A Guide to the Best of Southern California : LANDMARKS : Flight Plans

In Southern California, the desire to go directly from point A to point B often clashes with undulating terrain. So, when the going gets tough--topographically speaking--some designers take the stairs.

No stairway in Los Angeles commands more architectural attention than the broad Bunker Hill Steps. This $12-million project, loosely modeled after the Spanish Steps in Rome in that it creeps up downtown’s precipitous “Cardiac Hill” at ever-changing angles, opened in 1990 on 5th Street, between Grand and Flower. Cafes on the landing feature alfresco dining. A fountain at the top creates a waterfall that babbles down the center. And along one side is a contemporary concession to the less stout-of-heart--an escalator.

One of cinema’s most famous staircases is on Vendome Street, off Sunset Boulevard, in stair-happy Silver Lake. On these steep concrete steps, understatedly referred to as a “‘stoop” in the 1932 Academy Award-winning film “The Music Box,” Laurel and Hardy waged their hilarious and Sisyphean struggle with a giant piano. The vacant lot seen next to the stairway in the movie is now filled with buildings, but many of the surrounding houses--and the steps themselves--remain unchanged. Although it doesn’t rate as an official cultural monument, old-movie buffs still make pilgrimages to the site.

The climate changes at the top of the stairs in Palm Canyon. The temperature drops as direct sunlight disappears; a surreal display of rays penetrates the overhanging fronds. This fine wooden staircase with polished railings zigzags down 40 feet to the canyon floor, caressed by lush foliage all the way. The design, added to the canyon in San Diego’s Balboa Park in 1979, seems to stem from some arcane architectural consideration. But alas, the circumstances of its birth are mundane. “We had to build the steps around the existing trees,” explains Stan Fye, a project manager for the parks department. “After all, who’d want to mess with a 60-foot palm?”

When Edwin and Harold Janss, the original developers of Westwood Village, bestowed a $50,000 gift upon UCLA in 1930, the brothers had in mind the building of a gateway from their village to the university. Feeling remote and unconnected to that development to the north, however, UCLA instead opted to gussy up its eastern flank with a 195-foot-long, 18-foot-wide brick stairway that rises gracefully from the gymnasiums to Royce and Murphy halls. The Janss Steps have since racked up quite a bit of history. J.F.K., Adlai Stevenson and Martin Luther King Jr. gave speeches there. And sometimes--though the fraternities deny having anything to do with it--a Volkswagen has been known to mysteriously appear on the lamppost-lined stairway.