In 1996, Kerry Morrison became executive director of the Hollywood Entertainment District, which has led the efforts to clean up and modernize Hollywood as a community. Under her leadership, the BID began providing much-needed additional security and maintenance for the neighborhood. Hollywood’s landscape is now filled with such hot spots as the Hollywood & Highland retail development, the Kodak Theater, and numerous high-end restaurants and nightclubs. Additionally, many commercial buildings have been turned into condo towers, adding a residential component to the area. Morrison plans to continue to shepherd Hollywood’s renaissance. Last month, Hollywood property owners voted to renew and expand the business improvement district until 2018. New property assessments will fund a $3.4 million annual budget. Morrison met with the Business Journal at the Hollywood Entertainment District’s office in the 1920s-era Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine.

Question: How did you land your current position as the executive director of the Hollywood BID?

Answer: It was really serendipitous how I found out about the job. In fact, I always keep a copy of the job advertisement, which was in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 16, 1996 12 years ago. I had been working at the California Association of Realtors for 14 years, starting as local government strategist and moving up to vice president for public affairs. I had turned 40 that year, and I felt like it was time to move into something else.

Q: Why did you decide that you needed a new job?

A: The California Association of Realtors is a trade association, so I was in an office all the time dealing with Realtors. It’s a very large and politically active organization, and I had a lot of responsibility and had advanced to become a vice president. But I knew I wanted to get involved in the trenches of Los Angeles, and I think that motivation came from the riots in 1992.

Q: How did the riots affect you?

A: I was very much impacted by the civil unrest, and it just drove a stake in my heart. I was in this office job, working in a trade association and never dealing with people other then Realtors. Our office was right in the middle of one of the hot zones, near Wilshire and Vermont. To see the city in flames, and feel like I was disconnected with the underlying strife in Los Angeles, I came to realize that I needed to get into a job where I could be in the trenches, working with people and working on change.

Q: You have obviously been part of the change that has occurred in Hollywood. What do you remember about the area when you first became executive director of the BID in 1996?

A: The changes are mind-boggling. I remember my first day driving on Hollywood Boulevard. It was a cold, gray and rainy day in December. I looked around, and it was in horrible shape. Back then the subway was being tunneled under Hollywood Boulevard, which meant that it was under temporary decking and you were driving on wood. More than half of the stores were boarded up, closed or marginally operating, and there were transient people everywhere. It was scary, and it was like there was just a little bit of a pulse. The pulse was the Chinese theater, the Roosevelt Hotel and the Holiday Inn.

Q: Now Hollywood is booming with residential and commercial development, restaurants and retail. How did the growth happen?

A: Certainly the formation of the BID was critical to demonstrate to investors and potential developers that the property owners were not abandoning their community. They were willing to fund and govern a district that would essentially make Hollywood clean and safe, which are the underpinnings to any economic revitalization. And we all knew intuitively that the subway was going to be a great benefit to the community. Also, the agreement to develop what is now known as Hollywood and Highland I remember the day of that groundbreaking, it was a day of great hope because it represented the arrival of major investment. It was a milestone.

Q: The area is still growing. You can hear the construction noise outside of your office window.

A: I just love the noise; the noisier the better because it signals such progress and I just would not complain for a moment. I mean, who would have ever thought that we would have a W Hotel here? I love when people who haven’t been here for a while come, because then you see it through their eyes. They go, “Oh, my gosh.”

Q: What more is there to accomplish?

A: The goals are loftier now. The goals at the beginning were to make the area clean and safe. And we put private security on the street, cleaned the Walk of Fame and trimmed the trees. So we did our job and I think we have done our job excellently. Where are we going now? I never would have expected that Hollywood would transition into a residential neighborhood. Now we are going to do everything we can to promote a walkable, sustainable, vibrant and multipurpose district, which includes a very vital residential component.

Q: Did your time at the California Association of Realtors prepare you for your current role?

A: It was very people-intensive because it is a member-driven organization. I knew thousands of Realtors throughout the state, every personality, motivation and background. And when you are on staff of a trade association, you are in service to your members, you lead from behind, basically. That totally translated to this experience, because my responsibility now is to report to a board, property owners and professional people. I have to lead from behind with this group as well.

Q: What were the challenges of running a new sector within such a large organization like the Realtors association and raising two children?

A: My husband has always been amazingly supportive from Day One. You can’t have had the career that I’ve had and raise two children without having a husband who is amazingly supportive. We just shared a lot of the load. But there is a whole decade that’s a blur when the kids were young. I think that’s because there was probably not a lot of sleep involved. We used to live in the South Bay, and I’d be driving this huge commute every day.

Q: Where do you live now?

A: I live near Larchmont in Windsor Square and I love it because it is about six minutes away. We moved when I took the job in Hollywood after a year. The commute from Palos Verdes was just about bringing me to the end of my ropes.

Q: Since you don’t have a long commute, does this mean you get to spend more time with your children?

A: I have two kids: a son, Zach, who is 24 years old and he is working as a management trainee for Toyota, and a daughter, Mackenzie, who is 17. She just started her senior year at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks. We are beginning to work on college and I am preparing for the empty nest, which is actually kind of exciting. It’s like, hey, we have more money.

Q: What does your husband do?

A: He just retired. He was with Toyota for many years and retired as the dean of the University of Toyota, which he started. It’s all of Toyota’s education and training under one roof at their corporate headquarters in Torrance. Now, he is forming his own company to do consulting and training in management and leadership.

Q: How did you two meet?

A: It was when I was going to Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. That is where I started my undergraduate studies. He had graduated and moved back to California and I was just distraught. So, I transferred to Santa Clara, where he was, in 1976. Then we moved to Los Angeles in January 1978, so he could start graduate school at USC.

Q: What was your first job out of college?

A: My first job out of college was horrible, because you come out of college and you think you are ready to change the world. But, we had moved to Los Angeles, and I got a job as a secretary. I was 22 years old, and I was working for the human resources person. I was behind the door in a little closet that they had turned into the accountants’ recruiting room. My job was to work with this memory typewriter where I would type in the person’s name, and then I would push a button and their letter of acceptance or rejection would be made. I just did that all day long, and within about three weeks I knew I was going to go crazy so I started looking for another job.

Q: Where did you work next?

A: I went to work for the Harbor Regional Center for the developmentally disabled. It was kind of like a social work job, I was working as an outreach coordinator, which provided outreach services to the developmentally disabled. I learned a lot, but the turning point for me was that I started going to graduate school while I was working at the center. And then I heard about Coro.

Q: What is Coro?

A: It’s a public affairs leadership training program that takes 12 people each year and puts them through a nine-month rigorous internship process. In the course of nine months, you spend time with a labor union, a public campaign, a business organization, a media organization, a social service or non-profit organization, and a governmental agency. And at the end of those nine months, you have been exposed to viewpoints and people that you otherwise could go a whole career and not understand. Coro turned my whole career around, and when I left Coro, I knew that I wanted to work on housing policy.

Q: What is the best advice you have ever received?

A: I remember meeting Gretchen Dykstra, who used to be head of the Times Square BID. In 1997, I went to New York for the International Business Association conference and I was brand new to this whole world of BIDs. The Times Square BID was the icon of BIDs, so I called her up and I went to her office and said, “Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?” And she said, “Success has many mothers,” which to me connoted that all the people who have invested in this BID need to be acknowledged for their contribution to the upward spiral of the BID. And, she said, “Never forget your core mission.”

Q: What do you do apart from work?

A: I have a lot of things that I volunteer for, and my passion is to help on different community boards. I am on the Coro board, I am on the Hollywood Police Activities League Board and I am on the board of a homeless facility at Social Services at Blessed Sacrament Inc. I do a lot of volunteer work for my church, which gives me a great deal of pleasure. The church actually meets on Hollywood Boulevard, in the old Pacific Warner Theater here at Hollywood and Wilcox. I also like to knit. I just knit scarves and give them away, but I would knit at work if I could get away with it. I love to cook, and I read cooking magazines to calm down.

Kerry Morrison

Title: Executive Director

Organization: Hollywood Entertainment District

Born: 1955; Cleveland

Education: B.A., political science, Santa Clara University; master’s of public

administration, USC

Career Turning Point: Taking current job in 1996

Most Influential People: Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness; Michael Morrison, her husband

Personal: Lives in Windsor Square with her husband and teenage daughter,

Mackenzie; grown son lives in New Jersey

Hobbies: Cooking, knitting, volunteer work