Harold Lloyd isn’t trying to stop time in this famous scene from the 1923 silent comedy, Safety Last. The reason he’s hanging from this clocktower involves a convoluted tale of trying to make good in the big city, impress the true love he left back in Smalltown and make a quick bundle by scaling a 12-story building so that the fictional DeVore Department Store on the ground floor can generate some buzz and ideally move the merch — all that Horatio Alger stuff that doesn’t really change quite as much as it stays the same. The minute hand Harold’s holding onto over Broadway belongs to what is now the Sparkle Factory, owned by our good friend Tarina Tarantino, and stands across the street from the future Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles. The marquee you see in Harry’s background is for the former Majestic Theatre. By all accounts, it lived up to its name until it was demolished in 1933. While it’s too bad the Majestic couldn’t make it to the present in its physical form, we’re glad Harold’s literal take on social climbing managed to stop the clock and preserve its memory forever.
