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They erected a huge sign on the slope of Mt. Lee, above the development, with the name of the development spelled out in huge letters and lit up with 4000 light bulbs. The sign was meant to be temporary, but it stayed on the mountain, and over the years it suffered from lack of maintenance and other misfortunes. In 1932 a despondent starlet named Peg Entwhistle leapt off the "H" to her death. A few years later, a drunk driver careened off the cliff above and destroyed the "H." In 1949 the sign - without the "Land" - became the property of the City of Los Angeles, but it continued to deteriorate. The first "O" crumpled, so it resembled a "U". The last "O" collapsed entirely. In 1978, rocker Alice Cooper started a campaign to restore it, which has kept the sign in shape today.
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If you drive up North Beachwood Drive from Franklin Avenue, the sign is centered over the roadway in your windshield.
Soon you come to two granite gateposts that span the sidewalks with curved archways. This is the entrance to Hollywoodland.
Nowadays, people tend to call the neighborhood Beachwood Canyon. Although it's home to many industry people and celebrities, it's not glamorous at all - it's quaint and kind of quiet and neighborly. To the left of the gates a small complex holds a market, cleaners, and coffee shop. We stopped in the coffee shop for lunch before taking walk number 34 from Charles Fleming's Book "Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles."
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The coffee shop is like a throwback to the 1940s - all knotty pine woodwork, colonial-style furnishings, striped wallpaper and antique decor like old stoves, butter churns, vintage Coca-cola trays, and copper pans. The counter is set with low vinyl swivel stools, like a movie malt shop.
Inside, the cozy wooden booths were occupied with customers - impossibly skinny young women in tight jeans, young men with spiky hair-styles discussing club venues for their bands, families with small kids, and women in yoga-wear talking about screenplays. We had lunch - a cup of soup and half sandwich for me, a burger for [The Man I Love] before starting our walk.
Across the way is the Hollywoodland Realty office, a gabelled half-timber Tudor cottage. Beside it is an apartment court decorated like a Spanish hacienda. We started walking up North Beachwood Drive from this corner, and found our first set of steps.
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At the top, we walked around a road that curved beneath a looming hill crowned by this extraordinary juxtaposition of architectural styles:
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And here's the French house, its fanciful charms well hidden from the street.
The streets were remarkably quiet. A few cars - Range Rovers and Mercedes predominated - navigated the hairpin curves, but we saw no other walkers, no people in the front yards, and very little activity going on, even though the houses were decorated for Halloween. It was startling, then when we saw, perhaps fifty yards away, a coyote strolling boldly up a branching street in broad daylight. It was a reminder how high in the hills these houses are, and how close to the park and mountain wilderness.
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On the hill above the road, a pink asymmetrical '80s structure was perched next door to another castle, this one faced with irregular fieldstone.
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Beyond this, a mustard-colored Spanish house with lovely leaded-glass picture windows revealed a gilt grand piano in the parlor. We admired it for a while until a young man wearing nothing but a bright orange pair of Speedos stepped out to sweep the doorstep, and, embarrassed, we kept walking.
Beyond his home - which must have an enviable view of the Hollywood sign - another flight of steps - 178 of them - led down all the way to Beachwood Drive.
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We crossed Beachwood, and just off the drive at Woodshire Drive, we found the next set of stairs to carry us up the west side of the canyon.
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We continued around Belden Drive, and then up another flight of stairs to Durand Drive. Our guide urged us to take a short detour up Durand for a peek at a fabulous estate surrounded by massive granite walls.
This is Wolf's Lair - a 3 acre compound built by L. Milton Wolf, one of the real estate founders, in 1923. It's said that its guesthouse operated as a speakeasy during Prohibition, and that it included a secret hideaway apartment in the gatehouse with a South Seas style tiki bar, the better to seduce young starlets. It was recently sold to a famous musician for $3.5 million - quite a steal from its before-crisis listing of $7.9.
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It was shrouded in scaffolding when we arrived, so I couldn't get any good photos, but here's a location site that has some pictures.
At the height of Durand, at the entry to the Lair, the road turns and a footpath drops away through undeveloped wilderness, leading down to the shores of Hollywood Lake reservoir below, sparkling like an unexpected jewel.
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You can read blogger Robert Guerrero's account of his hike through Beachwood Canyon here - his group even took the detour down to the lake! He's further along than we are, covering the climbs in the book.