Parish History: 2004 Centennial Edition
Blessed Sacrament Parish History Book
Drouet Hall
Marie and Louis Drouet built a two-story building at the corner of Sunset and Cahuenga that doubled as both the family home and store front space for Louis' harness and saddle shop. "It had seven large rooms for living quarters, with a side entrance on the first floor," Marie's daughter Consuelo would later recall. "On the second floor they created a large hall that they rented out for social occasions. It was known as Drouet Hall." Being the only large meeting space in Hollywood, the Hall was in constant demand, hosting a variety of social events including graduation exercises, wedding receptions and dances.
Despite caring for a large home and raising four children, Marie found time to be very active in the community. According to Consuela, her mother "went about on horseback to visit the sick and aged, taking them groceries, and medicine, providing a baby layette for a newborn child without one. I remembering going with her at Christmas time to deliver packages and toys to the poor. Each child at home received a toy."
Although Hollywood had thriving Southern Methodist, Episcopal, and Methodist churches, at the time there was no Catholic church. Hollywood had developed with a decidedly Protestant population because that had been part of Harvey Wilcox's vision. A devout man, he had encouraged many of his fellow Protestant church-goers to settle in the area in hopes it would become a city founded on and grounded in religious principles.
With no church of their own, Catholics who lived in Hollywood had to travel either to St. Vibiana's Cathedral or Our Lady Queen of the Angels, also called La Placita, in central Los Angeles to attend mass. Feeling her community was being underserved, Marie took it upon herself to do an unofficial census of the Catholic population of Hollywood. When she finished, Consuelo said her mother was dismayed "to see how many children had not made their First Communion, or been Confirmed, and there were many babies not yet baptized."
Mrs. Drouet was energized into action and went to meet with Bishop George Montgomery in Los Angeles. She urged him to assign a priest to Hollywood and offered the use of Drouet Hall; although it wasn't a church, it was certainly big enough to hold a mass. The Bishop agreed to send a priest once a month and accepted her offer to use the Hall. On January 18, 1903, Bishop Montgomery himself celebrated the first mass at Drouet Hall for Hollywood's twenty-four Catholic families, using Marie's baby grand piano as the altar.
As the community grew, so did the demand for mass which soon was being celebrated once a week. After a while, it was obvious that Drouet Hall couldn't be a temporary church forever and that Hollywood Catholics needed a proper place of worship. When Marie Drouet donated two lots on Seward Street to the diocese for a church to be built, Bishop Thomas J. Conaty appointed Fr. Daniel W. Murphy, C.M., on January 12, 1904, as the first pastor of the new parish and directed him to oversee construction of the first Blessed Sacrament Church.
Notes: Hollywood's Brief Flirtation with Cityhood In 1903, the same year that Marie Drouet convinced Bishop Conaty that Hollywood needed its own priest, the residents voted to incorporate Hollywood as an independent city. But its bid for independence literally dried up six years later. Hollywood's chronic lack of water forced the city fathers to annex in 1910 to water-rich Los Angeles.
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