Aimee arrived last night (minus her bag, unfortunately, which didn’t arrive until it was delivered by an American Airlines employee this morning) and we were eager to get back into the swing of our weekly walks and hikes. We headed out to the Hollywood Bowl for one of the few remaining walks in Walking L.A., and parked on Camrose near the gate where we enter the Hollywood Bowl grounds for our pre-show picnics. We walked up some windy streets, past towering Mediterranean-style homes, and after taking another one of L.A.’s hundreds of staircases, we came upon a sight: the High Tower, one of Hollywood’s unique neighborhood features. Having just seen Altman’s The Long Goodbye not too long ago at the Silent Movie Theater (and again on DVD to catch its great Elliott Gould in a photobooth sequence), I was excited to see the elaborate elevator tower in person.
One of the four homes serviced by the elevator is apparently for sale, though word is you pay $50,000 for a key to the elevator, and the money goes towards maintenance. The homes, designed by Carl Kay between 1935 and 1956, according to a plaque, are intriguing, but it’s difficult to get a sense of what they really look like as you’re either looking at them from below, shrouded in trees, or you’re standing right in front of them, with nowhere to go for perspective.
The walk back down was nice, along narrow paths ans stairs, past the back yards of old houses stacked up on the hillside, some old and in disrepair, some obviously new and fenced off with high walls of bamboo.
I had hoped to tack on a trip to the Hollywood Bowl Museum at the end of our walk around the High Tower; sadly, their website hasn’t been updated to list their current hours, so it wasn’t open at 10am on Saturdays as I had thought. Next time.
