[rick m]

Originally Posted by tovangar2

OMG, the Ivar. It was notorious when I lived in Hollywood between the late 70's up till about 1983. Guy got shot dead one night under the canvas marquee and no one called it in until dawn.

There was a gay bar in the back behind the stage, "The Gaslight", reached from the driveway to the right of the theater entrance (the drive was later closed in just leaving a long, narrow hallway). Before that, it was a club, "Bido Lido's", and later "The Sewers of Paris". By the 1990's it was a rock venue (I was a patron by then), "The Opium Den".

The always-legit theater itself was opened in '51, but the great two-level club space was much older. What went on over the years in tiny Cosmo Street, the alley which one could access from the back of the club, was the very definition of noir.

Yessiree - When Prohibition ended the LAPD plowed into Cosmo and Selma's Jimmy's Backyard and BBB's busting the (to them) most flagrant clubs in Hollywood due to performers like Rae Bourbon , Billy the Male Harlow and the quasi L&G milieu - Malin,Haines and Tachman n Garbo lost their teensy haunts