THE LORE OF LOS FELIZ

A neighborhood where the first thing that happened is still visible, and the last thing that happened was a mountain lion.

Before the Name

The Tongva people built a substantial settlement in the mouth of what is now Fern Dell Canyon in Griffith Park — the same canyon that hikers pass through today on their way up to the Observatory. Archaeological surveys have found evidence of a major rancheria there, though its traditional name has been lost. When Gaspar de Portolà's expedition traveled through the valley in 1769, his scouts encountered members of this village. The Tongva who lived here had made their homes along the Los Angeles River and in the canyon mouths below the Santa Monica Mountains for generations, gathering acorns from the coast live oaks, hunting, fishing the river. The rancho system that followed the Spanish conquest displaced and eventually erased the village, as it erased nearly every Tongva settlement in the Los Angeles Basin.

What replaced it was a land grant. Around 1795, the Spanish Governor Pedro Fages granted 6,647 acres to Corporal José Vicente Feliz — a veteran of the Anza Expedition of 1776, the military leader of the Pueblo of Los Angeles, and a man who had spent two decades building the institutional foundations of a new city. The rancho that bore his family's name — Los Feliz, "The Feliz Family," though some render it as "The Happy Ones," since feliz means happy — encompassed what is now Los Feliz, Griffith Park, East Hollywood, and parts of Silver Lake. It was one of the first land grants made in California, and it set in motion a chain of ownership that would take two more centuries to fully resolve into the neighborhood that exists today.

The Colonel and the Park

By the 1880s, the Feliz rancho had changed hands multiple times through the usual mechanics of drought, debt, and American legal dispossession. In 1882, a Welsh immigrant named Griffith Jenkins Griffith bought 4,071 acres of the former rancho. He called himself Colonel Griffith, though the title was essentially self-invented — his highest official military rank had been "major" of rifle practice with the California National Guard. He was, by most accounts, a difficult man: a self-mythologizing mining magnate who had made a fortune in Mexican silver and reinvested it in Southern California real estate during the boom years, a blustering personality who collected enemies the way other men collected friends, and a man who managed to turn one of the greatest acts of civic generosity in the history of Los Angeles into something people argued about.

On December 16, 1896, Griffith donated 3,015 acres of the former rancho to the city of Los Angeles as a public park. He called it "a Christmas present." His stated reason was civic duty: "It must be made a place of rest and relaxation for the masses, a resort for the rank and file, for the plain people." His enemies — led by the journalist Horace Bell, who loved to deflate Griffith's pomposity — claimed it was a tax dodge, that he had failed as a ranch owner and was unloading land he couldn't sell. Both things may have been true.

The park was named Griffith Park. It is today one of the largest urban parks in the United States — more than 4,300 acres, five times the size of Central Park in New York City. It contains 53 miles of trails, the Greek Theatre, the Los Angeles Zoo, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Griffith Observatory, and Fern Dell Canyon, where the Tongva village once stood and where sycamores and ferns still grow along a small stream, improbably beautiful in the middle of a city.

Griffith didn't keep his own story clean. In September 1903, drunk and paranoid, he forced his wife Christina to kneel before him in a hotel suite in Santa Monica and accused her of conspiring with the Pope to poison him. He held a gun to her head and fired. The bullet went through her eye rather than her brain — she flinched at the last instant — and she survived by leaping from a window into the sea below. Griffith served two years in San Quentin. Christina divorced him. The city was embarrassed by its famous donor.

After his release, Griffith offered $100,000 to build an observatory on the hill above the park, and $50,000 for a Greek theater. The city, uncomfortable with his new status as a convicted felon, refused to move forward on either project during his lifetime. He died in 1919, leaving both gifts in trust. The Greek Theatre was built in 1930. The Griffith Observatory opened in 1935. Griffith's name is on both of them, and on the park, and on a 14-foot bronze statue near the park's entrance that watches over the land he gave the city and shot his wife in the same decade. Los Angeles has a long tradition of keeping complicated legacies in bronze.

The Birth of Hollywood Was Here

By 1903, there were fewer than 30 residences in the flatlands of Los Feliz. Within a decade, there were ten major film studios.

When the East Coast movie companies began migrating to Southern California around 1908, Los Feliz was ideal: cheap undeveloped land near the varied terrain of Griffith Park and the Los Angeles River, convenient streetcar access, year-round light. Within a few years, studios were operating throughout the neighborhood, and the motion picture industry's founding generation was living in the hills above them.

Walt Disney arrived in Los Feliz in 1923 at the age of 22, moving into his uncle's home on Kingswell Avenue between Vermont and Rodney Drive. He was, by his own account, drawing characters on the train west from Kansas City, already thinking about what he would build. Within months, he and his brother Roy were renting space on Kingswell for a new business — the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. It was here, in a small rented space on a quiet Los Feliz street, that Walt Disney first drew what would become Mickey Mouse. By 1925, the operation had outgrown Kingswell and moved to a purpose-built studio at the corner of Griffith Park Boulevard and Hyperion Avenue. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was produced there. By 1938, even that space was too small, and the studio relocated to Burbank. A Gelson's market now occupies the site of the Hyperion studio, with no marker to indicate what happened there.

Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, Oliver Hardy, and Rudolph Valentino all lived in Los Feliz during the silent film era. The neighborhood was essentially the residential campus of the early industry — the place where the people who were inventing the grammar of cinema came home at night.

Laughlin Park, the gated community at the western edge of the neighborhood established in 1905 by developer Homer Laughlin, became the enclave of choice for the wealthiest of them. DeMille's estate — built on the highest lot in the community with panoramic views from downtown to the ocean — later passed through many hands and was purchased in 2017 by Angelina Jolie for $24.5 million. The W.C. Fields estate, in an Italianate villa built in 1919, is still one of the most recognizable properties in the neighborhood. Charlie Chaplin, Basil Rathbone, and Carole Lombard all lived behind Laughlin Park's gates during the period when Los Feliz was the center of Hollywood's world.

The Architecture: A Neighborhood That Reads Like a Survey Course

Los Feliz has two Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. This alone would make it architecturally significant. Combined with everything else on the hillsides and flatlands of the neighborhood, it makes it one of the most extraordinary residential architecture collections in the United States.

The Hollyhock House sits atop Olive Hill in Barnsdall Art Park, at the junction of Vermont and Hollywood Boulevards. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it between 1919 and 1921 for Aline Barnsdall, a socialist oil heiress who had commissioned him to design an entire arts complex on the hilltop. Barnsdall's preferred flower — the hollyhock — runs through the design as a recurring motif: in the roofline bas-reliefs, the art glass windows, the furniture. The style is Mayan Revival, drawing on pre-Columbian temple forms that Wright had been studying, with flat roofs and slightly tilted walls that give the structure a monumental stillness. It was Wright's first Los Angeles commission. The construction was overseen largely by his son Lloyd Wright and, later, by his then-assistant Rudolph Schindler — who thus arrived in Los Angeles for the first time, saw the city, and never left. Hollyhock House is Los Angeles's first UNESCO World Heritage Site. You can tour it on weekends.

The Ennis House, designed by Wright in 1923 and built in 1924, sits on Glendower Avenue in the Los Feliz Hills — a massive, textured assemblage of more than 27,000 interlocking pre-cast concrete blocks arranged like Mayan temple stones across a hillside terrace. Wright was experimenting with what he called his "textile block" system, believing that patterned concrete could be an affordable and beautiful building material. The result is something that looks less like a residence than like a temple that has been convinced to allow people to live in it. The Ennis House has appeared in Blade Runner, House on Haunted Hill, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks, and Game of Thrones, among dozens of other productions — filmmakers reach for it reflexively when they need architecture that suggests something ancient, powerful, and slightly ominous.

The Lovell Health House, designed by Richard Neutra between 1927 and 1929 for naturopathic physician Philip Lovell, hangs off a cliff face on Dundee Drive, suspended by tension cables in what was then a radical application of steel-frame construction to domestic architecture. It was one of America's first International Style residences, and it announced that Los Feliz was where the next generation of architectural ideas was being tested.

Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, R.M. Schindler, Gordon Kaufmann, Wallace Neff, Paul Williams, and nearly every other significant architect of the 20th century has work in Los Feliz. The Los Feliz Improvement Association — founded in 1916, with Walt Disney, newspaper publisher Harry Chandler, and radio mogul Earle C. Anthony among its early board members — describes the neighborhood's architecture as "a visual feast" that "showcases residences designed by nearly every major architect of the 20th century." This is not an exaggeration.

The Observatory and the Hill

On January 17, 1976, the Griffith Observatory was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. It had opened forty-one years earlier, in 1935, built with the money Griffith had left in trust and positioned on the south slope of Mount Hollywood with the entire Los Angeles Basin spread below it. The Observatory is one of the most recognizable buildings in the world: the copper domes oxidized green against the California sky, the terrace where James Dean had his switchblade scene in Rebel Without a Cause, the view from the steps that appears in postcards and films and television shows so often it has become the image people see in their minds when they think of Los Angeles at all.

The Observatory is not, strictly speaking, in Los Feliz — it's inside Griffith Park, which is a separate entity. But it is the backyard of Los Feliz in a way that no other neighborhood can claim. Residents can hike to it from the streets below. The view from its terrace looks directly down into the neighborhood. It belongs to Los Feliz in the way that a park at the end of your street belongs to you without being yours — you can see it from your window, walk to it in minutes, feel its presence as part of the geography of your daily life.

The deodar cedar trees on Los Feliz Boulevard — planted in the early 20th century, now enormous and cathedral-like, their branches arching over four lanes of traffic — are a Historic-Cultural Monument in their own right. The city planted them. They outlasted everyone who planted them. They shade the sidewalks of Los Feliz every day.

The Bars, the Bohemians, and Swingers

Los Feliz has always attracted artists, writers, and musicians without requiring the neighborhood to descend into the period of urban grit that usually precedes a bohemian reputation. The architecture was too good. The park was too large. The proximity to the industry too convenient. It has always been expensive enough to keep the roughest edges off while being affordable enough to attract people who didn't want to live in Bel Air.

But it had its dive bars. Vermont Avenue and Hillhurst Avenue were, in their heyday, lined with places that Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Tierney and assorted working-class drunks, poets, and artists frequented. The Dresden Room on Vermont Avenue — open since the 1950s, its interior unchanged from its mid-century supper club origins, its carpet a specific shade of burgundy that no longer exists anywhere else — was still running its house band, Marty and Elayne, when Doug Liman made Swingers in 1996, and Marty and Elayne appear in the film doing what they did every night for decades: playing standards in a nearly empty room for couples who didn't need anyone else to be there.

Swingers put Los Feliz on the cultural map in a specific way, as the neighborhood where young men from the entertainment industry went to be tragically cool before the industry decided what to do with them. The Derby, the last remaining Brown Derby restaurant, appears in the film at the corner of Hillhurst and Los Feliz Boulevard, and for a few years in the mid-1990s it hosted a swing revival scene that brought half of Hollywood to Los Feliz on weekends. The Derby closed in 2009. The building became a bank and then a restaurant.

Beck was performing at the Onyx coffeehouse on Vermont in the early 1990s before anyone knew who he was. The bookstore and the independent cinema and the record stores and the farmers market have all been features of the village's life for long enough to be considered permanent, which in Los Angeles means a generation at minimum.

P-22

In 2012, a young male mountain lion born in the Santa Monica Mountains crossed two major freeways — the 405 and the 101 — to reach Griffith Park. The crossing was approximately 20 miles. Wildlife officials, as part of the National Park Service study of the local mountain lion population, detected him on a trail camera and fitted him with a radio collar. They designated him P-22: the 22nd mountain lion in the study.

He was the only mountain lion to have successfully made that crossing to Griffith Park. He would remain there, alone, for the rest of his life — ten years in a 9-square-mile urban park that is far smaller than the territory a mountain lion ordinarily requires, surrounded on all sides by the city. He had no mate, no cubs, no way back to the larger wilderness from which he had come. What he had was Griffith Park: 4,300 acres of chaparral and oak woodland and hiking trails, with the Los Feliz Hills on one side and the Hollywood Hills on the other, deer to hunt, coyotes to chase, and the constant ambient roar of the city beyond the treeline.

He became famous slowly, then instantly. When National Geographic photographer Steve Winter captured an image of P-22 at night with the Hollywood sign glowing in the background — a mountain lion in repose in the hills above one of the most observed pieces of real estate on earth — the photograph traveled everywhere. He became a symbol of something specific to Los Angeles: the way the wilderness survives in the margins of the city, the way urban sprawl has broken the landscape into fragments too small for the animals that need to move through them, the way a single creature can make a city fall in love with something it would ordinarily fear.

Los Feliz residents would occasionally spot him on trail cameras, or see him cross a street in the early morning. Hikers would come home with blurry photographs. His presence was felt even when he wasn't seen.

In late 2022, he was struck by a car crossing a Los Feliz street. The injuries were severe. When he subsequently killed a leashed Chihuahua and was deemed a threat to public safety, wildlife officials captured him for assessment. His condition — multiple injuries, organ damage, one eye partially destroyed — made a return to the park impossible. He was euthanized on December 17, 2022. He was twelve or thirteen years old.

A sold-out memorial celebration at the Greek Theatre drew thousands. The city council voted to create a permanent memorial. A wildlife crossing over the 101 freeway — the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the largest in the world, designed in part because of P-22's story — is under construction.

P-22 lived alone in the park that Griffith gave the city for a city that didn't always deserve him. He crossed two freeways to get to Los Feliz, and he never crossed back. Los Feliz kept him.

The Neighborhood Now

Los Feliz today is expensive, beautiful, walkable in a way that Los Angeles doesn't generally permit, and organized around its village life in a way that most of the city is not. Vermont Avenue and Hillhurst Avenue carry the rhythm of the neighborhood's daily existence: the coffee in the morning, the farmers market, the independent bookstore, the arthouse cinema, the dinner at ten. Skylight Books on Vermont has been a neighborhood institution since 1999 and hosts author events with the dedication of a small literary salon. The Vista Theatre on Sunset Boulevard — a 1923 movie palace with a blade sign visible from blocks away — survived the multiplex era and streams foreign films and revival prints to audiences who choose their cinema the way their grandparents did: by what's playing this week, at this theater, in this neighborhood.

The Griffith Observatory is still there, still pulling people up the hill at all hours. The Hollywood sign is visible from the neighborhood's upper streets on clear days. The deodar cedars still arch over Los Feliz Boulevard. The Ennis House still broods on its hillside. The Hollyhock House still carries its hollyhock motif through every surface. The canyon that held the Tongva village still flows with water in the wet season, lined with ferns.

It is one of the few neighborhoods in Los Angeles where you can stand on a single block and feel the full arc of what the city has been: the rancho, the silent film studios, the modernist experiments, the dive bars, the mountain lion crossing the street at 3am. All of it happened here. The weight of it is part of what makes Los Feliz what it is — a neighborhood that doesn't have to try to have history, because the history keeps showing up.

Notable past and present residents and figures include the Tongva people, Griffith J. Griffith, Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Carole Lombard, Basil Rathbone, Gloria Swanson, Frank Lloyd Wright (work), Richard Neutra (work), Charles Bukowski, Beck, and P-22.