Thanks, in large part, to its proximity to many early film studios – Silver Lake has been home to numerous film stars since at least the 1910s. Not all of those stars were human. There was, for example, Tom Mix’s horse, Old Blue, who is rumored to be buried underneath the parking lot in front of the East West Bank on Glendale Boulevard. There was also the Descanso-Vendome Stairs, a public stair street with no IMDB entry but at least four co-starring roles, including in one Oscar-winning film.
The Descanso-Vendome Stairs – long ago renamed the Music Box Steps – are the centerpiece of the annual Music Box Steps Day. The Silver Lake Improvement Association’s 30th Music Box Steps Day will take place on the 19th of October in Silver Lake’s Laurel and Hardy Park, from 11:00 am until 4:00 pm. In recognition of this momentous occasion, a Silver Lake stakeholder suggested an Ask Silver Lake about the annual festival and I thought it might be nice to do just that – but to expand the focus to all of the known appearances of Silver Lake’s stair streets in film. Given the attention paid to The Music Box, it may surprise some readers to learn that not only was it not the first comedy to feature that stairway, it was not even the first Laurel and Hardy comedy to do so. Furthermore, at least three of Silver Lake’s public stair streets have been prominently featured in films.
THE PEST (dir. Broncho Billy Anderson, 1922)
Most of our public stairs were constructed in the 1920s to facilitate pedestrian access between homes and the rail transit lines operated by the Pacific Electric Railway (PE). The longest stairway in Silver Lake, the 182-step Loma Vista Stairs, connected to PE’s Glendale-Burbank Line. The first known film to feature one of the communty’s public stairways was 1922’s The Pest, starring a solo Stan Laurel five years before he teamed up with Oliver Hardy. In The Pest, the stairs are not the central feature of the film but are prominently featured. The particular stairs in question were the Cove Avenue Stairs, which were built to provide access to the Edendale & Semi-Tropic Park Station.
Semi-Tropic Park was a campground in Elysian Heights that was used by the ghost-consulting Semi-Tropic Spiritualists. Edendale was the pre-Silver Lake community that rose to prominence as the original hub of West Coast filmmaking in the 1900s. A short stretch of Glendale Boulevard (then Allesandro Street) was historically home to at least thirty film studios. PE’s ended service through Edendale in 1955. Its right-of-way was taken over by the Glendale Freeway, the stub of which was completed in 1958. The neighborhood’s edenic character having thus been thoroughly obliterated, the Edendale name soon faded from use and what was historically Edendale came to be regarded as an area divided by Silver Lake and Echo Park.
Photograph of filming of a kitchen scene at the Mack Sennett studio in Edendale, circa 1918.
ISN’T LIFE TERRIBLE? (dir. Leo McCarey, 1925)
The Pest was filmed on the eastern Cove Avenue Stairs, on the Elysian Heights side of the rail line. The first film known to have been shot in what’s now Silver Lake was 1925’s Isn’t Life Terrible? The comedy starred Baltimore-born comedian, Charley Chase. The film was made for Culver City-based Hal Roach Studios, but Chase may’ve been familiar with the steps from his previous tenure at Mack Sennett’s still-standing Keystone Studios in Edendale (behind a Jack in the Box). Chase plays a hapless pen salesman tasked with working the fictional “Hill View District,” which provides the justification for a brief shot of the stairs that came to be named the Music Box Steps. The film also noteworthily features Oliver Hardy, then still two years from pairing with Stan Laurel.
ICE COLD COCOS (dir. Del Lord, 1926)
The stairs now known as the Music Box Steps next appeared, this time more prominently, in the 1926 Billy Bevan comedy, Ice Cold Cocos. Bevan was an Australian comedian who came to Edendale to work in Mack Sennett’s studios. In Ice Cold Cocos, the stairs truly have their first starring role. Bevan plays Gus Gander, an ice delivery man. The plot of the comedy concerns his efforts to successfully deliver heavy blocks of ice from the street below to the house at the tops of the stairs.
HATS OFF (dir. Hal Yates, 1927)
In the silent era, short films were cranked out at a furious pace. English comedian Stan Laurel and Georgia-born Oliver Hardy had already appeared in the same films ten times before they officially teamed up as Laurel & Hardy in 1927. Their first vehicle, The Second Hundred Years, was released on the 8th of October. Their second, with Charley Chase, was released a week later. Hats Off, released on the 5th of November, was only their third. In this Hal Roach comedy, Stan and Ollie lug an unwieldy washing machine up the public stairway to a woman whom they believe is a potential customer – only to find out that she merely wishes for them to post a letter for her. Hats Off is, unfortunately, a lost film.
THE MUSIC BOX (dir. James Parrott, 1932)
Four and a half years after Hats Off, Laurel and Hardy returned to the Descanso-Vendome stairs. This time, instead of a washing machine, the duo were attempting to deliver a player piano (the titular “music box”). This was the first sound film to feature the stairs and feels like a nod to both Ice Cold Cocos and Hats Off. The final gag, involving a leaky pen, feels like a call back to Isn’t Life Terrible?
The 133-step public stair street connecting Descanso Drive above with Vendome Street below was officially named the Music Box Steps in 1995, at the very first Music Box Steps Day. At that time, a plaque paid for by Hollywood Heritage Museum., the Society of Operating Cameramen, the Silent Society, and the Silverlake Improvement Association was installed at the base of the staircase. In 1997, the film was selected by the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for preservation. In 2011, the nearby pocket park, the Del Monte Triangle, was renamed Laurel and Hardy Park.
AN ACHE IN EVERY STAKE (dir. Del Lord, 1941)
In 1941, another comedic team, the Three Stooges, took a swing at Silver Lake’s stairs in the comedy, An Ache in Every Stake. This time it was the Edendale Stairs that co-starred. The director, Del Lord, was the same filmmaker that had made Ice Cold Cocos fifteen years earlier, once again mining comedy gold from ice delivery men pitted against long public stairways – albeit with Larry, Curly, and Moe in place of Billy Bevan – and, therefore, a lot more stoogey ultraviolence.
IT’S YOUR MOVE (dir. Hal Yates, 1945)
Like Del Lord with the Stooges, Hal Yates – director of Hats Off – returned yet again to Silver Lake’s stairs (this time the Descanso Stairs) for a remake starring Edgar Kennedy, titled It’s Your Move. Because the last known screening of Hats Off took place in 1930, the comedic set-up of trying to deliver a washing machine up a stairway maybe felt less familiar than it otherwise would have.
L.A. STORY (dir. Milt Jackson, 1991)
After It’s Your Move, Silver Lake’s stairs retired from their illustrious film career. And after the transit railways were removed, the stairways were forgotten, by most, for decades. In the 1990s, like many faded film stars rediscovered by a new generation, the stairs enjoyed a surprising career resurgence.
Several key events took place at the dawn of that decade. The Los Angeles Metro Rail was launched, reintroducing some Angelenos to mass transit. That same year, Adah Bakalinsky and Larry Gordon’s book, Stairway Walks in Los Angeles, reintroduced Angelenos to their public stairs. And finally, it was also in 1990 that filming took place for a satire about, among other things, about car dependency: L.A. Story.
In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Steve Martin’s pathologically carbrained television weatherman distractedly barrels down a public stairway, oblivious or unconcerned with the stair users who jump out of the way of his careening Chrysler LeBaron. The public stair street, in this instance, was Silver Lake’s Marathon Street Stairs.
At 30 years, Music Box Steps has at this point outlasted Laurel and Hardy’s professional partnership by three years and, like them, it may not last forever. Hopefully you can attend and perhaps get involved with maintaining this tradition. Maybe, in fact, you will be inspired to create even more stair-centered festivals around Silver Lake. Who else is down for a Three Stooges Stairway Festival or an L.A. Story Day?
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Eric Brightwell is an adventurer, essayist, rambler, explorer, cartographer, and guerrilla gardener who is always seeking paid writing, speaking, traveling, and art opportunities. He is not interested in generating advertorials, cranking out clickbait, or laboring away in a listicle mill “for exposure.”
Brightwell has written for Angels Walk LA, Amoeblog, Boom: A Journal of California, diaCRITICS, Hey Freelancer!, Hidden Los Angeles, and KCET Departures. His art has been featured by the American Institute of Architects, the Architecture & Design Museum, the Craft Contemporary, Form Follows Function, the Los Angeles County Store, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms With Los Angeles, Skid Row Housing Trust, the 1650 Gallery, and Abundant Housing LA.
Brightwell has been featured as subject and/or guest in The Los Angeles Times, VICE, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Magazine, LAist, CurbedLA, Office Hours Live, L.A. Untangled, Spectrum News, Eastsider LA, Boing Boing, Los Angeles, I’m Yours, Notebook on Cities and Culture, the Silver Lake History Collective, KCRW‘s Which Way, LA?, All Valley Everything, Hear in LA, KPCC‘s How to LA, at Emerson College, and at the University of Southern California. He is the co-host of the podcast, Nobody Drives in LA.
Brightwell has written a haiku-inspired guidebook, Los Angeles Neighborhoods — From Academy Hill to Zamperini Field and All Points Between, that he hopes to have published. If you’re a literary agent or publisher, please contact him.
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