Nickodell was nestled between KHJ Channel 9 and Paramount Studios on Melrose, almost as if it were a part of the studio complex. I was lucky enough to go there (way past its heyday) in the 80’s to grab an ice cream at the counter on a trip to the Paramount lot. I even snapped a shot of the mighty neon sign atop the building. Traveling up Melrose nowadays, I can almost still see it through the fog of history.
In 1936, restauranteur Nick Slavich took over the joint originally called the Melrose Grotto, and made it his own, at some point re-dubbing it Nickodell, a mash-up his and his wife’s names. (He owned another Nickodell a bit north on Argyle, but that’s another story.) It was an eatery (and boozery), largely popular with studio types, dishing out old school American fare like steaks, baked potatoes, and beloved Caesar salads.
Nickodell closed in November of ’93 and was subsequently demolished by Paramount in ’94 to make way for a few more spots in their parking lot, leaving us only with a few matchbooks and fond memories.
I arrived in Hollywood with a camera just in time to take one of the last shots of Tiny Naylor’s Drive In at Sunset and La Brea before it was flattened. The roof resembled an aircraft carrier and I half expected fighter jets to arrive and save this place from the destructive forces of commerce and modernization. Hell, when I was a kid modern meant cool. Modern meant a roofline like Tiny Naylor’s, a jet-age version of a 1950’s malt-burger sci-fi flick drive in. But Tiny N’s version of modern was itself modernized into a bad stucco strip-mall. And today you can order franchised Crazy Chicken parts and never know that at this same site modern man & modern woman once drove up in modern finned American cars and sat beneath a flying rooftop eating 
stripeycity 