Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.

Sunset Boulevard is a storied corridor where Hollywood's entertainment character meets an early metropolitan highway, hillside neighborhoods, music history and a serpentine route extending from Central Los Angeles across the Santa Monica Mountains toward the Pacific.

Running through Hollywood between Silver Lake and Beverly Hills, the metropolitan corridor follows an irregular westward course from the neighborhoods northwest of Downtown through Echo Park, Silver Lake, East Hollywood and the heart of Hollywood before bending around the southern foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Eastern stretches thread through densely built hills where the roadway curves between rising residential streets, closely spaced storefronts and abrupt changes in elevation, retaining a scale shaped before the dominance of wide arterial engineering. Traveling west through Hollywood brings longer commercial blocks, theaters, hotels, office buildings and increasingly substantial intersections into succession before the roadway enters the steeper terrain approaching the county line. The western reaches exchange Hollywood's continuous commercial frontage for wooded slopes, deep residential setbacks and long curves that follow the mountain contours through Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. The result is a corridor whose winding alignment, dramatic topographic changes, shifting development scale and extraordinary urban reach compress the geography of central and western Los Angeles into a single continuous street.

What you should know about Sunset Boulevard.

Sunset Boulevard is best known for evolving from disconnected local roads and a railway alignment into one of Los Angeles's earliest major cross-city transportation corridors. The idea of a boulevard extending west from Los Angeles emerged during the real-estate boom of the 1880s, when several isolated sections appeared but the difficult hills between the city and Hollywood remained an obstacle. In 1892, property owners led by the Los Angeles and Pacific Railway and attorney George H. Smith petitioned Los Angeles to open a continuous road through Echo Park and Silver Lake, recognizing that improved transportation would increase access to undeveloped hillside property. City engineers mapped the route the following year along portions of the defunct Ostrich Farm Railway, and contractor Charles Stansbury began cutting the roadway through soft sandstone on April 18, 1903. The newly macadamized boulevard opened May 14, 1904 with a procession of automobiles, horse-drawn carriages and electric railway cars traveling between Los Angeles and the still-independent community of Hollywood. Electric tracks occupied the roadway, and the Pacific Electric Company constructed the Olive Street Substation in 1905 to support service between Downtown and Hollywood. The boulevard entered the twentieth century at the precise transition between rail-oriented suburban growth and the automobile, with both transportation systems physically sharing the new route.

Successive extensions turned that local connection into a metropolitan road reaching dramatically farther west. Sunset remained incomplete toward the Pacific after the 1904 opening, and work beginning in 1921 pushed the boulevard west from the Sullivan Canyon area across the former Rancho Boca de Santa Monica landscape. The final connection to the ocean arrived in 1934 when the sinuous western roadway then called Beverly Boulevard became part of Sunset, completing the coastward route envisioned decades earlier. A different national distinction followed in 1936, when the western terminus of U.S. Route 66 moved from Downtown to Santa Monica and the highway used Sunset Boulevard as part of its new thirteen-mile extension toward the coast. Entertainment commerce simultaneously transformed the section west of Hollywood: Sunset Plaza opened in 1924, Club Seville preceded Ciro's during the 1930s and successive nightclubs made the county-controlled Sunset Strip a center of nightlife and popular music. Hollywood itself had already grown around the film industry after Nestor Studios opened at Sunset and Gower in 1911, with fifteen companies filming in the surrounding district within months and weekly local film payroll reaching $2 million by 1926. Sunset had consequently accumulated several identities across one alignment: interurban railway corridor, automobile boulevard, federal highway, studio district and entertainment artery.

How to fold Sunset Boulevard into your trip.

Sunset Boulevard works as the anchor for a West Los Angeles sequence connecting a pioneering Beverly Hills estate with an oil fortune translated into an immense architectural commission and a Hollywood entertainer's working ranch above the Pacific.

Begin at Virginia Robinson Gardens, created by Harry and Virginia Robinson at a moment when Beverly Hills remained scarcely developed. The couple encountered the property in January 1911 after searching for the new Los Angeles Country Club, and Harry purchased the five-acre parcel from the Rodeo Land & Water Company the following morning for $7,500. Virginia's father, architect Nathaniel Dryden, designed the residence, and the Robinsons moved in that year before turning surrounding chaparral hillsides into an elaborate horticultural estate. Their international travels supplied inspiration for Mediterranean fountains, water features and garden furnishings as the property developed into seven distinct garden areas, including an Italian terrace, palm forest, rose gardens and the pool terrace. The estate became one of the earliest major residences in Beverly Hills and preserves the domestic landscape created by the family behind Robinson's department stores during the city's formative years. Continue to Greystone Mansion & Gardens: The Doheny Estate, where the wealth generated by Edward L. Doheny's petroleum empire produced one of Southern California's largest private residences. Doheny gave his son Ned a 12.58-acre hillside parcel as a wedding gift in 1926, and construction began the following February under architect Gordon B. Kaufmann and landscape architect Paul G. Thiene. Ned, Lucy and their five children moved into Greystone in September 1928; the complete estate cost $3,166,578.12, with the mansion itself accounting for $1,238,378.76. Kaufmann created a 46,054-square-foot residence of reinforced concrete faced with Indiana limestone and covered by Welsh slate, incorporating 55 livable rooms and five chimneys individually conceived by different artists. Ned was found shot inside the house in February 1929. The City of Beverly Hills acquired the surviving property in 1965, dedicated it as a public park in 1971 and secured National Register recognition in 1976. Conclude at Will Rogers State Historic Park, where a performer who became one of America's most prominent entertainers constructed a working ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains. Alphonzo Bell sold Rogers the first 200 acres in 1922, when the steep property remained largely undeveloped, and Rogers initially envisioned a modest weekend retreat. The estate grew through the 1920s as Rogers developed a ranch house, stable, riding facilities and a regulation polo field, eventually making the property his family's primary residence in 1928. At his death in 1935, the ranch house contained 31 rooms and stood within an estate devoted extensively to horses, roping and polo, pursuits that remained central to Rogers even as his career expanded from vaudeville into newspapers, radio and motion pictures. Betty Rogers arranged for the 186-acre core to pass to California after her death in 1944, preserving the property as a state historic park. The progression moves from the Robinsons' transformation of undeveloped Beverly Hills hillsides through the architectural scale of Doheny petroleum wealth and culminates in Rogers's working mountain ranch, tracing three forms of private estate building that accompanied Los Angeles's westward expansion during the early twentieth century.

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