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 Vintage Hollywood Bowl View from a picture postcard |
The Hollywood Bowl is a modern amphitheatre in Hollywood, California, USA, that is used primarily for music performances. It officially opened in 1922 on the site of a natural amphitheatre formerly known as the Daisy Dell, and has been the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since then.
The Hollywood Bowl is well known for its band shell , a distinctive set of concentric arches that has graced the site since 1929. Popular entertainers including Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, and Judy Garland have given famous or noteworthy performances under the shell. Cartoon buffs may see a resemblence between the concentric arches of the shell and Porky Pig's backdrop in Th-th-that's all, f-f-folks; it is debatable whether it was intentional (however, the Bowl did make appearances in various Warner Brothers cartoon shorts, and at least one DePatie-Freleng Pink Panther cartoon).
Shortly after the end of the 2003 summer season, the Board of Supervisors of Los Angeles County, which owns the Hollywood Bowl, replaced the 1929 shell with a new, somewhat larger, acoustically improved shell, which had its debut in the 2004 summer season. Preservationists fiercely opposed the demolition for many years, citing the shell's storied history, but completely ignoring the fact that even as built, it was (at least acoustically) only the third-best shell in the Bowl's history, behind its two immediate predecessors (which had been designed by Lloyd Wright, the son of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright), and by the late 1970s had become (because of continued hardening of its transite skin) an acoustic liability. The new shell incorporates design elements of not only the 1929 shell, but of both the Lloyd Wright shells; during the 2003 summer season, the sound steadily improved, as engineers learned to work with its live acoustics.
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