Big Ed's and The Golden Horn

 

Attempted recreation of the Big Ed's post where all the links to Kinja are dead. This was the bar in Culver City which became The Golden Horn in Barfly (1987). 

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-05-11-we-5824-story.html

Big Ed’s bar, once a meeting place for screen stars, gamblers and prostitutes in the 1940s and 1950s, will probably be demolished next year so Culver City officials can redevelop a blighted block in the downtown area.

Some say that stars like Gordon MacCrea and Joan Crawford from the old RKO Studios across the street stopped by on occasion in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. And legend has it that a tunnel ran under Main Street to the Culver Hotel, where patrons went for trysts.

 Big Ed’s, originally built in 1927 as a drug store, was converted to a restaurant and bar in 1944 and became one of about eight cocktail lounges in Culver City within a block of RKO (now Laird International Studios).

“It was a fairly loose town (then),” said former City Councilman A. Ronald Perkins, who patrolled the bar as a Culver City policeman in the early ‘50s.

“It appeared to be nothing but gas stations and bars,” he said. “And it was pretty much who you knew and who you didn’t know that made the difference. There was considerable bookmaking in the town. The movie industry didn’t have too good of a reputation. The stars and studios kind of ran Culver City for years.”

 For Big Ed Schwartz the bar’s freewheeling past is long gone.

Schwartz, dressed in a black cowboy outfit, peered out of the swinging doors to his bar one lazy afternoon.

Behind him, a half-dozen middle-aged customers sat hunched over their drinks in silence, except for an occasional hoarse laugh or cough. Tex Ritter’s country classic “Rye Whiskey” played on the juke box. Sporting a white goatee, string tie, gold necklace and bifocals, Schwartz, 62, pondered his future as a bar owner.