Ode to the Top Level of the ArcLight Hollywood Parking Lot

"As, in a theatre, the lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed... we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama and the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away"

The top level of the ArcLight parking lot affords the best views of Los Angeles (outside the foothills) and this has largely gone unrecognized among the obituaries for the theater chain that populated my Twitter feed this past week. I am, of course, talking about the ArcLight Hollywood, built behind the famous Cinerama Dome, and not the ArcLight Sherman Oaks, built atop the ruins of the Sherman Oaks Galleria. We mourned the Galleria years ago.

Joining the Galleria in the afterlife of local weekend rituals, the ArcLight theater chain died this week, killed by the virus, like so many favorite restaurants we haven't even taken stock of yet. The ArcLight is the biggest such business demise so far, and coming as it does at the tail end (hopefully, fingers crossed) of this virus here in California, it seems particularly cruel for her to expire. Happening now, at this moment, it's like getting sick in between vaccine shots. It's like falling down in the last hundred meters of a marathon.

There were reports that mentioned some kind of landlord-tenant dispute at the heart of the ArcLight's closing. Some other reports suspected that the whole thing was a last gasp S.O.S., a telegram sent from a sinking ship, designed to attract a rescue vessel in the form of a movie matriarch, or patriarch, who might throw a life preserver to the chain, or just buy it, or just buy the Cinerama Dome at least, so that movies continue to play there, for our generation's children.

If that were the case, it would be a worthy effort. My dad took me to the Cinerama Dome. I went with my friends —multiple generations of friends— and I would like to go there with my children. There are so few deep roots in this City. This one I deem sacred, like Tom Bergin's, or the Formosa, or the Observatory, or Point Dume. Younger than those, but still. It’s a thing that was here before us, intended for when those before us were young, and a touchstone when we were young, and something to connect around with the forthcoming young.

The majority assumption seems to be that Netflix will step in and buy the place, in an act of goodwill from a good movie citizen. I doubt this, mainly because Netflix already preserves the Egyptian Theater. Quentin Tarantino is another candidate, especially given his latest film, a love letter to the very blocks adjacent to the Cinerama Dome in both directions, but he is otherwise occupied at present with the New Beverly Theater, which I imagine must be a write-off every year already. My money is on Megan Ellison. She appreciates the 70mm experience, at least judging by some of her team’s development choices. Also the cost of that property is, for her, what my dad calls a "rounding error."

That parking lot is probably going to stick around, regardless of who buys the ArcLight Hollywood, or who doesn't, for that matter. That lot is a monstrosity of concrete, an homage to late stage fossil fuel reliance and romanticism, expensive to tear down and expensive to ship off in pieces. Why bother. I don't know what someone might do with it, though. A six-storey parking lot at the intersection of Sunset and Vine? It would have to be superfluous without the Cinerama Dome in operation or Amoeba Records in residence. Maybe it's time for my own personal dream to come true: I always thought a restaurant belonged at on the top level of that parking lot. A Ruby's, maybe, like the ones you find at the end of piers shooting off all lonely into the Pacific. Think of the views from up there, the ocean of lights. People would get engaged there.

Think also of the parking. Isn't that the issue with every restaurant in Los Angeles, at least historically, in the beforetimes? Parking scarcity was the problem that valets were invented to solve. Remember valet parking? Not a soul in Los Angeles has valet parked their car in a year. That's incredible. Somebody should check in on The Valet of the Dolls. I hope they are surviving.

But no, there's no need for a valet at my dream restaurant on the top floor of the ArcLight parking lot. There are plenty of spaces, even if a big movie is playing. I used to park up there by default, back in the early days of those little LED lights that told you how many spaces were available on each level as you drove up the central ramp. I did not care and ignored them. P3 was irrelevant to me, 5 spaces or 500, it didn't matter, all that mattered was the view from the top. There were always hundreds of spaces up there, and you could park anywhere you saw fit. The top floor was freedom, and beauty, and in the expanse, in the promise of being able to see so much, out to the horizon and everything in between, you couldn’t but think about the decisions, the various paths ahead, that would lead you to your top floor restaurant dream. 

On the way back to your car, after you parted ways with the friends you met for Fast Five or whatever, the friends who became your hashtag-family, up on that top floor you got a moment alone, to linger as long as necessary, to take in that view, and think about who you might take up there with you one day.