THE LORE OF MOUNT WASHINGTON

The hill that required a train to reach it, a mystic to consecrate it, and a century of quiet to become what it is.

Before the Subdivision

The hills that became Mount Washington were part of Rancho San Rafael — the same enormous land grant that covered Highland Park, parts of Glendale, and most of the surrounding northeast. For generations after the Spanish period, the land was used for grazing: sheep, cattle, chaparral, the dry season scent of sage. The Hahamog'na band of the Tongva people had lived and traveled through these hills long before the rancho system divided them, moving between the Arroyo Seco valley floor and the higher terrain above it. By the time American real estate speculators arrived in the 1880s, the steepness of the San Rafael Hills had mostly protected them from development. Getting up was simply too hard.

There is some debate about the name itself. The most commonly repeated origin credits Colonel Henry Washington, a surveyor who mapped Southern California in the 1850s. A competing theory holds that the neighborhood was named by two men from New Hampshire — sons of that state, where the real Mount Washington stands as the tallest peak in the northeastern United States — who bought the land and chose a name from home. The plaque says one thing. The deed records suggest another. Like much of early Los Angeles, the truth has been papered over by the story that sells best.

The Funicular and the Hotel: A Developer's Dream

Mount Washington, as a neighborhood, begins in 1907 with a man named Robert Marsh. A real estate developer in early 20th-century Los Angeles, Marsh looked at a steep, chaparral-covered hill rising 940 feet above the valley floor and saw a problem he knew how to solve. The problem was access. The solution was a train.

He had watched Angels Flight — the funicular that carried passengers up and down Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles — transform that neighborhood into something desirable. The same principle, applied to Mount Washington, could turn uninhabitable hillside into valuable real estate. Construction began in October 1908. The Los Angeles and Mount Washington Incline Railway opened on May 24, 1909. Two counterbalanced cable cars, named Florence and Virginia after the daughters of Marsh and his financial partner Arthur St. Clair Perry, climbed a 42% grade from the base at Avenue 43 and Marmion Way to the summit in under five minutes, for a nickel a ride.

At the top, Marsh built his centerpiece: the Mount Washington Hotel, a three-story Mission Revival structure with an observation deck, tennis courts, and Japanese gardens spread across fourteen acres of hilltop, with panoramic views stretching south to downtown and northeast to the San Gabriel Mountains. The hotel became, almost immediately, a gathering spot for the film industry figures working at the nearby Edendale and Sycamore Grove studios — Charlie Chaplin stayed there while filming. For a brief moment at the dawn of Los Angeles cinema, Mount Washington was where the stars came to rest above the noise.

The incline railway closed in January 1919, after city inspectors declared the main cable worn and Marsh refused to pay for its replacement, becoming embroiled in a legal dispute over which regulatory body had jurisdiction over his operation. The cars were sold, the tracks removed. The hotel struggled. It briefly became a military school. Then a hospital. Then it sat empty, a grand Mission Revival shell on a hilltop that had briefly meant something and was trying to figure out what to mean next.

The Swami and the Mountain

The empty hotel had been sitting on its hilltop for a few years when Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in Los Angeles in 1925.

Yogananda had come from Bengal, India, where he had been born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in 1893 and had found his guru, the great yogi Sri Yukteswar, at the age of seventeen. In 1920, driven by a vision he believed was divine, he sailed to America — one of the first teachers of Indian spiritual practice to establish a permanent presence in the West. He lectured on the East Coast to audiences that included the intellectuals and wealthy seekers of the Jazz Age, who were hungry for alternatives to what felt like a stagnant Western Christianity. His organization, the Self-Realization Fellowship, founded in 1920, was growing. He needed a home.

A transcontinental speaking tour brought him to Los Angeles in 1925. The city reminded him, he said, of Varanasi — the Indian spiritual capital — in its tolerance and diversity. Then, on the way to a lecture, his car turned a curve on a hillside road and he looked up and saw a building on a summit, and stopped. He stood looking at it. "This is the place God would have us build," he is reported to have said — though those words belong to a different story, attributed elsewhere; what is certain is that when Yogananda saw the former Mount Washington Hotel at 3880 San Rafael Avenue, he knew it was his.

With the help of students who contributed funds and two mortgages Yogananda took on personally, the Self-Realization Fellowship established its International Headquarters atop Mount Washington in October 1925. Yogananda lived there for more than 25 years, until his death in 1952. His bedroom has been preserved as a shrine. The chapel where he conducted services is open daily for meditation. The grounds — twelve acres of meditation gardens, majestic trees, and quiet paths with views of downtown Los Angeles to the south and the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast — are one of the most genuinely peaceful places in the city.

The SRF headquarters, known as the Mother Center, now has more than 600 temples and meditation centers around the world. Its followers are spread across every continent. All of it traces back to this hilltop in Northeast Los Angeles, to a building that had been built as a hotel, turned into a hospital, and was sitting empty when a young swami from India saw it from the road and recognized it as home. The Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda's memoir published in 1946, has never gone out of print. Steve Jobs reportedly requested that it be distributed as the only digital book at his memorial service, and left instructions for every attendee to receive a copy. Millions of people have come to yoga and Eastern spiritual practice through Yogananda's work. They all lead back to Mount Washington.

The Museum on the Hill

Visible from the freeway and from much of the neighborhood below, the Southwest Museum sits on a separate but adjacent hilltop just east of the SRF headquarters — a Mission Revival castle with a tower, perched above the Arroyo Seco, looking like something that shouldn't be in Los Angeles but feels, from the right angle, like the only building that could possibly be here.

Charles Lummis founded the Southwest Museum in 1907 — the first museum in Los Angeles — out of the same conviction that had built El Alisal: that this city needed to understand where it came from before it could understand where it was going. He spent decades collecting Native American artifacts, ceramics, baskets, textiles, and ceremonial objects from across the Southwest and California, making wax cylinder recordings of indigenous songs that would otherwise have been lost, documenting in text and photography the cultures that the mission system and American expansion had pushed to the margins.

The museum building was designed by architect Sumner P. Hunt and opened on its hilltop in 1914. Hunt designed it in Spanish Colonial Revival style, drawing on the region's mission architecture and on the Alhambra in Spain, wanting the building to feel like a cultural acropolis — a place of visibility and permanence that announced Los Angeles was serious about its past. The collection eventually grew to more than 238,000 artifacts, one of the most significant holdings of Native American material culture in the United States.

In 2003, financial struggles led the Southwest Museum to merge with the Autry Museum of the American West in Griffith Park. The collections were transferred. The building on Mount Washington closed to regular public programming. It has stood largely unused since then — maintained by the Autry, occasionally opened for special events, its Mission Revival tower visible from the freeway and from the streets below, a landmark in the true sense: a mark on the land that helps you know where you are. The fight to find a sustainable future for the building continues. It is, to anyone who has stood on its hilltop and looked out over the Arroyo Seco and the city below, one of the most significant and underprotected spaces in Los Angeles.

The Steepest Street

Eldred Street has a 33% grade. It rises 219 feet in elevation between Avenue 50 and Cross Avenue on the northeast side of Mount Washington, and it is one of the steepest drivable streets in California — steeper than anything in San Francisco, which considers itself the authority on such things. The street was built in 1912, named after a man named Delos W. Eldred, before the city of Los Angeles established its current rule limiting new streets to grades below 15%. It will never be replicated. The mailboxes of Eldred Street residents are all located at the bottom of the hill. The people who live there drive trucks.

At the top of Eldred Street, a set of wooden stairs leads to a trailhead — the Eldred Steps, some of the oldest public stairs in Los Angeles, predating the painted hillside staircases that have become a symbol of Silver Lake and other NELA neighborhoods. The steps are unglamorous and steep and take you somewhere worth going: into the canyon trails that wind through the hills above the neighborhood, where the chaparral reasserts itself and the city disappears briefly and you can look back and see how the hills look from inside rather than from below.

The people who live on Eldred Street call themselves the Eldred Highlanders. This is a neighborhood where the geography generates nicknames.

The Architecture of the Hillside

Mount Washington's terrain — steep, winding, with lots that plunge and rise at angles that make conventional construction difficult — attracted a particular kind of architect in the postwar decades. People who saw the challenge of the hillside as an opportunity rather than a problem.

A. Quincy Jones built his Pilot House here in 1948, in collaboration with architect Whitney Smith. It was designed as a pilot project — a demonstration that well-designed modern homes could be built on steep hillside lots — before the two architects went on to design the Crestwood Hills cooperative in Brentwood. The Pilot House sits on its slope with angled windows that frame the surrounding hills, patios on three sides, a hidden pool. It was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2002. Jones went on to design hundreds of homes across Southern California in collaboration with developer Joseph Eichler and partner Frederick Emmons, becoming one of the defining architects of California mid-century modernism. His career traces back, in part, to this hill in Northeast Los Angeles where he proved the concept.

Gregory Ain was here. John Lautner was here. The hillside terrain that made Mount Washington hard to develop conventionally made it ideal for architects who were thinking unconventionally about how to site a house, how to use a slope, how to make a building that seemed to grow from its location rather than being imposed on it. The result is a housing stock that is deeply varied — Craftsman bungalows from the 1910s and '20s, Spanish Colonial cottages, mid-century modern houses tucked into hillsides at surprising angles — but consistently oriented toward the view, toward the light, toward the specific condition of being high up in these hills with the city spread below.

The Neighborhood That Has No Commercial Strip

Mount Washington is one of the few neighborhoods in Los Angeles with essentially no commercial street of its own. The terrain doesn't allow for it. There are no coffee shops on the hill, no bars, no restaurants. The neighborhood's residents go down — to Highland Park, to Eagle Rock, to Cypress Park — for everything that requires a counter to stand at. This is unusual in Los Angeles, where the commercial corridor is usually the spine around which neighborhood identity forms, and it gives Mount Washington a quality that is genuinely rare in the city: it is a place defined almost entirely by its residential character, by its houses and its hills and its views, by what happens inside the homes rather than on the street in front of them.

The result is a neighborhood that feels private without being exclusive, secluded without being remote. Fifteen minutes by car from downtown Los Angeles. Fifteen minutes on the Gold Line from Highland Park to Union Station. But on the hill itself, at the end of a winding road with the city glittering below — it can feel like somewhere else entirely. The SRF meditation gardens are open to the public. The canyon trails begin at the top of the Eldred Steps. The views from San Rafael Avenue on a clear day extend to the ocean.

There is something about a neighborhood without a bar that is hard to articulate but easy to feel when you arrive. Mount Washington is not a neighborhood you stumble into. You go there because you were looking for it, or because someone told you about it, or because you live there. The hill selects for intentionality. It always has — from the funicular that required a nickel and a decision to board, to the swami who looked up and saw a building and made a choice, to the architects who saw a slope and designed a house that could only belong to that exact slope. Mount Washington rewards the people who make the effort to get there.

Notable past and present residents include Paramahansa Yogananda, A. Quincy Jones (work), Charles Fletcher Lummis (adjacent), and Mahershala Ali.