Paul Haddad's El Segundo hike has been prodding Barbara and me for attention for about a year now with little success. Seriously, what could be attractive about a city that features an airplane, smoke stacks, and a palm tree on its flag? But today curiosity won out and we headed down the 405 to visit the small beach town hidden in plain sight between LAX to the N, the Chevron refinery to the W and S, a major commercial zone to the E, and Manhattan Beach to the S. Unique as a beachside town, El Segundo isn't exactly beachside—the Chevron refinery and Hyperion Reclamation plant stand between the town and Dockweiler Beach—but the isolation just adds to the novelty of El Segundo. When Standard Oil leased the farm land for a refinery in 1911, the company needed housing for its labor force. Within 6 years, pitched tents on sand dunes unfolded into homes, hotels, and restaurants in the 5.46 square mile company town of "El Segundo," Spanish for "the second" (as in the second Standard Oil refinery on the West Coast). The city incorporated in 1917. In 1928, Canadian William Mines leased the land to the N for a flying field that became L.A. Municipal then L.A. International Airport (LAX), and the story (but not the town) grew from there. Chevron literally has a pipeline into the airport. Aerospace, technology, sports, airlines, Mattel, Northrup, Raytheon and more all moved their headquarters to encircle El Segundo. Meanwhile, the small little city all maintained its almost Midwest charm, and that's what Barbara and I explored today. We began our hike at Library Park on Main Street and headed N. Across the street, El Segundo High—a school not only noted for its solid academic reputation, but its stately and timeless brick facade, circa 1927, boasts 39 listings in IMDB including 1955's Blackboard Jungle, War Games, and Beverly Hills 90210. We followed Main to its end at Imperial Highway and walked toward the ocean on the Imperial Strip and Memory Row of trees dedicated to in someone's memory. Imperial Hwy is next to the LAX cargo terminal so, wow, NOISE, but also a stunning overhead view of planes taking off and landing. As we neared the end of the greenway, we decided to pass on the beach and instead wander through the neighborhood. Charming. Walkable. A world of early and mid-20th c. bungalows in various shapes and sizes with a few Craftsman homes for fancy. Most featured at least a flag in the front yard, many were decorated in red-white-blue banners or tchotchkes. Articles and websites on El Segundo refer to its "Mayberry" feel, and our walk-through didn't disappoint. We hiked through the neighborhood to Grand Avenue at the center of downtown El Segundo, alive with sidewalk restaurants, small businesses, and a surfboard shop. We stopped at the Old Town Music Hall on Richmond, an El Segundo cultural landmark that features silent movies accompanied by a 2600-pipe, 4-keyboard, 1925 Wurlitzer organ. Around the corner and back to Main Street, we stopped to read the menu and the ceiling at the original Rock & Brew co-founded by Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons from Kiss. Another quick hop (everything in this town is nearby) led to El Segundo Recreation Park, a multi-purpose recreation area created specifically for the growing population of aerospace workers in the 1950s, and now home of the George Brett Little League Baseball field named for the 1971 El Segundo High grad who made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame. A surprising, entertaining hike that felt like we not only learned about a new beach town—it took us back in time and proved to us, once again, that you can't really know a place until you investigate it on foot!

   

   

   

   

   

Barbara and I are chummy with Palisades village—after hiking local trails like Will Rogers and Los Leones, we always stop at the pink Starbucks on Sunset at Swarthmore, take our drinks to the little triangle park across the street, and then browse our favorite shops on Antioch. But experience taught us that to know an area is to explore it on foot, and when we saw Paul Haddad's urban hike through the Palisades we were in. Haddad's version is 5-miles and includes Temescal Canyon trail but we broke it in half. Village this week, trail next week. We parked at the intersection of Frontera and Pampas Ricas Blvd. and walked NE through part of the residential area south of Sunset. Beautiful hou$es with gardens that earned our "Best Neighborhood Landscaping" award, topping hard-to-beat Hancock Park for variety and organization. We picked up Sunset at Carey Street, walking west through the quaint "old" business district past the former location of the Bay Theater designed by S. Charles Lee in 1949. The theater is gone (but the iconic sign has not been forgotten), and the building now houses a failing hardware store. Moving on, we came to our favorite little triangular park. The tiny Palisades Village Green dates back to the founding of PP in the 1920s, progress put a gas station there, and in 1973 sentimentality brought the Village Green back. Across the street, our Starbucks, but today we learned that its pink home (and don't you dare try and change the color)—the Business Block Building—is an L.A. Cultural-Historic Landmark built in 1924, a year before Sunset Boulevard was paved. We crossed Sunset north on Swarthmore Avenue, and BOOM, the old Palisades became the new Palisades as soon as we entered the revamped Palisades Village. Shopping center mogul Rick Caruso (Grove/Americana) rehabilitated three acres of tired shops into an "expensive Pleasantville," quaint, classy, swell, that includes a brand new Bay Theater fronted by a replica of the old Bay Theater sign. Sunday is Farmer's Market Day and we strolled through the crowd doing a little produce checking in the stalls, window shopping in the new shops, and our first celebrity spotting (what's in your wallet?) near the patriotic, 9-foot, 800-lb. "Steadfast" sculpture by Jim Rennert. Palisades Village, opened in 2018, has all the right shops and cafes, and you can feel the shine and new life it adds to the old business area. Leaving the Village, we continued west on Sunset to Temescal Canyon Road. Instead of going into the park to hike (doing that next week), we walked south to Haverford Avenue and Founders' Oaks Island, the 1922 birthplace of Pacific Palisades. This small pocket park marks where Rev. Charles H. Scott and a Methodist Organization founded their secluded, close-knit community targeted to the religious and intellectual. By 1925, there were 100 homes. Today Pacific Palisades population tops 28,000. Continuing on Haverford we passed another L.A. Cultural-Historic Landmark—the Aldersgate Lodge, a stunning Mission-Revival Craftsman built in 1892 in L.A.'s Wilshire district and moved by the Methodists to PP in 1928 for a retreat center. A quick jump over to Via De La Paz to see the Spanish-Colonial-designed Pacific Palisades Elementary (1930), PP's first elementary school. A walk through Palisades Recreation Park took us back to the car, and then, as usual, we drove to our pink Starbucks for mochas. This hike may not be for everyone, but it was really fun for us to learn about an area we thought we already knew so well. 

  

  

Paul Haddad called this an "anti-tourist" walk. That it is, especially if—like Barbara and I did—you take this hike early on a Sunday morning before the souvenir and lingerie shops open and the tourists and vagrants show up. And if you keep your feet on the star-studded Walk of Fame and your eyes up instead of forward or down, you'll experience the growth of Hollywood Boulevard from the end of WWI to the start of the Great Depression and then some. After Prospect Avenue was renamed Hollywood Boulevard in 1910, developer Charles E. Toberman, the "Father of Hollywood," began to envision a theater district and regional shopping district. Enter the 1920s: the Jazz Age, flappers, the silents-to-talkies transition, Prohibition, Hollywood royalty, and the Golden Era of Los Angeles architecture. Toberman and a string of famous architects brought Hollywood Boulevard alive with brand new movie theaters, nightclubs, hotels, and office buildings in a panoply of architectural styles. The entire district is on the US Register of Historic Places and nearly every old building is a L.A. Historic-Cultural Landmark. Barbara and I started at Argyle Avenue and walked west with an eye on the golden pharaohs looking down on us from the cornice of the Pantages Theater. Built in 1930 as an Art Deco vaudeville house, it transitioned to movies then stage productions. Howard Hughes made his office on the second floor in 1949 (ghost rumors unfounded.) At the NE corner of Hollywood and Vine, the 1929 Late Gothic-Art Deco Equitable Building, a 12-floor attempt to "metropolitanize" Hollywood, has a cast of corbels staring down from the edges. Quick side trip up Vine for a look-see at the Avalon, the 1927 Spanish Baroque etched with goat men and sphinxes around the entrance. It opened as the Hollywood Playhouse, lived several media lives and in 1978 became the we've-all-been-there music venue, The Palace. Back to Hollywood Blvd. and the former Warner Bros. Hollywood Theater, a Gothic structure edged with 75 faces. Built in 1928, it had a ballroom on the second floor, the KFWB radio tower on top, and an ice rink in the basement. Steps past Cherokee, Musso & Frank opened in 1919 and still serves the best chicken pot pie/martini lunch in the city. (Chandler wrote there, Chaplin had his own booth.) But three movie palaces on the Boulevard define the area and the era. The first, the Egyptian Theater, built on the south side of the boulevard, opened in 1922 with the premier of ROBIN HOOD. Why Egyptian Revival architecture? Howard Carver was excavating the Valley of Kings at the time and the nation was curious. He found King Tut two weeks after the Egyptian opened! At the NE corner of Hollywood & Highland is the Hollywood First National Bank. When it was built in 1927 it had a moment as the tallest hi-rise in LA, an Art Deco-Gothic "economics temple" with gargoyles and corbels of Columbus and Copernicus. The NW corner is the Hollywood & Highland complex (2001) on the site of the old, 1902, Hollywood Hotel. The Dolby Theater hosts the Academy Awards, and the red carpet path to the theater is edged with pillars listing every Best Picture since the origin of the Oscars. Across the street, the second iconic movie palace, the El Capitan, built in 1926 in California Churrigueresque/Spanish Baroque style. "Hollywood's first Home of Spoken Drama," the El Capitan hosted the premier of Citizen Kane in 1941. Disney bought the theater in the late 80s, and premieres all of its movies there. Kimmel tapes next door at the Masonic Lodge, a Neoclassical temple built in 1921. Next stop, the third iconic movie palace, the Chinese Theater. Built in 1926 to resemble a Chinese pagoda, it sits on the site of the former Francis X. Bushman mansion. Conflicting stories about how the cement hand- and footprint tradition got started, but my favorite is the one where Norma Talmadge accidentally stepped in cement. We took a side trip up Orange Drive to see the Nirvana, a 1925, Oriental Revival apartment complex with a dragon above the front entrance. A terrific street to make our turnaround—at the north end, the Magic Castle, known to us as the 1909 Lane House, built at the birth of Hollywood. At the south end of Orange on Hollywood Blvd., the 1927 Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the oldest continually operating hotel in LA. Gable and Lombard rented a suite there for $5/night. On our walk back, three fun stops. A different view of the staircase to the Hollywood & Highland complex and its courtyard archway inspired by DW Griffith's 1916 movie Intolerance, that beautifully frames the Hollywood sign in the hills beyond. At Hollywood and Vine, the Broadway Department store built in 1927. Sure it's a historic landmark, but even more so because Barbara worked there as a "Hi-Deb" when she was in high school. The Walk of Fame didn't begin until 1958, and as of today there are 2,690 stars. It felt like we walked over most of them on this hike, but my favorite was Rochelle Hudson's star at 6200 Hollywood Blvd. Family legend has it that my dad named me after her because the star resembled my mom. I like that. Great walk back in time to how the boulevard became the symbol of old Hollywood.