If you think the Hollywood Hills are plenty developed, thank you, then you might want to put pen to paper and fire off a letter in support of the city's bid to keep
Cahuenga Peak McMansion-free.
The peak, which at 1820 feet towers over Mount Lee and the Hollywood Sign, is one of the last undeveloped pieces of private land in the eastern Santa Monica mountains. The city believes it should be made part of Griffith Park, which it adjuts, to keep the vista of our remaining sage-covered hills intact. The developers who the own the land feel, somewhat unsurprisingly, that the land would be best used by building houses upon it.
I don't have anything against houses in the hills, but I think I can say with some degree of certainty that we probably have enough of them. I know there's a lucrative market for homes in the Hills. People want a house with a view. Well, so do I, and so do millions of other Angelenos who live in the flatlands.
I enjoy my view of the Hills. I also enjoy gawking at the
sometimes spectacular homes nestled in the crenallated folds of the Hills. But at some point the whole meta experience of us looking at them, while they look down on us, both of us knowing we're looking at each other, doesn't quite compensate for the loss of what little open land we still possess.
And so, in what may prove as fruitless an effort as the battle to save the Ambassador Hotel, City officials have taken to shaking the (sparsely leafed) Sacramento money tree, trying to pull down state grants to help finance a municipal purchase of Cahuenga Peak.
To throw your weight behind this effort, you can send your handwritten (what, no email address?) screeds, full of heated "soak the rich" rhetoric, here:
Councilmember Tom Labonge
200 North Spring Street
Room 480
Los Angeles, CA 90012
