Hollywood Dell, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Hollywood Dell in Los Angeles, California.

Hollywood Dell is a secluded enclave where the Hollywood Hills' canyon character meets steep residential streets, Spanish Colonial Revival houses and a sheltered topography that drew spiritual communities and film-industry residents into the Lower Santa Monica Mountains.

Positioned between Hollywood Heights, Beachwood Canyon, and Lake Hollywood Estates, the neighborhood occupies a sunken pocket of the eastern Hollywood Hills, where narrow streets descend from surrounding ridges before curling through small valleys enclosed by densely built slopes. Spanish Colonial Revival houses, Mediterranean villas, hillside cottages and later modern residences climb sharply above retaining walls and terraced gardens, producing an unusually compressed relationship between architecture and terrain. Holly Drive supplies the primary encounter through the interior, bending beneath rising residential streets as short side roads disappear into folds of the hills and houses stack vertically above the roadway. Ivarene Avenue creates a secondary passage through steeper terrain, where closely spaced hillside lots and abrupt elevation changes intensify the sense of enclosure created by the surrounding ridges. The result is a neighborhood whose recessed geography and architectural concentration preserve a distinctly intimate chapter of Hollywood Hills development within a few blocks of Central Hollywood.

What you should know about Hollywood Dell.

Hollywood Dell is best known for containing the surviving core of Krotona, the Theosophical colony that made the Lower Hollywood Hills an important American center of alternative religion during the years immediately preceding Hollywood's ascent as a motion-picture capital. Members of the Theosophical Society began moving onto the hillside in 1912, and architect Arthur S. Heineman prepared an ambitious campus concept combining spiritual, educational and residential functions across the terrain. Frank Mead and Richard Requa designed Krotona Court that year as a Spanish Colonial Revival composition organized around a landscaped courtyard, creating one of the colony's earliest major buildings. Arthur and Alfred Heineman followed in 1914 with the Grand Temple of the Rosy Cross, a rare Moorish Revival structure built for larger gatherings and ceremonial use. Krotona grew into the American headquarters of the Theosophical Society, drawing a community that numbered 300 by the late 1910s and connecting Hollywood with an international movement associated with Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Gardens, residences and institutional buildings occupied the hillside as the colony developed into a concentrated spiritual settlement above the expanding town below. Internal changes within the movement eventually redirected its center away from Hollywood, and the Theosophical community transferred its principal California activities to Ojai during the 1920s. Krotona Court and the Grand Temple entered residential use by 1926, leaving their architecture embedded within the neighborhood that subsequently grew around them. Their survival gives Hollywood Dell a cultural history predating the residential boom that filled its hillsides and ties the district to the religious experimentation that flourished in early twentieth-century Southern California.

Motion-picture prosperity brought another population into the surrounding slopes as Hollywood's studios expanded during the 1920s and houses appeared across streets overlooking the growing entertainment district. Stage actor Orville Caldwell commissioned architect Hilding G. Brelin to design a seven-room residence on Ivarene Avenue in 1922, two years after Caldwell arrived in Hollywood. A Spanish-style house completed in 1923 later became home to director King Vidor and actress Helen Hayes, retaining coved ceilings, arched openings, original glass and a Batchelder tile fireplace from its early construction. Wallace Beery commissioned Reed & Company in 1924 for a two-story Mediterranean residence on Pilgrimage Trail, and the firm became associated with some of the substantial Italianate and Mediterranean houses appearing around La Granada and San Marco drives. Carl Jules Weyl designed another Spanish residence on Vista Del Mar Avenue in 1926 before his later career as a Warner Bros. art director, where his work included Casablanca. Actress Lillian Rich and her husband Leo Nicholson purchased that house during Rich's silent-film career, followed by later occupants connected with screenwriting and literature. The concentration continued beyond the silent era: architect Edward H. Fickett designed a post-and-beam residence on Rinconia Drive in 1959 that Ava Gardner later occupied, extending Hollywood Dell's relationship with entertainment figures into midcentury architecture. Successive generations of actors, directors, writers and designers consequently left the neighborhood with a residential fabric spanning the Spanish and Mediterranean houses of early Hollywood through the glassier hillside modernism of the postwar period.

How to fold Hollywood Dell into your trip.

Hollywood Dell works as the anchor for an outing connecting an outdoor amphitheater shaped through a century of architectural experimentation, a religious theater rebuilt after wildfire and Hollywood's oldest surviving motion-picture production building.

Begin at Hollywood Bowl, whose site originated as Daisy Dell before arts advocates developed the natural amphitheater into an outdoor performance venue and launched its first Los Angeles Philharmonic season in 1922. The Bowl became an architectural laboratory almost immediately: Lloyd Wright designed an angular pyramidal shell in 1927, replaced it in 1928 with nine adjustable wooden panels whose positions altered the acoustic enclosure, and Allied Architects erected a $50,000 semicircular shell in 1929 that endured for 74 years. The long-running venue subsequently hosted performers spanning Billie Holiday, The Beatles and generations of Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians, turning the natural canyon into one of Southern California's principal performance sites. Continue to The Ford, where Christine Wetherill Stevenson and Chauncey D. Clark acquired hillside ground for Stevenson's The Pilgrimage Play and opened a wooden amphitheater in 1920. A brush fire destroyed that structure in 1929, and architect William Lee Woollett designed its poured-concrete successor around forms intended to recall ancient Jerusalem; the rebuilt theater opened in 1931. Los Angeles County received the property in 1941, annual productions of The Pilgrimage Play ended in 1964 after litigation over the religious presentation and the venue received the John Anson Ford name in 1976 in honor of the county supervisor and arts advocate. Conclude at Hollywood Heritage Museum, housed inside the Lasky-DeMille Barn, the surviving production building tied directly to the formative years of Hollywood filmmaking. The 1901 structure became the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company's production facility in 1913 after Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille came west to make The Squaw Man, the first full-length feature produced in Hollywood. Famous Players and Lasky combined in 1916, and their corporate lineage subsequently developed into Paramount Pictures. Hollywood Heritage, founded in 1980 by Frances Offenhauser, Christy Johnson McAvoy, Marian Gibbons and Susan Peterson St. Francis, rescued the threatened barn and opened its museum there in 1985; the building later entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. The progression moves from a natural canyon transformed through successive acoustic designs through a religious amphitheater rebuilt in concrete and culminates inside the surviving barn where DeMille and Lasky helped launch Hollywood feature filmmaking, connecting performance, architecture and cinema across the hills surrounding Hollywood Dell.

MAKE IT REAL