City Stairways--They’re a Step Behind in Upkeep

As Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy showed, living at the top of a hillside stairway can have amusing disadvantages. Their roles as deliverymen carrying a piano up the Del Monte Drive stairs in Silver Lake proved so bumblingly funny that their 1932 film “The Music Box” won an Academy Award.

That concrete stairway is still there, albeit marred by weeds and changed in appearance by a new handrail. It is sometimes a mecca for movie buffs with the lungs and legs to climb 131 steps. More often, the stairway is simply a direct route for pedestrians to get themselves, their pets and their groceries up and down a steep hill covered with circuitous streets. It is, in effect, a vertical sidewalk.

“The Music Box” stairway is one of the more than 100 city-owned stairways in the older, hilly neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Mainly built in the ‘20s and ‘30s, they are vestiges of a slower age, before the automobile conquered the city and made walking a suspect activity. Car-bound, most Angelenos do not notice them, let alone climb them.

That is, except for people who live on or near the stairs and a passionate group of walkers and joggers who consider them to be among the city’s few public spots of quiet and charm. They say the city should maintain, clean and police the stairways better even if only some are heavily used.

“There is something mystical and magical about the stairs,” said Michael Heesy, a Neighborhood Watch captain who lives near the enormous Micheltorena Street stairway in Silver Lake. “They can make you feel that you’re in another country, that you’re not living in smog-polluted L.A.”

“They are a quiet, unsung aspect of the city and certainly something to cherish,” Adah Bakalinsky said. She has written a book about San Francisco’s stairways and has done research in Los Angeles, where she said they appear to be much less cared for.

Scores of Angelenos have no driveways and no sidewalks to connect them to the rest of the world.

“Very few traveling salesman travel this area . . . and very few trick-or-treaters,” said Cortez McCoy, a cartoonist who lives with his family in an ivy-covered house off the middle of the 246-step Landa Street stairway in Silver Lake.

McCoy loves the privacy and the enforced exercise that the stairs provide, but he admits to some problems of life there. The mail and newspaper carriers will climb the steps, but the garbage pickup crews will not. Plus, the concrete steps and landings provide a secluded spot for truants to hang out and paint graffiti.

Michael Heesy recalls that it took a fib to get the Micheltorena Street steps cleaned up. “You could probably walk down them and catch a disease,” he said of the 218 steps that rise from Sunset Boulevard.

After what he said were many calls to the city, Heesy said he called once more and made up a tale that Mayor Tom Bradley was about to visit the stairway. Within a couple of hours, he said, the city sent out a crew to pick up litter and cut back weeds.

A walking survey of about 40 stairways by an out-of-breath Times reporter showed that some city hillside stairways, particularly the concrete ones, are in fine shape. For example, the Camrose Canyon-Hollywood Heights area just south of the Hollywood Bowl is chockful of stairways and walkways built in the 1920s to simulate a Mediterranean village; walking up the steps, sided with vermilion bougainvillea and cypress trees, is like taking a quick trip to Spain.

But many stairways are dirty messes. Plant overgrowth and soil erosion make passage difficult on the 124 steps between Woodshire and Belden drives in Hollywoodland. The wide and once-elegant 66 steps on Laveta Terrace in Echo Park are cracked, poorly patched and covered with graffiti and litter.

A few are downright scary, like the 170 wooden steps up Avalon Street near Elysian Park. Despite repairs, that steep, zig-zagging walkway still bears the blackened burn marks of an arson fire.

Ellen Rabin, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Public Works, said maintenance of municipal stairways are “a real low priority” compared to keeping streets, bridges and sewers in good repair. Budget limitations force the department to concentrate on the facilities that get the most use, she said.

The city does inspect its 41 timber stairways every six months, officials say. And every year, one or two timber ones are replaced by the sturdier concrete. This year, one near Ferntop Drive in El Sereno and another at Bellevue Avenue in Echo Park were replaced for nearly $220,000.

“This isn’t a walking city. . . . So there is not that much pressure (for upkeep),” said Tom Fulton, the Hollywood field deputy for Councilman Michael Woo. Area residents credit Woo’s office with helping to speed repairs for several of the six granite-faced stairways in Hollywoodland.

That neighborhood’s showpiece is a 148-step flight that rises from just off North Beechwood Drive to Belden Drive. It once had a center embankment of flowers and little waterfalls that are now covered with concrete and graffiti. Local activists hope that it can be restored to the grace of the 1920s and declared a city monument for protection from demolition or ugly renovation.

No city stairway has municipal landmark protection, officials say. Twice in the last four years, the Cultural Heritage Commission turned down requests for such status for the “The Music Box” stairs.

Recently, modern lamps and a metal handrail were installed there. Crime-wary residents are pleased, but not Leon Smith, a city detective who has written two books about Laurel and Hardy film locations. “It takes away from its original look,” said Smith, who otherwise evinces great pleasure in standing where “the boys” stood.

In some areas, neighbors also want locked gates to deter criminals and prevent homeless people from making the steps into vertical dormitories. The meandering steps up Whitley Terrace in the Whitley Heights section of Hollywood are already gated.

Residents there say they are so besieged by crime that they have plans to block incoming roads with mechanical gates and to add fences at some of its seven other stairways. Bob Higgins, the president of the local Civic Assn., said, “The stairs give easy access and a certain amount of privacy if you want to do something illegal.”

Police say various stairways in Hollywood and Echo Park have been hangouts for youth gangs but that there have not been any major recent problems. The city is reluctant to gate any but the stairs with the least traffic and most problems.

Bakalinsky, the author of “Stairway Walks in San Francisco,” said crime would decrease and more people would use Los Angeles’ stairways if they were better maintained. She called city stairways “a depressurizing zone, a place where you don’t have to worry about the car behind you. Where you meet only dogs and cats and other people.”

And enjoy a strenuous workout in the process.

Juan Figueroa, for example, has been delivering mail in Hollywood Heights for four years. Inside a tower that resembles an Italian church steeple is the private elevator that he usually rides to reach the fashionable Art Deco apartments above High Tower Drive.

But when the elevator is out of service, he has to hike up several steep flight of steps. That also means that he has to carry all the mail and parcels in a shoulder bag. “I’m not crazy about it,” he said.

But, to ease his pain, he thinks of the guy who has worse troubles--the man who delivers bottled water. Said Figueroa: “I feel sorry for him.”