A History of Los Angeles . . . in One Block

Los Angeles is often picked on by residents of other U.S. cities as having no history. This belief, supported by many Angelenos themselves, ignores a simple fact: El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de Porciuncula was founded in 1781, long before San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, St. Louis, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. The city has an abundance of history.

To find it, we’re going to look at one city block, straddling Los Angeles and West Hollywood, bounded on the north by Sunset Blvd., on the east by Cresent Heights Blvd., on the south by Fountain Avenue, and on the west by Havenhurst Drive. Like many Los Angeles blocks, its north-south dimension (around 1150 feet, or a fifth of a mile) is much greater than its east-west dimension (around 460 feet). I’ve chosen this block (a.k.a., “our block”) for two reasons: first, it’s near where I live, and second, it has a particularly rich and well-documented history.

Our Block’s Geology

Until around 20,000 years ago, our block, along with all of North and South America, was unoccupied—by humans, that is. Roaming the region were bison, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, and mammoths, all of which have been found in the nearby tar pits. Just north of our block are the hills that separate the Los Angeles basin, of which our block is a part, from the San Fernando Valley to the north.

Running along the southern edge of the hills, following Sunset Blvd. (and therefore just north of our block), is the Hollywood Earthquake Fault. This fault has been relatively calm over the past few hundred years, but it has the capacity, optimistically, for a magnitude 5.8 to 6.5 earthquake every 1,600 years, and pessimistically, a magnitude 7.0 every 3,000 to 5,000 years. (For those of you not living in seismic zones, a 7.0 is big. No earthquake in Los Angeles County since 1900 has been stronger than magnitude 6.7, and a 7.0 is almost three times stronger than a 6.7.) So, for our block, the seismic clock is ticking. But then, few areas on the Pacific Coast don’t have a ticking clock.

Tongva

The region has been occupied by indigenous people for more than 8,000 years. By at least 500 CE, the Tongva people were living throughout what is now Los Angeles and northern Orange Counties. They were organized in villages, each ruled by a tumaia’r, who could be a man or a woman. Each village had its own territory, and either defended that territory from other Tongva villages or joined with other villages to create larger communities.

No Tongva villages were on or near our block. Water, then as now, determined how the region was settled, with most villages being located near rivers or springs. The villages closest to our block were Maugna in modern Hollywood, Cahenga at the Los Angeles River where Universal City now sits, and Koruuvanga in West LA near Santa Monica, not far from UCLA. Koruuvanga was located at a sacred spring that today is on the campus of the University High School Charter and still produces water. Other nearby villages were Guashna at Playa Vista, Hahamongna along the L.A. River near Glendale, and the largest in the region, Yaangna, near today’s downtown west of the L.A. River, and now buried under the 101 Freeway. The original pueblo was built just north of Yaangna.

The Tongva near our block had an unusual and valuable resource: what are now called the La Brea tar pits a couple of miles southeast of our block. The Tongva used the natural asphalt as waterproofing material.

Spain

In the 1540s, Spanish military expeditions began exploring the California coast. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo led a party to the Los Angeles area and encountered the Tongva in 1542. Along with Cabrillo’s party and the others that followed came smallpox and measles, which decimated the indigenous population.

In the 1760s, Spain became worried that other countries, particularly Russia and Britain, would try to plant their flags in California, and hurried their own colonization. In 1769, King Carlos III of Spain sent an expeditionary force, accompanied by Catholic missionaries, to occupy California. The Mission San Gabriel was established in 1771, around 18 miles east of our block, and by 1778, most of the Tongva people had been relocated to the mission, with the others living hidden in the mountains and canyons.

Mexico

In 1822, Spain surrendered its claim to California to Mexico. Within a few years, Mexican settlers had taken over all the former Tongva lands, so that by 1848, only a few Tongva people were still able to live in something like a traditional manner. Today, because the Tongva were never restricted to a reservation, their numbers are uncertain, from a few hundred to maybe a few thousand.

To encourage settlement of their California lands, Mexico continued and expanded a Spanish practice of issuing large land grants to prominent citizens. One of these land grants—there were around 270 of them—was Rancho La Brea, originally granted in 1828 and comprising around nine square miles, including Hollywood, the Wilshire Blvd. Miracle Mile, parts of West Hollywood, the La Brea tar pits, and our block.

Then, in 1846, the United States started a war with Mexico.

The Mexican?American War was America’s flimsily justified, Manifest-Destiny effort to acquire what is now most of the American Southwest. During the war, the U.S. military occupied the Los Angeles region. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war, leaving the U.S. with Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, and most of Arizona and New Mexico. The treaty honored the Mexican land grants, and the Rancho La Brea grantees—Antonio José Rocha, José Jorge Rocha, and Josefa de la Merced de Jordan—then spent the next decade and most of their money legally defending their claims. In 1860, they sold the property to their lawyer, Henry Hancock, who then mined the tar pits for the asphalt. After Hancock died in 1883, his wife and son discovered oil on the property, becoming even wealthier than Henry ever was, and developed and subdivided the Rancho property, including our block. (Twenty-three acres of land with the tar pits were donated to Los Angeles County in 1924.)

Los Angeles

Meanwhile, Los Angeles was growing. The Los Angeles pueblo was established in 1781 (and is partially preserved at Oliveira Street just west of Union Station) and the city was incorporated in 1850, but for most of the 19th century, Los Angeles was a small town. Its population in 1880 was under 12,000.

After 1900, and especially after Owens Valley water started flowing into the city, Los Angeles began an aggressive expansion. By 1930, the city’s population had grown to 1,238,048 (more than 100 times its 1880 population). Along with this population explosion was physical growth, as the city annexed a series of adjacent communities. Major annexations included Westgate (including the future UCLA campus) and the San Fernando Valley in 1915, Melrose (two blocks south of our block) in 1922, Fairfax (including the tar pits) in 1924, and Fairfax Addition 2 (where Park La Brea is now) in 1941.

Hollywood was annexed earlier, on February 7, 1910, but our block wasn’t part of that. It wasn’t until May 16, 1923, with the annexation of Laurel Canyon (including much of the Hollywood Hills), that the north tip of our block became part of Los Angeles. One final tiny annexation affected our block: the 1961 Laurel Canyon Addition 5, consisting of just one lot immediately south of the Laurel Canyon annexation. The remaining 75% of our block—the entire southern end of it— continued as unincorporated county land until it became part of the City of West Hollywood in 1984.

That our block wasn’t in the city of Los Angeles meant that the Los Angeles Police Department had no jurisdiction to enforce Prohibition (in effect since 1919) and other vice laws. The stretch of Sunset Blvd. between our block and Beverly Hills to the west continued to be unincorporated for another six decades, resulting in the famous (and notorious) Sunset Strip, where nightclubs, speakeasies, casinos, strip clubs, and other such establishments thrived.

Hayvenhurst

What did our block look like in the 1890s and early decades of the 1900s? Photos of the region show mostly open fields with scattered groves of trees, some agriculture, and isolated structures, such as the United Artists studio complex on Santa Monica Blvd., surrounded by empty fields and dirt roads. A 1918 photo shows a casaba field at Harper and Sunset, just one block west of our block. In those days, our block was within an area called Sherman, named for Moses Sherman, who built a streetcar yard where the Pacific Design Center now stands. In 1925, the residents of the area voted to change the name of their community—it wasn’t really a town or city yet—to West Hollywood.

Sunset Blvd., from as early as 1780, was a dirt cattle trail connecting the Los Angeles pueblo with the Pacific Ocean. West of Crescent Heights Blvd. the trail closely followed the base of the Santa Monica Mountains, giving it the curving, hilly character it retains today as a four-lane street. Until 1931, the road was unpaved west of Havenhurst. It became one of Los Angeles’s more famous streets in 1950 thanks to the movie Sunset Blvd.

In 1913, real estate developer William Hay acquired and developed 160 acres of unincorporated county land, bounded by Sunset to the north, Santa Moncia Blvd. to the south, Fairfax Avenue to the east, and Sweetzer Avenue to the west, with our block in the middle. At the north end of our block he built Hayvenhurst, a 2.5-acre private estate and mansion on Sunset between Crescent Heights Blvd. and Havenhurst Drive (which had previously been called Kays Avenue). Hay didn’t stay in Hayvenhurst long, building and moving into a new house a few blocks to the east (where the Directors Guild of America building is now). In 1918, he leased the Hayvenhurst estate to actress Alla Nazimova and sold it to her the following year.

The Garden of Allah

Nazimova was born in Russia as Adelaida Yakovlevna Leventon. She became a star on stage in Moscow and St. Petersburg before immigrating in 1905 to the United States. After quickly learning English, she became a success on Broadway and moved on to Hollywood. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Nazimova nurtured her Hollywood acting career, while also developing a, for the time, somewhat scandalous reputation by having a series of romantic relationships with prominent women, including director Dorothy Arzner and Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s niece).

In 1926, after losing much of her money financing independent films, Nazimova added 25 small cabins and a Black Sea?shaped pool to Hayvenhurst and converted it into a hotel, called “the Garden of Alla.” She sold the property in 1930 to a holding company, which renamed it “the Garden of Allah Hotel” (center photo), but she continued to live there, in Villa 24, until she died in 1945. During Hollywood’s golden age, the 1930s and 1940s, celebrities of all sorts lived at the hotel, including actors Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and the Marx Brothers; writers Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edgar Rice Burroughs; singers Eartha Kitt, Frank Sinatra, and Vic Damone; and musicians Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Benny Goodman. The place had a well-deserved notoriety as a temple of hedonistic pleasure, with rampant sex, drugs, and liquor (illegal until 1933).

Also on Our Block

While the Garden of Allah was our block’s most famous bit of history, other structures have been significant. On the west side of our block, one lot south of the 1961 L.A./WeHo border, the Colonial House was built in 1930. Residents of this seven-story white-painted brick building, designed by Leland A. Bryant (1890-1954), have included Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Carol Lombard, Myrna Loy, and Katy Perry. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Just south of the Colonial House is the Ronda Apartments, a four-story Spanish-colonial courtyard building designed by Arthur and Nina Zwebell and also in the National Register of Historic Places. (Both buildings in upper-right photo.)

On the southeast corner of our block, at Fountain and Crescent Heights, is “the Temple of the Stars,” the Temple Beth El, the first synagogue in Hollywood. Established in 1920 in a bungalow on Wilton Place, it moved to a permanent temple also on Wilton just north of Sunset Blvd. in 1922. Its members included prominent Jewish movie people such as studio moguls Louis B, Mayer (MGM), Carl Laemmle (Universal), Samuel Goldwyn, and the Warner Brothers. After World War II, two things made it necessary for the temple to move: its size was no longer adequate and, more crucially, the temple’s site was about to become an exit ramp for the new Hollywood Freeway. The congregation acquired a new location on our block and built the current Art Deco building in 1952.

Lytton Savings & Loan

By the end of the 1940s, the Garden of Allah had lost most of its prestige and had become somewhat seedy. Celebrities found other places to live (and play). In the late 1950s, the property was bought by banker Bart Lytton, who demolished the hotel to make room for Lytton Savings and Loan. Architect Kurt W. Meyer (1922?2014) [1], along with interior designer Adele Faulkner (1911-2000) [2], designed a two-story modernist structure with a distinctive folded concrete roof above a seemingly floating travertine box (upper-left photo). In a report by the Historic American Buildings Survey, conducted by the National Park Service, the building was described as an “example of California Mid-Century Modern architecture reflecting influences of New Formalism in its glass walls, travertine cladding and concrete columns, and Googie architecture in its zigzag folded roof plate.”

Along with the new bank building, Lytton’s plan for the site included a 12-story office tower and a three-story parking structure, neither of which were built. However, in 1962, the Lytton Center, comprising a 200-seat auditorium and a Hollywood museum, was added to the south side of the bank. The Los Angeles Times reported that the “extraordinary Lytton Center for the Visual Arts exists as one of the most vital community centers concerned with the arts … a truly unique experiment.” The center closed in 1969 and was demolished in the 1980s. A nondescript, two-story strip mall, extending from Crescent Heights to Havenhurst, was added in 1988.

In 1968, Lytton Savings and Loan declared bankruptcy, and the building was bought by Great Western Savings, then later by Washington Mutual. After the 2008 financial crisis, Washington Mutual was acquired by Chase. [3]

Around Our Block

Surrounding our block is even more history. Across Sunset from our block is the seven-story Chateau Marmont, originally an apartment building when completed in 1929 but converted to a hotel in time for the 1932 Olympics. Next to the main building are a swimming pool, nine Spanish-style bungalows, and two mid-century modernist residences designed by Craig Elwood. As apartment building and hotel, it has been a haven for celebrities since it was built, noted for its bohemian ambience and a what-happens-there-stays-there attitude of its staff, filling a need formerly served by the Garden of Allah. Today, tourists are interested in seeing it mostly because, as tour-bus guides never fail to announce, it was where John Belushi died in 1982 (in Bungalow No. 3). [4]

On the west side of Havenhurst Drive across from the Garden of Allah site is another courtyard building, the Andalusia, completed in 1926 and also designed by the Zwebells. Its residents have included actors Sondra Locke, Marlon Brando, and Cesar Romero, and writer Louis L’Amour. The Andalusia joined the National Register in 2003. Just north of the Andalusia, on Sunset west of Havenhurst, was Jay Ward Productions, the animation company that produced the classic TV show Rocky and His Friends (later renamed The Bullwinkle Show). In 1961, the studio erected along Sunset a 14-foot-tall statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Sometime after 2000, after the company became part of Comcast and moved to Costa Mesa, the Jay Ward family donated the statue to the City of West Hollywood, which reinstalled it a mile west, at the intersection of Sunset and Holloway.

Just northeast of our block is Laurel Canyon, famous in the 1960s and 1970s as the counter-cultural home of musicians, such as Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, and Cass Elliott. Winding its way through the canyon is the narrow, two-lane Laurel Canyon Blvd., which began as a dirt road in 1907. L.A.’s freeway designers failed to appreciate the canyon’s charm and planned the Laurel Canyon Freeway to connect the Ventura Freeway in the San Fernando Valley to the San Diego Freeway (Interstate 405) near the LAX airport. As late as 1967, plans continued to show the freeway, part of which was built where La Cienega Blvd. passes through the Baldwin Hills. The plan, fortunately, was killed in the late 1960s. It would have seriously affected, and possibly demolished, our block.

One block south of our block runs Santa Monica Blvd., which was the westernmost stretch of Route 66, the famous highway celebrated in song (“Get Your Kicks on Route 66”) and literature and film (The Grapes of Wrath) that connected Chicago with the Pacific Ocean. Another aborted freeway, the Beverly Hills Freeway, had been planned to connect the Hollywood Freeway to the 405. Had it been built, it would have obliterated the Santa Monica commercial corridor.

On the west side of Cresent Heights opposite our block stands Granville Towers, a seven-story, 40-condo building designed by Leland Bryant to resemble a French chateau. The building housed such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson, and David Bowie. Bryant, who was educated at UC Berkeley, also designed other still-standing buildings near our block: the Sunset Tower, a beautiful Art Deco structure a few blocks west, in 1931, and La Fontaine, another French chateau?style apartment building, across Fountain from our block.

Just east of our block on Sunset was the John Lautner?designed Googie’s Coffee Shop, built in 1949. An entire architectural style was named after this building. The Googie Style featured prominently in diners, car washes, drive-in theaters, bowling alleys, and banks (see above) throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

East of Googie’s, at 8024 Sunset, was Schwab’s Pharmacy, which opened in1932. Schwab’s was a popular hangout for movie celebrities and reporters, and was featured in the movie Sunset Blvd. Legend has it that composer Harold Arlen was inspired to write “Over the Rainbow” while spending time in Schwab’s. Googie's and Schwab's were demolished in 1988 to make way for a shopping and theater complex.

Across Sunset from Schwab’s is a two-story, Mediterranean-style building, built in 1925 and once owned by Groucho Marx. It now houses the original Laugh Factory.

One block east of our block, on Laurel Avenue, are three more historic sites. The apartment building at 1403 N. Laurel was former Garden of Allah resident F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last home, where he was writing the unfinished The Last Tycoon before his death in 1940 (he died in a friend’s apartment nearby). Two lots south is the Villa d’Este, a lovely 1920s’ courtyard building designed by the architects (and brothers) Walter and Pierpont Davis.

Immediately south is Laurel Avenue Park, which represents a victory for historic preservation. Several buildings are in the wooded park, with the largest one called Tara, built in 1914 and later named after the house in Gone with the Wind (although the house doesn’t look much like the movie’s Tara). The owner of the estate for many years was Ellie Weisman, a socialite who hosted celebrities such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt in the house. Shortly before Ms. Weisman died in 2000 (at the age of 101), she had deeded the estate to the city of West Hollywood. The city planned on demolishing all the buildings on the site, including Tara, and removing most of the trees, and building a new apartment building for low-income senior living. Preservationists waged a eight-year battle to save Tara, finally getting City Council approval in 2011 to turn the property into a public park and community center.

Meanwhile, back on our block … ???

Sunset Strip Riots

At the northeast tip of our block, a small triangular island is wedged between Sunset, Crescent Heights, and the curving right-turn lane from Sunset onto Crescent Heights. Before the 1970s, this island was twice as large as it is now, and sitting on it was a small coffee house called Pandora’s Box, which became the focus of some of the more turbulent events to affect our block.

Before the 1960s, the Sunset Strip, extending along Sunset from Doheny in the west to Cresent heights in the east, featured mostly adult entertainment, such as nightclubs and strip clubs, and attracted Hollywood’s wealthy customers. By the mid-1960s, however, a new type of venue and a new clientele were making their presence on the Strip. Clubs such as Whisky a Go Go, which opened in 1964, began attracting teenagers to see bands such as the Doors, the Byrds, the Mothers of Invention, and Buffalo Springfield. Because the teenagers, who were characterized by the conservative mainstream newspapers as “beatniks,” and then “hippies,” were below the legal drinking age, they mostly hung out at nonalcoholic coffee houses, such as Pandora’s Box and the Fifth Estate just west of Jay Ward Productions (and home to the National Lampoon in the early 2000s). More problematically, from the point of view of the older establishments, the teens cluttered up the Sunset Strip sidewalks and clogged Strip traffic and parking. The congested street and sidewalk traffic were keeping the older customers away, so the owners of the adult venues turned to the LA County Sheriff’s Office and the LAPD to do something about it. The authorities began enforcing curfews and anti-loitering laws. The teens decided to push back.

On Saturday, November 12, radio stations and flyers told teens to gather for a rally at Pandora’s Box. At least a thousand teenagers showed up. The sheriff’s officers and the police unfortunately reacted with more enthusiasm than was merited, beating kids with their night sticks and arresting hundreds. This was repeated every weekend in November. The city’s major newspapers, including the then-conservative LA Times, reported falsely that the police were combating rioters.

On December 5, 1966, Buffalo Springfield recorded the Stephen Stills song “For What It’s Worth,” about what the band had been witnessing on the Strip; by December 10 radio stations were already playing it. The lyrics were generic enough to turn it into an all-purpose protest song. [5] Frank Zappa, in his 1967 song “Plastic People,” was more specific: “I hear the sound of marching feet down Sunset Blvd. to Crescent Heights, and there, at Pandora's Box, we are confronted with a vast quantity of plastic people. … Watch the Nazis run your town.” The riots were further memorialized in a low-budget movie, Riot on Sunset Strip, which was written, filmed, and released by April of 1967. The movie is terrible, but it does include footage of the actual protests, and we get glimpses of the pink-painted Pandora’s Box and the Lytton Bank.?

The Los Angeles City Council, meanwhile, voted to use eminent domain to demolish Pandora’s Box in August of 1967, ostensibly to straighten Crescent Heights so it joined with Laurel Canyon Blvd., but possibly just out of spite. ?

Our Block Today

In 2016, the same year that former the Lytton Savings building was designated as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, a developer acquired the property and engaged Frank Gehry to design a large residential project covering the entire Garden of Allah site. Preservationists, including the Los Angeles Conservancy and Friends of Lytton Savings tried, unsuccessfully, to save the building.

In the 1960s, Lytton Savings had commissioned sculptor David Green (1908-2000) to create a large, patinated-metal sculpture called “The Family” for the north side of the bank building (lower-left photo). The figures in the sculpture appear to be looking in terror at the oncoming wrecking ball. In early December 2020, eyewitnesses reported seeing mysterious masked men [6] crating the sculpture and placing in a truck, taking it … where? A secret government warehouse, perhaps? This was the first indication that the bank building was doomed.

Barriers were erected in early April 2021, and on April 23, demolition began (middle-left photo). By May 10, the bank building was gone, followed a year later by the strip mall.

The Frank Gehry?designed project for 8150 Sunset Blvd. was to be a 13-story, 330,000-square-foot commercial and residential complex filling the entire Garden of Allah site. Gehry had seen the hotel before it was torn down, and intended his project to capture some of its character. In 2023 online news stories reported that the project, already entitled by L.A. city planning, was for sale. As of mid-2024, the site remains a dirt field, surrounded by an eight-foot-high black-painted, poster-covered plywood fence (lower right-hand image).

The next chapter of our block—or at least its northern end—remains to be written. But whatever happens, whether it’s the Gehry project or something else, our block, like Los Angeles, will continue to see change, and will at the same time preserve its past. If someone from the 1940s—say, Bogie and Bacall—were to visit our block today, they would find a lot they would recognize: the Chateau Marmont, the Colonial, La Ronde, the Andalusia, the Granville Towers. Although their beloved Garden of Allah is long gone, they might feel at home.?????????????

Footnotes:

[1] Meyer was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and received his Bachelor of Architecture at the Swiss Institute of Technology. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1948 and moved to Los Angeles to work for the Bechtel Corporation. After getting his architectural license in 1955, he became a partner in Cox, Hagman & Meyer, and a principal with Hagman & Meyer in 1957 and Kurt Meyer & Associates in 1963. He designed many bank buildings for Bart Lytton and Mark Taper in the 1960s, along with the Japanese Village Plaza in Little Tokyo. After retiring in 1992, Meyer and his wife traveled through the Himalayas, documenting Nepalese culture in photographs and books. He was chairman of the board for the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arch) from 1986 to 1992. He was elected a fellow of the AIA in 1973 and, more surprisingly, of the Explorers’ Club in 1990. (To become an Explorers’ Club fellow, a person must make documented contributions to scientific knowledge through field expeditions. Other fellows included Robert Peary, Buzz Aldrin, and Jacques Cousteau.)

[2] Adele Faulkner Quinn was the first woman to be named a fellow by the American Society of Interior Designers. She doesn’t appear to have been related to William.

[3] Lytton was to be a major donor for the construction of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with a building to be named for him. In 1966, Lytton withdrew his donation when he disagreed with LACMA’s decision to use international rather than local architects. Also in 1966, Lytton tried to save the Irving Gill?designed Dodge House in West Hollywood. He hired Kurt Meyer to design a condo building while preserving the house. Unfortunately, at this time Lytton Saving’s had its financial problems and he had to abandon his plan. The 1970 demolition of the Dodge House triggered West Hollywood’s preservationist movement.

[4] In his thorough history of the Chateau Marmont, The Castle on Sunset, Shawn Levy relates only one other celebrity death at the hotel. In 2004, fashion photographer Helmut Newton drove his car out of the underground parking garage and crashed directly into a concrete wall across the street from the hotel. It was later determined that the 83-year-old Newton had suffered a heart attack and lost control of the car.

[5] I, as well apparently as everyone who has made a Vietnam War documentary, assumed “For What It’s Worth” is about antiwar or civil rights protestors. That it’s about curfew protestors doesn’t diminish its significance. While the LAPD and County Sheriff’s officers had been using excessive violence against antiwar or civil rights protestors, the Sunset Strip events were the first blatant violent reactions by the conservative authorities and their police forces against the youth generation.

[6] This was in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, so of course the men wore masks.

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