In the tradition of all celluloid legends, the Broadway Hollywood's history is embroidered with big breaks, limelight-dimmed lulls, and triumphant comebacks. But unlike most fleeting starlets, this statuesque Classical Revival tower boasts a charismatic pedigree that transcends simple studs and stucco.

Designed by respected Los Angeles architect Frederick Rice Dorn, the original Renaissance style building is stylized with decorative Corinthian reliefs and columns supporting the upper level loggias. Along Hollywood Boulevard, classical mantelpieces tie the structure to a six-story 1938 International style addition by Parkinson & Parkinson, the designers of another retail grande dame, Bullocks Wilshire.

1645 North Vine was born in 1927 as the B.H. Dyas Specialty Emporium, one of the city's first department stores. In 1931, the building joined Arthur Letts' retail chain and was rechristened the Broadway Hollywood. A storied haunt of the famous and the fashionable, the influential West Coast retailer allegedly introduced women's slacks at its Vine Street location years before New York tastemakers adopted the look for the fairer sex; a top floor activity room provided a stylish play pen for the under age set while parents shopped below. Hollywood lore also holds that the building appeared in the Charlie Chaplin epic Modern Times.

Some sixty years after Hollywood Boulevard's first commercial heyday, the Broadway closed its doors to shoppers and embarked on a quiet two-decade stint providing space for urban music stations KACE and KRTO, Capitol Records satellite offices, and exteriors for the Harrison Ford crime feature Hollywood Homicide.

Today, nearly eighty years since the building's debut, the Broadway Hollywood is readying itself from the marble ground floor to the sun and starlit rooftop for a definitive and lasting close-up.