Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles

Laurel Canyon
—  Neighborhood of Los Angeles  —
Laurel Canyon
Location within Los Angeles/San Fernando Valley
Coordinates:
Country U.S.A
State California
County Los Angeles
City Los Angeles
Time zone PST (UTC-8)
 • Summer (DST) PDT (UTC-7)

Laurel Canyon is a canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. It was first developed in the 1910s, and became a part of the city of Los Angeles in 1923 (prior to then, it was an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County).[1]

Much like Topanga Canyon, community life is focused on its central thoroughfare, Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Unlike other nearby canyon neighborhoods, Laurel Canyon has houses lining one side of the main street most of the way up to Mulholland Drive. There are many side roads that branch off the main canyon, but most of them are not through streets, reinforcing the self-contained nature of the neighborhood. Some of the main side streets are Mount Olympus, Kirkwood, Wonderland, Willow Glen, and Lookout Mountain Avenue. The zip code for a portion of the neighborhood is 90046.

Laurel Canyon is an important transit corridor between West Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, specifically Studio City. The division between the two can roughly be defined by the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. In early 2005, the first section of the road on the Hollywood side was partially washed away in a heavy rainstorm, and traffic was redirected to a normally quiet residential side street.

Contents

History

The Laurel Canyon area was inhabited by the local Tongva tribe of Native Californians before the arrival of the Spanish. A spring-fed stream that flowed year round provided water. It was that water that attracted Mexican ranchers who established sheep grazing on the hillsides in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the Mexican government was ejected, the area caught the attention of Anglo settlers interested in water rights. Around the turn of the 20th century, the area was subdivided and marketed as mountain vacation properties.

Between 1912 and 1918, a trackless electric trolley ran up the canyon from Sunset Boulevard to the base of Lookout Mountain Road where a road house served visitors. Travel to the newly subdivided lots and cabins further up the canyon was at first made on foot or by mule. As the roads were improved access was possible by automobile.[1]

Around 1920, a local developer built the Lookout Mountain Inn at the summit of Lookout Mountain and Sunset Plaza roads, which burned just a few years after opening.

Among the famous places in Laurel Canyon are the log cabin house once owned by silent film star Tom Mix that later became home to the Zappa clan (1), and another (directly across the street) that magician Harry Houdini may have lived in.

Laurel Canyon found itself a nexus of counterculture activity and attitudes in the 1960s, becoming famous as home to many of L.A.'s rock musicians, such as Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison of The Doors, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Love. Joni Mitchell, living in the home in the Canyon that was immortalized in the song, "Our House", written by her then-lover Graham Nash, would use the area and its denizens as inspiration for her third album, Ladies of the Canyon. That bohemian spirit endures today, and residents gather annually for a group photograph at the country market.

Laurel Canyon has been mentioned in many films and novels of Los Angeles, including Laurel Canyon written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko in 2002, and is the subject of a number of books (see Further reading, below).

Laurel Canyon is mentioned in the 2007 song White Jumpsuit, by Mary Edwards.

Laurel Canyon was also featured in the 2003 film Wonderland, which chronicled the 1981 Wonderland Murders that occurred at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in the Canyon, involving porn star John C. Holmes and reputed gangster Eddie Nash. The Wonderland Massacre has been described as one of the bloodiest mass murders in California history.

Literary references

In his mathematical fantasy short story "—And He Built a Crooked House—" author Robert A. Heinlein characterized Laurel Canyon (in the opinion of Hollywood residents) as:

"— where we keep the violent cases." The Canyonites — the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slaphappy unfinished houses — regard with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live.

Heinlein gives the address of his protagonist in that story as 8775 Lookout Mountain Avenue, "across the street from the Hermit — the original Hermit of Hollywood" (i.e., himself).

In real life, during the early 1940s Heinlein's home on Lookout Mountain Avenue was the meeting place of the Mañana Literary Society, an informal but regular gathering of science fiction and fantasy authors. Considerable of Anthony Boucher's mystery novel Rocket to the Morgue (1942) revolves around such an SF writers' group, the characters being thinly disguised representations of the members who had gathered in the Heinlein house in 1940 and 1941, and scenes in the novel are thereby set in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood.

Notable residents

Deaths in Laurel Canyon

Notes

2. Frank Zappa: the clean-living hellraiser interview with Pauline Butcher, Zappa's live-in secretary 28 September 2011, online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15082153

  1. ^ "Laurel Canyon" (1 ed.). 1997.  by Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, published by the University of California Press, Los Angeles.

Further reading

External links

Topics
Government
Regions
Downtown • Eastside/Northeast • Harbor Area • Greater Hollywood • Westlake & Silver Lake/Los Feliz • San Fernando and Crescenta Valleys • South Los Angeles • Westside • Wilshire
Districts and
neighborhoods
Points of
interest
See also
Downtown · Eastside/Northeast · Harbor Area · Greater Hollywood · Westlake/Silver Lake/Los Feliz · San Fernando and Crescenta Valleys · South Los Angeles · Westside · Wilshire