On Thanksgiving morning, my friend Jack and I decided to work up an appetite by hiking up to the Hollywood sign, my first visit to LA’s most iconic landmark. We parked about a half mile away from the trailhead on North Beachwood Drive and made our way up, passing the various storybook homes…
Personal favorite: the faux medieval castle at 2925 N Beachwood, complete with fake turret…
…and on the front, this odd portrait of an archer holding a bird. Lest you think any of it might be new…
…the house is nearly identical to how it looked a year after its construction in 1926:
We arrived at the rather imposing entrance gate and started up the trail…
And man…for a place that regularly seems to find itself on “ugliest cities in America” lists, that’s quite the view.
A little further around, and our destination appeared:
We continued hiking for another 20 minutes or so, swinging around the north side of the mountain and taking in views of the Valley…
…and what looked frighteningly like a swath of Vermont magically teleported into Burbank (actually Forest Lawn, of course):
A little further on and up a dirt path…
…and we arrived at arguably the nine most famous letters in the world:
After enjoying the gorgeous vistas and taking some pictures, there was one last thing I wanted to do before heading back down for turkey: see if anything remained from when there used to be a mountaintop pool behind the Hollywood sign for “bathing beauties.”
A bit of backstory. Looking at the top of Mount Lee today, you’d probably assume it was leveled to accommodate the large radio tower rising up just east of the Hollywood sign. But in fact, it was flattened in 1925 for a different purpose altogether…
To build what would have been among the most mindbogglingly amazing mountaintop residences on the planet:
The above estate was designed for movie director Mack Sennett, famed for having helped birth the slapstick comedy genre. An investor in the burgeoning “Hollywoodland” development, Sennett bought 304 acres on the summit, on which to build a palace fitting for the oft-described “King of Comedy.” With his mother leading the charge, he sent a work crew up to carve 69-feet off the top, creating a 4-acre plot:
Ultimately, Sennett decided against building the estate for a variety of fairly obvious reasons, and the plot remained empty for over a decade. Then, in the late 1930s, part of the property was sold to Thomas Lee, son of pioneering broadcaster Don Lee, who intended to build the highest transmitting tower and television studio in the world at its peak.
This one actually happened.
Built atop the newly christened Mount Lee, the art-moderne studio was able to broadcast further afield than had previously been possible.
While reading up on the studio prior to our hike, I happened to come across a fascinating little-known tidbit in Gregory Paul Williams’s fantastic The Story of Hollywood: there also used to be a pool up there.
The pool was built by Lee for televised “bathing beauty” segments, such as the one pictured below in 1939, the year of the studio’s construction.
The studio was eventually closed and demolished, and decades later, the property wound up in the hands of the city of Los Angeles, who operate the current tower.
The original structures are long gone. But was there any chance a trace of the old pool might have survived?
Making my way precariously around the side, it seemed unlikely – everything appeared to have been paved over.
But then… Looking at an aerial view, you can see that the white foundation line of the original studio building still exists, running along the eastern and southern sides. The pool would’ve been just below the red dot…could something still be lurking just below the tarmac?
Perhaps thousands of years from now, an archaeologist will break through and uncover a still extant mountaintop pool, and wonder: what exactly was a bathing beauty?
-SCOUT
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