Why you should experience Mount Lee in Los Angeles, California.
Mount Lee is a commanding Hollywood Hills peak where Griffith Park's rugged mountain terrain meets pioneering television history, filmmaking ambition and the colossal hillside lettering that fixed this ridgeline in Los Angeles culture.
Set above Mount Lee Drive near Mulholland Highway and just steps from the Hollywood Sign, the 1,708-foot peak rises along Griffith Park's western ridge between the Los Angeles Basin and San Fernando Valley. Its steep southern face carries the nine white letters beneath a broad summit, with Cahuenga Peak continuing the ridgeline west and chaparral-covered slopes dropping sharply toward Beachwood Canyon. The ascent brings the mountain into focus through switchbacks and exposed ridges that progressively open the basin below, shifting attention from the famous southern face toward the geography surrounding it. Reaching the upper ridge reverses the familiar city view, placing the Hollywood Sign below the summit as Downtown, the San Fernando Valley and successive folds of the Santa Monica Mountains spread across opposite sides of the crest. The result is a mountain whose topography turns one of Los Angeles' most familiar silhouettes inside out, revealing a summit shaped by broadcasting, cinema and private ambition across nearly a century.
What you should know about Mount Lee.
Mount Lee is best known for carrying the name of Don Lee, the automobile entrepreneur and broadcaster whose television venture transformed the summit into an important site in the development of West Coast broadcasting. Lee held California rights for Cadillac automobiles before expanding into radio through KHJ and other stations, then committed part of his radio profits to experimental television as the medium remained technologically uncertain. W6XAO began broadcasting in December 1931 near Gardena and moved by 1932 to Lee's Cadillac building at Seventh and Bixel in Downtown, where the station transmitted television coverage of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and aired Vine Street, an early serial drama created for television. Don Lee died in 1934, leaving his son Thomas S. Lee in control of the broadcasting operation during its next technical chapter. Line-of-sight transmission restricted reception across the San Fernando Valley, pushing the Lee organization toward higher ground. The Don Lee Network purchased 20 acres behind the Hollywood Sign in 1938 and completed a studio-transmitter complex on the summit the following year. Its 300-foot tower transmitted from more than 2,000 feet above sea level and ranked as the world's highest-elevation television transmission tower at completion. A swimming pool and outdoor production areas joined the studio, allowing the mountaintop facility to function as a production site as well as a transmitter. W6XAO relayed the 1940 Tournament of Roses Parade through an elaborate radio link to the summit for the first live remote television broadcast on the West Coast, and by 1941 the station was transmitting close to two hours of programming per day. Postwar broadcasters found Mount Wilson more effective for metropolitan transmission, shifting television infrastructure away from Mount Lee after the summit had already helped move Los Angeles television from downtown experimentation into high-elevation broadcasting.
Mack Sennett had radically altered the summit years before the Lee broadcasting operation arrived, pursuing a private estate whose unfinished earthwork permanently changed the mountain's profile. Sennett purchased 500 acres in 1918, including 304 acres later incorporated into Griffith Park, and reserved an 18-acre summit parcel for an elaborate residence designed by architect John L. DeLario. DeLario conceived a Mediterranean-influenced house with formal reception rooms, guest quarters, terraced Italian gardens, a conservatory, paddock and a 2,800-square-foot swimming pool with a sand beach. Reaching the crest required Sennett to grade roads toward the summit with mule-drawn equipment, and thick brush filled with rattlesnakes prompted the filmmaker to purchase 500 hogs to clear the danger around his costly Missouri mules. Steam shovels subsequently removed 69 feet from the mountain, flattening four acres of the rounded summit and carving the approach that connected the crest with Mulholland Highway. The house pad neared completion in 1926, and a scale model presented the proposed residence to the public, yet Sennett's financial collapse after the 1929 stock-market crash ended the project before the mansion rose. His bankruptcy in 1933 left the graded summit without its intended residence, preserving a physical alteration substantial enough to prepare the same crest for the broadcasting operation that followed later in the decade.
How to fold Mount Lee into your trip.
Mount Lee works as the anchor for a daytime route through Bronson Caves, Greek Theatre and Griffith Observatory, moving across Griffith Park through filmmaking, live performance and public astronomy without leaving the cultural terrain surrounding the Hollywood Hills.
Begin at Bronson Caves, where Union Rock Company opened a quarry in 1903 and left a group of artificial tunnels whose jagged openings became one of Griffith Park's most persistent screen locations after extraction ended. Film crews converted the former quarry into settings far removed from Los Angeles: John Ford used it during the climax of The Searchers in 1956, Invasion of the Body Snatchers placed part of its alien world there the same year, and the 1960s Batman television series turned its entrance into the Batcave. Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, Star Trek: Voyager and Wonder Woman extended that screen career across westerns, science fiction and television adventure, giving a discarded industrial site an unusually long second life through Hollywood production. Continue to Greek Theatre, conceived through Griffith J. Griffith's bequest for a performance venue within the park he had given Los Angeles in 1896. Architects Samuel Tilden Norton and Frederick Hastings Wallis worked with Frederick Heath on the open-air theater, whose canyon location was selected for its acoustic qualities before the cornerstone was laid in 1928 and the building was dedicated on September 25, 1930. A crowd of 4,000 attended the first major performance in June 1931. World War II changed the building's role when the theater accommodated military personnel, followed by a postwar return to performance and James A. Doolittle's 23-year tenure beginning in 1952. Alterations expanded its production capabilities across subsequent decades, carrying Griffith's early twentieth-century cultural bequest into a long-running Los Angeles concert stage. Conclude at Griffith Observatory, where Griffith J. Griffith's 1919 bequest developed into a public astronomy institution guided by scientists and architects with major connections to American observational science. George Ellery Hale directed the early scientific planning, Caltech physicist Edward Kurth prepared preliminary plans, Russell W. Porter advised on instruments, and John C. Austin and Frederick M. Ashley assumed architectural responsibility in 1931. The Griffith Trust purchased a 12-inch Zeiss refractor for $14,900, joined it with a Foucault Pendulum, solar coelostat and a 75-foot planetarium theater, and opened the Observatory in May 1935. Its planetarium later trained military pilots in celestial navigation during World War II and Apollo astronauts during 1966 and 1967, extending Griffith's public astronomy project into two consequential periods of American flight. The progression moves from an abandoned quarry repeatedly converted into cinematic worlds through a canyon theater created for public performance into an observatory where architecture, astronomy and flight training converged, placing Mount Lee within a Griffith Park history shaped by image-making, performance and technological experimentation.
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