An Urban Oasis : A Patch of Serene Beauty Nestles High Above the Madness of L.A.

Elisabeth Clark remembers the winter evening in 1981 when she discovered one of the best kept secrets in Los Angeles.

“It took me over a year to find it,” the sinewy marathon runner said. “It was just sunset and as I walked in, the mist came sweeping toward me. It was so beautiful, so otherworldly. Just three minutes from Hollywood and Vine, and I felt like I was on a Scottish moor.”

Screenwriter and producer Herb Wright said he came upon it by accident.

“We were scouting for a (movie) location,” said the 39-year-old jogger. “I was amazed. Here it was in the middle of Los Angeles . . . this strange Shangri-La in the midst of all this madness. It is as extraordinary as finding a polar bear in the Congo.”

The wildly beautiful spot Wright and Clark came across is a Department of Water and Power facility known simply as the Hollywood Reservoir. Nestled high in the hills above the hustle of Hollywood Boulevard, the 1920s-vintage reservoir feeds drinking water to more than 400,000 people from Hollywood to the Los Angeles Harbor.

Beyond that, it is known to the cadre of runners, walkers and bicyclists who regularly cover the 3.25 miles of pathway around it as an oasis, a special place to be savored not just for its natural beauty but for the camaraderie it fosters.

Framed by a ring of pine-covered hills, the leaf-shaped lake is clear enough that its bottom is visible. A favorite nesting spot for ducks, blue heron, owls and flocks of geese, the reservoir also draws families of deer, coyotes, snakes and even possums.

“I was running one Sunday afternoon and I heard this constant clattering behind me,” Clark said. “It was a doe coming straight at me . . . and for a while, we were running side by side. It was so staggering to have a deer running beside you.”

There are the smells, the pleasant kinds of fragrances that change with the seasons and the colors. Sometimes the scent is apricot, other times the piney odors of the forest.

The only hints of the city are the chain-link fence that protects the lake, a faint hum of freeway traffic in the distance and the block letters of the fabled Hollywood sign perched on a nearby hillside.

The man in charge of keeping it this way is Lowell Stanley, a DWP worker who has lived for the last six years in a 1,200-square-foot cottage on the edge of the Mulholland Dam, the 188-foot-high edifice that keeps the reservoir waters in check. One jogger affectionately calls Stanley “the moral fiber” of the spot.

For a salary of $30,317 a year and the right to live rent-free on the grounds, Stanley does round-the-clock duty as a maintenance man and general watch-dog. He knows most of the regulars by name, describes their habits and, for some, is a sounding board for problems.

“The Hollywood lake is like his Walden Pond,” Wright said. “He really cares about it, cares about us as runners.”

For his part, Stanley considers himself the “luckiest man in Los Angeles.”

“You come up here and it’s like a private little paradise,” said Stanley, a man who can call out the names of birds and trees as readily as he can quote a literary classic.

“When the clouds are scudding across the skyline or it’s raining, you don’t even think you’re in this country. . . . You can smell the wind. This is the perfect place to live.

“And as long as I do my job, I’ll have a place here.”

Completed in 1924 after 14 months of construction and dedicated in 1925, the reservoir even then, without the vast expanses of eucalyptus, pine trees and other foliage that gives it a unique flavor, was something special.

“My associates are in the habit of twitting me on the appearance of all the work I have done elsewhere,” dam engineer William Mulholland said at the official dedication. The man who spearheaded construction of the aqueduct that brings water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles, Mulholland said critics had likened his earlier work to “an old woman’s apron--an object of utility but not of beauty.

“But in this project I may take a little pardonable pride.”

The only one of the DWP’s 24 reservoirs where the grounds are open to the public, the lake and its massive dam have been spotlighted time and again over the years in movies and on weather segments of local news programs.

In the 1974 film “Chinatown,” one character is found dead along the shores of the lake and in the disaster epic “Earthquake,” it is the Mulholland Dam that supposedly cracks, pouring an avalanche of water onto the city.

Despite starring roles, however, the privacy of the reservoir is what has proved most magnetic to those who return to it. Fiercely protective of the reservoir and watchful of one another, they will stoop to pick up garbage and make special trips to help Stanley and other DWP workers paint over the inevitable graffiti.

Last year, when their right to park along a roadside leading in from the Hollywood side of the reservoir was impeded by No Parking signs (a second access road is on the San Fernando Valley side), the regulars waged a spirited campaign for change.

They circulated petitions, flooded Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo’s office with complaints and, in a form of civil disobedience, uprooted some of the signs and backed their cars over others. As a result, a larger parking area was opened adjacent to the dam.

“We were receiving an awful lot of letters and calls from the joggers there,” said Pat Michell, an aide to Woo. “They were placing flyers on telephone (poles) with the name of someone on our office on them. . . . We worked doubly hard and helped work out a solution.”

Once peace and their right to park was restored, the joggers, walkers and bicyclists got quickly back to their regular routines. The songwriters got back to etching sheet music in their heads, one minister to composing his Sunday sermon as he jogged, the bicycling lawyers to thinking out their cases.

“It’s kind of an expansive, problem-solving time,” Clark explained. “That’s what is so nice about the long expanse of running space. Your mind can go far away to areas you don’t explore all the time.”

The friendships the regulars make are based mostly on their shared love of the place. They swap anecdotes about their lives and trade remedies for the injuries that sometimes plague runners.

“I have made an enormous number of friends,” said Cecelia Avidor, a 57-year-old nurse who walks the half-mile from her house to the reservoir to jog four days a week.

“I don’t know their last names, I have no idea where they live. But I know all about their lives, their happinesses and their tragedies.

“This is a place to exorcise demons. You can be depressed, tired, irritable, and you go up there in the fresh air, you see your friends, you talk a little, you jog a little and you feel like a million bucks.”

Wright said he has regularly taken his paces at the reservoir for the last six or seven years. And he doesn’t even like running.

“I’m one of those runners who runs with a Walkman to cover up the fact that I don’t like to hear my heartbeat, my feet pounding on the pavement,” he said. “I just like the benefits, the way it makes me feel to be there.

“Having the lake there is one of the reasons I stay in Hollywood. It’s a reminder of the good things that can still happen.”

And, at the reservoir, the things that happen are mostly good.

Despite its proximity to the city, the spot is relatively crime-free. Stanley says there has been only one death in recent times, and that was a jogger felled by a heart attack.

“It’s a place where people can come and just enjoy being by themselves. We’ve never had a problem here,” Stanley said.

Aside from noise and littering sometimes caused by local teen-agers and an occasional trespasser (the reservoir is closed at night and during the early afternoon, except on weekends), Stanley said his major worry has to do with the sunsets each night.

Laughing, he posed the problem:

“Will it be a 10 or will it be a 6?”