Rustic Enclave Trades Hustle for Serenity : Beachwood Canyon: Civilization is just at the end of the street but canyon offers peace and isolation.

When I moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco eight years ago, I didn’t really know much about the city. Just by chance, I wound up living in Beachwood Canyon. In many ways it seemed to me not like Los Angeles at all, this rustic enclave just east of the Hollywood Freeway and west of Griffith Park.

There, beneath the Hollywood sign, was a bulletin board where residents left messages about lost cats and houses to share, and neighbors knew each other by name. In the Beachwood Cafe, one could linger over coffee and peruse the trades. At night, the scent of jasmine drenched the air.

At the time I first lived in Beachwood, as residents call it, I did not know many people in Los Angeles and was working at home. Just down Beachwood Drive was civilization, or what passed for it, in the form of Hollywood. Still, there were many days I chose not to leave the canyon at all, and the only person I would talk to was the checker at the Beachwood Market, the upscale neighborhood grocery.

But for those who wanted it, there was also community involvement.

Periodically, this manifested itself in protests over the “commercialization” of the Hollywood sign, or “alerts” by the homeowners’ group announcing recent neighborhood crimes. After two elderly women were killed crossing Beachwood Drive, residents banded together to pressure City Hall into putting up a stop sign, placing flowers and candles at the site until they got their way.

More recently, homeowners barricaded the street with dumpsters during the riots to prevent intruders from coming through.

I no longer live in Beachwood. But I still often drive up there, on days when I need quiet or a sense of place. It is this combination of seclusion and nature that has attracted most people to the area.

“There are plenty of people who just like to be by themselves, the writer types and music composers,” said longtime Beachwood resident Lamonta Pierson, a broker with Hollywoodland Realty Co. “It’s always been a show business crowd. They like the quiet and the respect from other people.”

Pierson, 63, moved to Beachwood in 1952 with her former husband, actor Jon Shepodd, perhaps best known as the father on “The Lassie Show,” largely because he wanted to be close to Hollywood. The house they bought, and in which she still lives with her second husband, was designed by eminent architect Pierpont Davis. They paid $29,500 for it. A recent appraisal valued the four-bedroom, Mediterranean-style house with vaulted ceilings at $743,000.

“It was the first house we looked at,” recalled Pierson. “We just fell in love with it.”

Like many older residents, Pierson has stayed in Beachwood because of its small-town atmosphere. Her four children grew up there and attended Cheremoya Avenue Elementary School on Beachwood Drive. Pierson herself is active in a local volunteer group sponsored by the Los Angeles Fire Department to train residents in emergency procedures.

“I like it because it’s a neighborhood,” she said. “We get to know people just bumping into them in the coffee shop. It’s got a little spirit all its own. A lot of people discover it every day.”

Julie Carter, a 30-year-old free-lance art director, is typical of another group of people who cluster in Beachwood: young, creative professionals who have come to Los Angeles from somewhere else and are in search of a community.

After graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, she lived in Rome for three years, then San Francisco. Two years ago, when she came to Los Angeles, she knew nothing about the city and didn’t have a job. Today, she’s designing album covers for major record companies.

When Carter decided to buy a house early this year, she searched everywhere. “I looked in Silver Lake. I looked in Los Feliz. I looked in Laurel Canyon but it was way too congested,” she recalled. “I looked at so many houses. One weekend I saw 45 places.”

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Carter eventually bought a three-bedroom, three-bath, Spanish-style house, built in 1930, near the top of the canyon for $500,000. She moved in four months ago.

“It’s amazing here,” she said. “It’s kind of like a Spanish treehouse. I feel like I can look out and no one can look in. It has French windows and doors everywhere. It’s very European, which is something that really appealed to me. . . . I’m in the country and yet all my clients are 10 minutes away. I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

It is precisely this sentiment that Harry Chandler hoped to instill in potential home buyers when he conceived of Hollywoodland, the 500-acre subdivision he built in the canyon beginning in 1923. Earlier in the century, Beachwood got its start when developer Albert Beach had put in a road named after himself, Beachwood Drive. But it took Chandler, then publisher of the Los Angeles Times, to see the potential for development.

He had formed a real estate partnership with M. H. Sherman, director of the Pacific Railway Co., and together the two men had a vision of Hollywoodland as an idyllic setting for the rich and middle-class.

Working with developer S. H. Woodruff, they set out to capitalize on the glamour of Hollywood. As “The Story of Hollywoodland,” a recent locally published book recalls, publicity men or “assistant directors” were deployed to make the tract famous. A huge metal sign spelling out Hollywoodland--later amended to read Hollywood--was erected atop the canyon as a promotional stunt. Costing $21,000, the sign was adorned with thousands of light bulbs, and at night the lights could be seen flashing for miles.

To woo buyers, there were lavish brochures extolling the tract’s protective virtues. “Give the kiddies a chance,” advised one. “Crowded boulevards, dangerous canyons, unknown companions are an ever-present danger to the children of big cities.”

A series of roadways and staircases were built so that residents could easily get to the canyon floor. The developers also zoned a small area for a business center, which included the Hollywoodland Realty Co., a drug store, gasoline station and market.

Chandler played up the area’s exclusivity, which included a strict design code. Homeowners could build a castle or a farmhouse, as long it conformed to French Normandy, Tudor English, Mediterranean and Spanish architecture. It was here, for instance, in 1926, that oil baron Patrick Longden built Castillo del Lago, a Spanish colonial style castle with 32 rooms, an elevator, and city and lake views--all for $250,000. Gangster Bugsy Siegel ran a gambling operation out of the place in the 1930s.

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The 20,000-square-foot castle, which in later years suffered from vandalism and disrepair, was recently restored to its original condition. Two years ago it sold for just over $3.5 million, making it the most expensive property in Beachwood Canyon.

Beyond design restrictions, there were other conditions imposed by Hollywoodland’s developers. “When we bought our lot, it was limited to Caucasians only,” recalled Ruth Godshalk, 90, a retired florist who along with her late husband purchased property in Beachwood for $6,000 in 1926. “That was in the deed and lasted 50 years. In the meantime we’ve had all different races.”

Godshalk and her husband, who worked in the tooling department of Lockheed, built their home in 1937 with a $10,000 loan. In all the years that have passed, with all the changes throughout Los Angeles, the neighborhood has remained pretty much the same, she said, insisting: “I would hate to live anywhere else.”

Chandler’s plans for expanding Hollywoodland ended abruptly when the developers went bankrupt in the crash of ’29. And in the 1960s, the canyon’s architectural integrity became somewhat compromised when lax building codes and cheap land produced a rash of stilt houses and modern apartment complexes. Beachwood now has a ratio of 90% homeowners to 10% renters.

According to Arnold Carlson, a longtime resident and broker with Hollywoodland Realty, the most expensive property the firm has sold in recent months is a five-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath house, built in 1941, featuring a garden, pool and room for 10 cars. The 3,000-square-foot house went for nearly $1.1 million. On average, houses are selling for $600,000, with the cheapest being a contemporary stilt house that recently brought $315,000.

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Such houses notwithstanding, a major draw continues to be the area’s historic architecture. Marilyn Solomon, director of corporate relations and executive producer of information programs at KCOP, recently bought one of the oldest homes in Beachwood with her husband, Allen, assistant vice chancellor of administration at UCLA. The home, built in the mid-20s and occupying two lots, is a two-story Mediterranean with a lush subtropical garden. Originally priced at “800 something,” the three-bedroom home sold for $730,000.

The Solomons, who were living in a “spectacular” Wilshire Boulevard condo, decided to buy in Beachwood because they were looking for a change of lifestyle.

“We have six kids,” said Marilyn Solomon, who is in her mid-50s. “When they moved away we thought, ‘It’s time for a condo.’ But for me it was not satisfying. I missed the outdoors and I missed the birds singing.”

After searching in Santa Monica, Hancock Park, Cheviot Hills, among other places, the couple found their home through an ad in the Real Estate section of The Times. “We discovered Beachwood Canyon really by accident,” said Marilyn Solomon. “My children knew about it. But I tend to stay away from hillside houses in general. I’m just not that crazy about heights. But nowhere else in the city did we find a house like this.”

On the day we spoke, the Solomons were moving in and looking forward, once they got settled, to taking long walks in the hills. Asked if she had noticed a downside to Beachwood yet, Marilyn Solomon mentioned all the gawkers seeking a view of the Hollywood sign.

“It does seem to attract traffic and tourists,” she observed. Still, she added, “Beachwood just has a specialness. It feels very much like the early parts of Los Angeles.”

At a Glance

Population

1991 estimate: 13,334

1980-91 change: +8.1%

Median age:37.5 years

Annual income

Per capita: 31,435

Median household: 41,461

Household distribution

Less than $15,000: 16.4%

$15,000 - $30,000: 22.1%

$30,000 - $50,000: 20.7%

$50,000 - $100,000: 22%

$100,000 + 18.8%