Why you should experience Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, California.
Sunset Strip is a theatrical enclave where West Hollywood's entertainment character meets interwar nightlife, rock-and-roll history and a sinuous boulevard whose clubs, hotels and billboards became inseparable from Hollywood celebrity culture.
Positioned between Hollywood Hills West, Norma Triangle, and Beverly Hills, the neighborhood occupies a winding section of Sunset Boulevard beneath the southern Santa Monica Mountains, where commercial frontage follows the base of steep residential slopes before reaching the western gateway of West Hollywood. Hotels, low-rise commercial buildings, music venues and taller towers occupy irregular parcels along a roadway whose curves repeatedly compress and reopen sightlines beneath densely developed hillsides. Sunset Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through a continuous east-west corridor where entertainment properties stand directly against the street and successive bends reveal architecture from radically different periods within short distances. Sunset Plaza creates a secondary passage through terraced commercial blocks whose elevated storefronts and adjoining hillside streets strengthen the Strip's unusual relationship between boulevard commerce and residential terrain. The result is a neighborhood whose linear geography concentrates nearly a century of Los Angeles entertainment history along a remarkably short corridor shaped as strongly by its mountain edge as by the industries that made it famous.
What you should know about Sunset Strip.
Sunset Strip is best known for developing during the 1930s as an entertainment corridor outside Los Angeles city limits where Hollywood celebrities, studio executives and nightclub operators gathered along the route between Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Sunset Boulevard had been extended west through Hacienda Park in the opening twentieth century, and grading eventually carried the road to the Beverly Hills boundary, completing the section that became the Strip. Francis Montgomery developed Sunset Plaza during the 1920s on property inherited through his wife Gertrude Ponet, placing restaurants and retail spaces along the boulevard as automobile traffic increased. Russian Eagle operated there as a speakeasy patronized by film figures, and a 1928 explosion sent Charlie Chaplin, boxer Jack Dempsey, actress Estelle Taylor and actor Richard Dix scrambling from the building. Billy Wilkerson, publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, opened Cafe Trocadero in 1934 and helped shift the corridor toward celebrity-centered nightlife. The Clover Club had opened the previous year as an exclusive supper club concealing high-stakes gambling, joining several establishments that exploited the Strip's position in unincorporated Los Angeles County. The name itself emerged from that geography: “county strip” referred to unincorporated territory surrounded by municipal jurisdictions, and a 1935 entertainment column contained an early published use of “Sunset 'strip.'” A 1937 contest attempted to replace the term with “The Sunset Eighties,” referencing the boulevard's 8000-numbered blocks, yet the older nickname endured. The combination of county jurisdiction, automobile access, Hollywood wealth and concentrated nightlife transformed a former foothill roadway into a nationally recognized entertainment address before West Hollywood existed as a city.
Rock music recast the boulevard during the 1960s as young audiences converged on clubs positioned within a few blocks of one another. Whisky a Go Go opened in 1964 and helped popularize suspended cages for go-go dancers, then employed the Doors as a house band during the group's ascent. Musicians including Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix became fixtures within the surrounding club scene, and nearby Laurel Canyon housed numerous performers whose professional and social lives repeatedly crossed the Strip. Teenagers unable to enter many alcohol-serving venues gathered on the sidewalks, intensifying conflict with businesses, residents and authorities as enforcement of a 10 p.m. youth curfew increased during 1966. A demonstration outside Pandora's Box on November 12 drew as many as 1,000 participants, with Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda among the public figures present, and the confrontation became associated with Stephen Stills's composition “For What It's Worth.” Ed Ruscha was simultaneously photographing the corridor for E Building on the Sunset Strip, his 1966 artist book presenting continuous photographic sequences of both sides of the boulevard. The Doors initiated another visual chapter in 1967 through a large promotional billboard, helping turn enormous hand-painted music advertisements into a defining feature of Sunset Boulevard through the 1970s and opening 1980s. Gazzari's strengthened the later club circuit with performers including Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Tom Petty, Mötley Crüe and Guns N' Roses, carrying the Strip from its countercultural period into the hard-rock and glam-metal eras.
How to fold Sunset Strip into your trip.
Sunset Strip works as the anchor for an outing connecting a dramatic experiment in collective domestic architecture, César Pelli's immense design complex and the Doheny family estate overlooking Beverly Hills.
Begin at Schindler House, completed in 1922 after Viennese architect R. M. Schindler decided to remain in Los Angeles following his work supervising Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House. Schindler conceived the Kings Road property for himself, Pauline Schindler, Clyde Chace and Marian Chace as a collective dwelling for four adults, using tilt-up concrete slabs, redwood, glass and canvas to depart sharply from conventional domestic construction. Pauline Schindler's salons subsequently drew artists, writers, musicians and architects into the house, strengthening its place within the development of Los Angeles modernism; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture has operated there since 1994. Continue to Pacific Design Center, where César Pelli transformed a fourteen-acre site into one of West Hollywood's largest architectural compositions. The 750,000-square-foot Blue Building opened in 1975, its immense glass skin earning the “Blue Whale” nickname; Pelli's 450,000-square-foot Green Building followed in 1988, and the 400,000-square-foot Red Building completed the three-building complex in 2012. The resulting 1.6-million-square-foot campus concentrates the region's interior-design trade within an architectural ensemble developed across nearly four decades. Conclude at Greystone Mansion & Gardens, created after oil magnate Edward L. Doheny gave his son Ned 12.58 acres in 1926 and construction began the following February. Gordon B. Kaufmann designed the steel-reinforced concrete residence with Indiana limestone facing and a Welsh slate roof, and Ned Doheny, Lucy Doheny and their five children moved into the estate in September 1928. The property cost $3,166,578.12, including $1,238,378.76 for the mansion, before later ownership changes brought the remaining 18.3 acres to Beverly Hills in 1965 and public-park dedication in 1971. The progression moves from Schindler's dramatic reconsideration of domestic life through Pelli's multidecade design complex and culminates at Kaufmann's vast oil-fortune estate, tracing three radically different architectural responses to wealth, creativity and private space immediately beyond Sunset Strip.
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