Biography | Lionel Richie — The Forecourt Where He Wrote Hello in Wet Cement

The Walk of Fame star at 7018 Hollywood Boulevard is a terrazzo disc in the sidewalk.

This is the other Hollywood floor: the courtyard in front of the Chinese Theatre, where hands and feet go into wet cement.

On 7 March 2018 Lionel Richie put both into the slab at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard.

Jimmy Kimmel ran the ceremony. Samuel L. Jackson was in the crowd. Nicole, Sofia, and Miles Richie stood with him.

He wrote the word hello under the prints, the title that had already named a song, a park in Tuskegee, and half a career of punchlines.

Sid Grauman opened the theatre on 18 May 1927. Los Angeles listed it as Historic-Cultural Monument No. 55 in 1968. The naming-rights title TCL dates from 2013.

The courtyard is public during posted hours. The slab is one of hundreds. A visitor does not need a ticket to look down.

This pin is not the 2003 recording star farther along the same boulevard. It is not a current home. It is the cement he said would not be torn up the next time he went back to Alabama.

The theatre still shows films. The forecourt still takes weather.

Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, of the Chinese Theatre facade. A rights-clear photograph of the 2018 pouring itself was not available on Commons.