Mulholland Highway, Calabasas

Why you should experience Mulholland Highway in Los Angeles, California.

Mulholland Highway is a storied corridor where Calabasas' mountain character meets 1920s scenic-road engineering, rugged Santa Monica Mountains geography and an ambitious automobile route conceived to carry metropolitan Los Angeles toward the Pacific.

Running through Calabasas between Woodland Hills and the Las Virgenes Valley, the mountain corridor follows a winding line from the western San Fernando Valley into the Santa Monica Mountains before continuing through Cornell, Triunfo Canyon and the western range toward the Pacific coast. Tight bends climb and descend through sandstone ridges, oak woodland, chaparral and narrow canyon floors, replacing the rectilinear street pattern of the Valley with a roadway governed almost entirely by topography. Traveling west brings repeated changes in elevation and orientation as the pavement crosses Las Virgenes Road, Cornell Road, Kanan Road and Decker Canyon Road through long stretches with little roadside development. Mountain walls repeatedly close around the roadway before broader valleys and elevated sections reopen views across undeveloped slopes, producing sharp changes in scale across relatively short distances. The result is a corridor whose winding alignment, steep terrain, changing elevations and sustained passage through the western Santa Monica Mountains preserve the physical character of an automobile road conceived around landscape itself.

What you should know about Mulholland Highway.

Mulholland Highway is best known for emerging from one of Los Angeles' most ambitious 1920s road projects, a scenic automobile route engineered across the Santa Monica Mountains and named for Los Angeles water engineer William Mulholland. Planning began under the working name Skyline Drive, with engineer DeWitt Reaburn directing a project conceived during the extraordinary expansion of automobile ownership and hillside real-estate development after World War I. Construction began in 1923 at several points simultaneously, using steam shovels and blasting powder to cut a roadway across steep mountain terrain. Reaburn supervised a workforce approaching 500 men as the project advanced under a $1 million bond issue, and $885,000 had been spent by the end of 1924. The completed first section extended 24 miles from Cahuenga Pass to Calabasas and opened on December 27, 1924, with an air circus, rodeo, parade and dance forming part of the dedication festivities. William Mulholland christened the roadway with aqueduct water at the Calabasas ceremony, linking his name to an engineering project outside the water system that had made him one of the city's most prominent public figures. The opening transformed a mountainous route conceived as Skyline Drive into a highly publicized piece of metropolitan infrastructure, placing Calabasas at the western portal of a road promoted as a scenic connection between Los Angeles and its surrounding mountains.

The road's western development carried that original concept into a substantially different landscape beyond the first Calabasas terminus. The 1924 opening map showed the completed road ending at Calabasas with a planned extension continuing west toward the ocean, and later construction pushed the route through the Santa Monica Mountains until the highway reached Pacific Coast Highway near Leo Carrillo State Park. Calabasas itself entered a new development phase almost immediately: Samuel Cooper Jr. subdivided two tracts beside Mulholland Highway in 1924 that became known as the Highlands. William Lingenbrink, C. Henry Taylor and Cooper later created Park Moderne on former ranch property, organizing 174 lots along narrow curving streets as an artists' colony during the closing years of the decade. The highway name underwent another decisive change in 1939 when the heavily traveled eastern section became Mulholland Drive and the western mountain road retained Mulholland Highway. That division preserved two related road types under different names: an increasingly urbanized ridge road through Los Angeles and a western highway extending from Calabasas across the mountain interior to the Pacific.

How to fold Mulholland Highway into your trip.

Mulholland Highway works as the anchor for an outing connecting one of the San Fernando Valley's oldest surviving residences, a studio movie ranch that converted Santa Monica Mountains terrain into global screen geography and a state park assembled from ranches, country-club land and a major twentieth-century film property.

Begin at Leonis Adobe Museum, centered on an adobe structure dating to 1844 that Miguel and Espiritu Leonis occupied during the 1870s. Miguel Leonis enlarged the earlier building with adobe brick and reshaped it into a two-story California Monterey residence with a wraparound veranda and Victorian architectural elements, later enclosing portions of the veranda to create additional rooms on both floors. Leonis became one of the most powerful ranchers in the western San Fernando Valley, and the surviving house carries the domestic architecture of the ranching period into modern Calabasas. Family portraits remain in their original locations inside the residence, and restoration work recovered original decorative finishes beneath successive layers of paint. The property gives the outing a nineteenth-century starting point rooted in the ranch economy that preceded the automobile road and suburban communities surrounding it. Continue to Paramount Ranch, where Paramount Pictures acquired 2,700 acres in 1927 as a dedicated outdoor production property. The studio created an extensive working complex with headquarters infrastructure, set-construction and prop-storage buildings, livestock facilities and corrals, supporting 162 films between 1927 and 1943. Productions used the varied terrain to represent settings extending from the American West to colonial Massachusetts, ancient China, South America, Africa and Europe. William Hertz acquired the southeastern portion in 1953 and constructed a permanent Western Town from old studio prop sheds, bringing television productions including The Cisco Kid to the property. A racetrack followed in 1956 during the Paramount Sportsman's Ranch period, and surviving portions still cross the grounds. The National Park Service acquired part of the original property in 1980, returning filmmaking to a site subsequently used for Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, American Sniper and Westworld. Conclude at Malibu Creek State Park, where nineteenth-century homesteading, private recreation and Hollywood production successively reshaped the Las Virgenes Valley. Pedro Sepulveda constructed an adobe there in 1863, and Crags Country Club formed in 1910 on former homestead land, attracting affluent Los Angeles members who built weekend retreats including the Hunt House and John G. Mott's circa-1925 adobe. Twentieth Century Fox purchased the property in 1946 and developed Century Ranch as a production location used for more than 100 films and television programs, including Planet of the Apes, Roots and MASH. California acquired Century Ranch during the early 1970s and added adjoining properties that included White Oak Farm and Ronald Reagan's Yearling Row ranch before the state park opened in 1976. The progression moves from the Leonis family's nineteenth-century ranch residence through Paramount's industrial conversion of mountain terrain into cinematic geography and culminates in a state park assembled from homesteads, private recreation grounds and a major studio ranch, tracing successive uses of the Santa Monica Mountains surrounding Mulholland Highway.

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