you might say, is California Optimism, a blending of Mediterranean architectures into smooth forms of white that seem to promise the dissolution of reality into the continual fantasy of a world building itself out of nothing under the Southern California sun. What makes Crossroads so successful is that it literally sells this image by building it up carefully out of vaguely familiar forms and by enticing you into its human-scaled world.

Unfortunately, the complex hasn’t kept up with the times and is now a half-empty dinosaur, protected by the National Register of Historic Places. But its architecture is still so convincing that the Disney Corp. recently bought the rights to use its likeness at Disneyland. Shorn of the realities of time and the social complexities of the neighborhood in which the real Crossroads sits, the imitation is a more pristine and financially successful version of the Southern California dream.