Hollywood close-up gets ugly
LOS ANGELES -- If you come to Hollywood, you better be ready for your close-up. And if you hike just far enough, you get a great view of the Hollywood sign and likely a visit with Los Angeles City Councilman Tom Lebonge.
Lebonge is an avid hiker and the unofficial ambassador of LA's nine-letter landmark.
"I do love tourists and I do love the people of Los Angeles and I am trying to solve this situation," Lebonge told me.
The situation is this: cars and people all trying to reach the Hollywood sign through a neighborhood home to 20,000 other people. The high traffic area was once a little known access point to LA's Griffith Park.
GPS and the internet have given everyone a map to Sara Jane Schwartz' front door. She's lived in the neighborhood for 35 years.
"It is like inviting people to a public pool where there is no lifeguard," Schwartz said.
She has documented the mayhem, capturing narrow streets lined with tour buses, cars, and hordes of people walking in between them. Some weekends 10,000 people walk past her house.
Schwarz says she's more concerned with the safety risk than the inconvenience the traffic poses.
"Until they can figure out how to make this place safe this should all be shut down," she told me.
The city has restricted parking; there's a guard to keep an eye on things; and big signs try to throw sign-seekers off the trail. But this hike is in a public park and the city says it should stay open.
"I am for the public," Lebonge told Schwartz.
"If the public gets run over in the street that's not being for the public," Schwartz countered.
Ironically the sign was put up in 1923 to attract the public -- homeowners for a new neighborhood called Hollywoodland. But it's the shorter version worthy of a selfie that's now causing so much strife.
