Nostalgia Steps Out at the Stairways : Landmark: Roaring ‘20s tunes, a tap-dancer in vintage attire, bubbles and a red ribbon made the reopening of Hollywoodland’s granite steps a gala affair.

Laurel and Hardy couldn’t make it, so the piano came by van for the ceremony to rededicate the public stairways of Hollywoodland.

Except for the comic duo, whose piano-moving efforts on a steep public stairway were immortalized in the 1932 film “The Music Box,” not much else was missing from Monday’s event on Beachwood Drive.

As bubbles wafted up from a bubble machine, a pianist tickled away on the upright, a baritone belted out George Gershwin’s 1922 hit, “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” and a tap-dancer twinkled her way down the refurbished granite steps.

There was even a red ribbon to cut, and City Councilman John Ferraro was there to cut it.

“We go back a long time with these stairs and we want to preserve them forever,” said Ferraro, who dug into the city’s Bridge and Tunnel Maintenance Fund to find $92,000 to fix Hollywoodland’s six public stairways.

City officials said the use of bridge and tunnel funds was justified by the hazardous condition of the stairways, which were broken, overgrown by weeds and lacking railings after nearly 70 years of use.

It was a moment to savor for Christine O’Brien, vice president of the Hollywoodland Homeowners Assn., who admitted to being a bit of a pest about the stairways.

“Every few weeks (city officials) would get a phone call,” she said, describing the four-year process that led to Monday’s event.

It took a year to get an engineering survey. Then the city had to find the money, design the project, hire a contractor and find more of the granite that was used to build the stairways in the mid-1920s.

Shailesh Patel, a city structural engineer, said he had no original documents to work from when he drew up the plans. The stairways were built by the developers of Hollywoodland, one of the first subdivisions in the Hollywood Hills.

To replace crumbling granite blocks, workers went back to the original quarry, at the north end of Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park.

Instead of the original topping of plaster or concrete, which tend to break down in a few years, the stairs are now covered with Sikatop 111, a synthetic product that lasts for decades, Patel said.

Work is not yet finished on two of the six stairways, but should be completed by mid-December, O’Brien said.

Joel Schiller, a movie industry art director who lives nearby, praised the quality of the work, which was performed by Ryco Construction Inc.

“We thought they’d just cast the steps or do it out rough, but they were very sensitive to the restoration,” he said. “Now a new generation will have a chance to see what it was like in the ‘20s.”

Jannette Kanst Mathewson, who played along those stairways on her way home from the Cheremoya Avenue Grammar School almost 70 years ago, could not make it for the ceremony, but she sent along her memories in a letter.

“I collected polliwogs and moss from the little pool on the stairs and took them home to develop into little frogs,” she wrote.

The pool, part of a waterfall that once cascaded down the stretch between Beachwood Drive and Belden Drive, was cemented over years ago because the frogs were too noisy, according to Larry Gordon, a Times reporter and co-author of “Stairway Walks of Los Angeles,” a walking guide.

In the interest of water conservation, the waterfall will not be restored, Patel said.

There are about 200 public stairways in the city, almost all of them built of utilitarian concrete.

“These are especially fancy with the granite facing,” Gordon said.

Some neighborhoods elsewhere in the hills have fenced off their stairways or asked the city to close them for fear of intruders, but O’Brien said that was not a problem in Hollywoodland, which nestles at the foot of the famous Hollywood sign, a relic of the original real estate development.

Residents resent the tourists whose cars prowl their curving streets in hopes of reaching that inaccessible landmark. But O’Brien said that visitors are welcome to ascend the stairways, whose shaded risers offer offer glimpses of terraced cactus gardens, morning glories, fig trees and vistas of homes on the steep canyon sides.

“They’re tucked away, and a lot of people don’t know where they are,” she said. “We’d really like people to enjoy them if they’re willing to climb them.”

Here are the six stairway locations: from 2477 Westshire Drive to 2823 Pelham Place; 2800 Beachwood Drive to 2835 Westshire Drive; 3020 Beachwood Drive to 3057 Hollyridge Drive; 2795 Woodshire Drive to 2872 Belden Drive; 2829 Beachwood Drive to 2960 Belden Drive, and 2917 Belden Drive to 2950 Durand Drive.