Crossroads of the World has been called America's first outdoor shopping mall. Located on Sunset Boulevard and Las Palmas in Los Angeles, the mall features a central building designed to resemble an ocean liner surrounded by a small village of cottage-style bungalows. It was designed by Robert V. Derrah and built in 1936.
Once a busy shopping center, the Crossroads now hosts private offices, primarily for the entertainment industry. It has been used for location shooting in many films, including L.A. Confidential and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, in TV shows including Dragnet and Remington Steele, and in commercials by McDonald's, Ford and Mattel. A reproduction of Crossroads' iconic tower and spinning globe can be seen just inside the entrance to Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World in Florida.
Today, Crossroads is the creative home of a variety of music publishers and producers, television and film script writers, film and recording companies, novelists, costume designers, publicists and casting agencies.
Famous quotes containing the words the world, crossroads of, crossroads and/or world:
“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is “Who in the world am I?” Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“...I’m thirteen years old, and I think I’m at the crossroads of my life. I’ve got to make good between now and the time I’m twenty, and I have only seven years to do it in. Besides, I’m the father of my family and I’ve got to earn all the money I can.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas’ mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,—mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)