Illustrated by Pixel Pushers; Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images; Bob Riha Jr./Getty Images There was a time when Hollywood Boulevard was a truly glamorous destination. During the 1920s, the film industry was booming and the municipality of Hollywood was freshly incorporated into the city of Los Angeles. Prospect Avenue was renamed Hollywood Boulevard, and a flurry of tony hotels, palatial theaters and glitzy boutiques opened along the stretch between Vine Street and Highland Avenue. Dreamers from all around the country made their way west to be discovered along the boulevard - at the soda fountain of Schwab's Pharmacy (corner of Cosmo) or Café Montmartre (between Highland and McCadden). Most movie stars of the time lived above the boulevard in the Hollywood Hills, and the first Academy Awards ceremony took place at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel (a venue that seems inconceivable today). Related Stories Lifestyle What Your L.A. Coffee Shop Says About You Lifestyle Hollywood's Favorite Personal Shopper Gets Her Own L.A. Boutique But that is not a Hollywood I have ever experienced. The Hollywood & Highland shopping center - a failed attempt to revitalize the neighborhood à la Times Square during the 1990s - opened in 2001, when I was 14. The Academy Awards ceremony took up permanent residency at the Kodak (now Dolby) Theatre inside that same shopping center (a forced marriage if ever there was one) in 2002. But even the Oscars couldn't bring back Hollywood's lost glory. Frank Sinatra etched his signature in concrete in 1961. Nextrecord Archives/Getty Images Like most Angelenos, I rarely visit Hollywood today, except for the occasional nostalgic dinner at Musso & Frank or a Sunday morning stroll through the farmers market. Yet I found myself there on a recent weekday afternoon, walking down Vine to Trader Joe's. As I did, I read the starred names at my feet: Bob Burns, Frank Crumit, Audie Murphy ... I'm ashamed to admit I had no idea who these people were, and the tourists around me seemed no wiser. They, too, struggled to identify figures along the Walk of Fame that spoke to them. Michael Jackson's star got a photo, as did Jennifer Aniston's, while Judy Garland's star only got a finger point and countless others drew nothing more than an oblivious glance. And even with new stars added almost weekly, it's hard to imagine how relevant the Walk of Fame, or the handprints in front of what was once known as Grauman's Chinese Theatre, will be in the coming years as film and TV stars increasingly cede the spotlight to a raft of new media celebrities. Will MrBeast and Bella Poarch one day have landmarks dedicated to their legacies? Probably. Will they be in Hollywood? Probably not. Then what are tourists coming here hoping to find? Are they even coming at all? As the traditional entertainment industry continues to contract, Hollywood's allure to visitors clearly loses its appeal - and that has massive implications for L.A., which for decades has counted on Hollywood to bring in billions in tourism dollars. According to the Hollywood Partnership, a nonprofit dedicated to the beautification and economic vitality of the neighborhood, foot traffic around the entertainment district has dropped about 50 percent the past year and has never fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. And it's clear why: The area is neglected, dirty, uncomfortable to be in. Plus, what is there really to see or do in Hollywood? Get hustled by a knockoff Spider-Man in front of the Chinese Theatre, then eat at Wetzel's Pretzels as you wander past the various Scientology centers along the boulevard? Gone are the days of sitting in the audience for a live taping of a hit show. If, as Eve Babitz wrote, "there was never any visible Hollywood," then even the invisible Hollywood is fading. The neighborhood is no longer the center of film and television production. And Los Angeles more broadly is no longer where many of the people who make up the industry live. A once-glamorous stretch of the Walk of Fame with Mary Pickford's star. Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images I was beginning to despair about this grim outlook. I called Eric Avila, professor of Chicano studies and urban planning at UCLA and a preeminent historian of Los Angeles. Surely he could give me some perspective. "For those of us who do not live in Hollywood or the Westside, there's never been the issue of Hollywood and L.A. being the same thing," he says. Yet this feeling of the industry crumbling "goes back decades. It was really in the late '60s and '70s that Hollywood [the neighborhood] started becoming less 'Hollywood' because production was leaving the L.A. basin." Film production dwindled in Culver City around the same time, Avila explains. Both MGM and Culver Studios changed hands between multiple investors from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. Meanwhile, a string of box office flops led 20th Century Fox to sell off much of its backlot, just north of the 10 Freeway, to real est