What goes up must come down
In the Academy Award-winning short film, The Music Box, three times do “businessmen” Laurel and Hardy laboriously push and pull a boxed piano up multiple flights of a steep staircase. Three times does their cargo take a clamorous tumble down the steps while Laurel and Hardy, out of breath and exhausted, look on despondently. Finally, on their fourth and successful attempt, they arrive at the customer’s door, where a chipper postman informs them that all they had to do was take their horse-drawn delivery cart up a different street directly to the front door, avoiding the staircase altogether. With this, the geniuses choose to go down that treacherous staircase with the piano again to take the simpler route.
Those 133 well-trodden steps are a public staircase linking the one-way Descanso Drive and Vendome Street. When the film was shot, large swaths of undeveloped land lined the south and north sides of the stairs. Now, when you walk up the eleven flights, all around you are homes nestled into the hills. While the environs have changed, the unremarkable concrete stairs look exactly the same as they did when they were immortalized by the comedy duo.
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Address The bottom of the staircase is next to 935 Vendome Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90026; the top is between 3270 and 3778 Descanso Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90026 | Getting there Unmetered street parking | Hours Always open| Tip To explore more of Los Angeles’s outdoor staircases, check out www.laclimbingthehiddenstairways.blogspot.com.
There are many hidden staircases sprinkled around Los Angeles. In the pre-automobile era, they served to connect pedestrians to trolleys, buses, and trains. They also provided a safer route down the city’s steep hills. There’s the meandering Beachwood Canyon Staircase, which takes you through old Hollywood. It includes a section – at the corner of North Beachwood and Woodshire Drives – that’s a double set of steps separated by planter boxes, which apparently once held a running stream. Also popular are the famous Santa Monica Stairs, loaded with weekend warriors, at 7th Street and Entrada Drive. Though many of these staircases are no longer widely used, they’re a charming reminder of an earlier car-free time, before Angelenos started driving to take a walk.
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