[Music playing] Woman: ♪ You, you, and you And you ought to be in pictures You're wonderful to see You ought to be in pictures Oh, what a hit you would be... ♪ Ralph: The rest of the world thinks Hollywood is Los Angeles, but you and I know that isn't true.

Hollywood is just another community here, the one that specializes in making movies and music and malarkey.

All the stars had to come from somewhere, and many people think they came from right here.

[Music playing] Woman: ♪ My star My star of stars ♪ Man: Schwab's was the kind of place where Frank Sinatra could come in and read "Daily Variety," and nobody would ask for an autograph.

This was a big place, and it had anything and everything.

But most of all, it was a meeting place.

Woman: Schwab's was a way of life.

I mean, people came for breakfast and stayed all day.

Ralph: Schwab's drugstore was known around the world as a place to be discovered, where everybody who wanted to be somebody had to be seen.

Maybe the real reason Schwab's became so famous is that one man wrote it all down.

Jack: Sid Skolsky.

Was that the man's name?

That...that was his office.

He made that place his office.

He wrote a big column, and everybody knew what was happening in the whole of L.A. from Sid Skolsky's column, which he wrote in Schwab's.

Woman: So, he made it his base of operations, and he started writing about it.

And then people would read about it, and when they came to California, they would rush to Schwab's.

Greg: My first trip out here, my dad took me to Schwab's, and I was so excited, because I thought Lana Turner would still be right there on that stool.

Ha ha ha!

And I miss it.

It wasn't anything special, but I'll tell you, thousands of girls in tight sweaters did sit there, hoping to get discovered.

Ralph: And in Hollywood, so many people wanted to be discovered that, in 1956, Schwab's Drugstore expanded eastward and added a coffee shop.

But, unfortunately, a sad day for many Angelenos came in 1983, when Schwab's Drugstore closed their doors.

Sondra: Harriet Nelson, she was so upset when it closed that when she would come in and drive by, if she had to go down Sunset Boulevard, she couldn't look at it.

She turned her face to the right.

She got so upset.

She said, you know, she always felt like Schwab's was Hollywood's corner.

Ralph: A lot of myths and legends came out of Schwab's, but the real legends lived across the street in an exotic old hotel called the Garden of Allah.

It was the former home of Alla Nazimova, one of the silent-film sirens who became an instant antique when talkies came in.

But she fought back, building a bunch of stucco cottages around her main mansion, and, voila, a hotel.

Now, if Schwab's was the hangout, the Garden of Allah was the hideaway for hanky-panky.

So, what happened?

Why did it disappear?

Well, the employed actors bought homes in Beverly Hills.

They didn't need hangouts and hideaways anymore.

Both Schwab's and the Garden of Allah were replaced by super shopping malls.