Vine Street, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Vine Street in Los Angeles, California.

Vine Street is a storied corridor where Hollywood's entertainment character meets early streetcar growth, Golden Age broadcasting and a concentration of music, film and commercial architecture that helped turn a former agricultural road into an internationally recognized address.

Running through Hollywood between East Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills, the urban corridor follows a north-south line from Melrose Avenue across Santa Monica Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Boulevard and Yucca Street before climbing toward Franklin Avenue beneath the eastern slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains. Southern stretches move through lower commercial blocks and studio-related properties before the street enters the denser building fabric surrounding Sunset Boulevard. Traveling north brings taller office buildings, theaters and commercial structures into increasingly close succession as the roadway approaches Hollywood Boulevard, where the regular street grid meets one of the district's most intensely developed intersections. North of Hollywood Boulevard, the terrain begins rising toward the hills as the dense commercial frontage gives way to apartment buildings and narrower blocks beneath the ridgeline. The result is a corridor whose compact length, escalating architectural scale, major boulevard crossings and transition from the Hollywood basin toward the foothills compress an unusually broad section of Central Hollywood into a single north-south street.

What you should know about Vine Street.

Vine Street is best known for becoming one of the principal addresses through which Hollywood converted its entertainment economy into a recognizable urban center. The roadway began as Weyse Avenue and received its modern name during the first decade of the twentieth century, inspired by grapevines then growing north of present-day Santa Monica Boulevard. Hollywood incorporated as an independent city in 1903 with 700 residents, and a Los Angeles Pacific Railroad track was laid along the street the following year, connecting its emerging residential districts with the expanding regional streetcar system. Population reached 4,000 by 1909, placing substantial development pressure on former orchards and large residential properties surrounding the route. Commercial ambitions intensified after Hollywood joined Los Angeles in 1910, and local property owners organized the Vine Street Improvement District to widen, grade and pave the roadway between Hollywood and Wilshire boulevards. The rebuilt avenue opened in 1922, making Hollywood and Vine a major commercial intersection just as film-industry wealth was accelerating construction across the district. Height-limit office buildings subsequently concentrated around the crossing, providing space for entertainment companies, agents and related businesses during Hollywood's 1920s expansion. Vine Street had moved within two decades from a grapevine-lined local road with a single electric track to a metropolitan business address embedded in the physical growth of the American motion-picture capital.

Broadcasting created a second era of exceptional concentration along Vine Street as radio networks moved production closer to Hollywood's performers, musicians and studios. KNX, KHJ and KFI were operating in Hollywood by 1922, and national networks subsequently built major West Coast operations across the district. NBC opened Radio City at Sunset and Vine in 1938, placing a major broadcast complex directly on the corridor at a moment when Hollywood ranked behind only New York in American radio production. Twenty-five nationwide broadcasts originated from Hollywood's CBS and NBC facilities during this period, turning the surrounding streets into a working center of network entertainment. ABC occupied facilities at 1529 to 1559 North Vine between 1949 and 1956, extending the street's broadcasting importance into the television era. Music created another institutional turn after songwriter Johnny Mercer, film producer Buddy DeSylva and retailer Glen Wallichs founded Capitol Records in 1942. EMI acquired Capitol for $8.5 million in 1955 and backed a new Hollywood headquarters designed by Welton Becket and Associates with Louis Naidorf as designer. Completed beside Vine in 1956, the circular reinforced-concrete tower rose thirteen stories beneath a 90-foot aluminum spire whose beacon spells H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in Morse code, with high-fidelity recording studios constructed underground. Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, Dean Martin and the Beach Boys subsequently recorded there, extending Vine Street's importance from network broadcasting into the recorded-music industry.

How to fold Vine Street into your trip.

Vine Street works as the anchor for a Hollywood sequence connecting the surviving birthplace of a foundational film company with a Spanish Colonial Revival performance house spanning radio, television and concert history and an open-air amphitheater shaped through a century of architectural experiments.

Begin at Hollywood Heritage Museum, housed in the barn where Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille began one of early Hollywood's most consequential production enterprises. The structure originated in 1901 as a stable at Selma Avenue and Vine Street, and an office addition followed in 1912 for the Burns & Revier Film Company. Lasky and DeMille rented the property after arriving in Hollywood in 1913 and used it as their production base for The Squaw Man, the first feature-length motion picture made in Hollywood. Lasky's company merged with Famous Players in 1916 and acquired Paramount for distribution, helping create the corporate lineage of Paramount Pictures as the studio expanded around the barn. Hollywood Heritage rescued the structure decades later, restored it and opened the museum in 1985, preserving the building after its original Vine Street setting had disappeared. Continue to Avalon Hollywood, built at Hollywood and Vine in 1927 as a Spanish Colonial Revival theater for live performance. The building later became the Palace Theatre and entered broadcasting history in 1940 through radio production before television followed during the 1950s. ABC's The Hollywood Palace subsequently used the theater during the 1960s, bringing a weekly variety series into a venue already associated with several generations of entertainment technology. The Beatles appeared there during their first West Coast visit in 1964, adding another layer to a building that had begun in the final years of vaudeville. Concert and nightclub uses followed from 1978, and the property received the Avalon name after a 2002 remodeling, extending its performance function across nearly a century. Conclude at Hollywood Bowl, whose architecture evolved through repeated attempts to harness the acoustics of the natural amphitheater formerly called Daisy Dell. Choir leader Hugo Kirchhofer applied the Hollywood Bowl name to the canyon in 1920, and successive shells became architectural experiments during the following decade. Allied Architects created a semi-elliptical shell in 1926, Lloyd Wright answered with a pyramidal structure in 1927 and then developed a curved 1928 version composed of nine adjustable wooden panels that altered the acoustic configuration for performances. Allied Architects returned in 1929 with a $50,000 semicircular shell built from Transite, a structure intended as temporary that survived for 74 years. A fifth shell replaced it in 2004, carrying the amphitheater's architectural lineage into a new century. The progression moves from a stable converted into an early motion-picture production base through a theater repeatedly adapted for changing performance media and culminates in an amphitheater refined through successive acoustic experiments, tracing film, broadcasting and live music across Hollywood's institutional rise.

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