We had a bit of a shortened weekend, as I was at a film preservation conference at work all day Friday and all day Saturday, but we made the most of it, with a nice dinner out at Barefoot Restaurant on Saturday night and an afternoon walk in Beachwood Canyon on Sunday. And I thought we’d encountered a lot of staircases on our previous walks… This two-mile walk had six stone staircases to tackle, all built when Hollywoodland, as the neighborhood was known, was being laid out. Up and down we went, finding ourselves returning to streets we thought were somewhere else altogether, getting disoriented and marveling at the views of downtown, Hollywood, and the Lake Hollywood reservoir, which we’d somehow never seen before.



We saw a lot of huge, imposing houses, some of them dating to the ’20s and ’30s when the development started, but many more of them rebuilt monstrosities that took up every square foot of the sloping lots they were built on. It was a fun walk, though, and good exercise.



At the end of the walk, we stopped at the Beachwood Market, a great independent grocery store in the neighborhood that has obviously been there a long time, and reminded me of Family Market down the street from us in downtown Anchorage. They had most everything you’d need, just fewer of each item. The architecture, the layout, and the lighting looked like they hadn’t changed significantly in years. On the wall above the produce section was a blown-up still from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as the market and the street in front of it were the scene of the iconic shot in which a crowd of people flees down the street. Everywhere you turn, especially under the shadow of the Hollywood sign (and thanks, Huell, for that great episode on the sign that we watched last night), there’s some movie history.

A set of photos from the walk.