CITYSCAPE

As personality quirks go, it’s a fairly minor one: I see a flight of stairs and I feel compelled, depending on where I’m standing, to either ascend it or descend it.

Stairs go up and stairs go down. They are yin and yang. They are Zen.

Los Angeles is a city that seems flat, but isn’t. I spent four years climbing the stairs of Silver Lake and Los Feliz, and kept coming upon more of them. I’d leave at 7 in the morning, and listen to the city wake up as I huffed and puffed up such wonderments of late-’20s municipal works as the Cove Avenue steps, which rise from the Silver Lake reservoir to the very well-named Apex Avenue, offering a dizzying, dazzling view of the water below, a coterie of Neutra and Schindler houses and the Hollywood Hills. From there, it was possible to connect with the nearby Loma Vista Place steps and the Ayr Street steps, each carrying me farther and farther from home. Along the Ayr steps were small bungalows called “step houses,” reachable only by, obviously, steps.

When I want to impress fellow walkers with the wonders of stairs, I take them to Radio Walk, which begins not far from the Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz, and climb, level after level, to Ronda Vista Drive, another aptly named street, with a view of Griffith Park and Glendale to the north. It’s a trickster of a climb, for every time you think you’ve reached the top, another flight looms before you. It’s not for the faint of heart, or the weak of knee.

Ultimately, all stair climbers wind up in Santa Monica, taking the steps from Rustic Canyon up to Adelaide and 4th. These are the Sports Connection of steps, 189 of them and steep, perfect for body watchers. And there are some serious bodies to behold--thighs and calves that have gone up and down these steps hundreds of times. At the top, there’s a beautiful street where you can gasp and sweat, and wonder why people always say that going downstairs is as difficult as going up.