Not so long ago, the hike to the Hollywood sign was one of Los Angeles’s better-kept secrets. Now, in the words of one local resident, it’s a “goat rodeo”.  Every weekend the narrow, winding streets of Beachwood Canyon – or Hollywoodland, as the original land developers called it – turn into a chaotic mess of tour buses that can’t turn around, cars that can’t park and pedestrians with nowhere to go to the bathroom unless they knock on people’s doors and beg.  Residents routinely find their driveways blocked, their cars dented, the streets impassable. They can’t get down the hill into town, and fire trucks and other emergency vehicles couldn’t get up even if a brushfire started – a risk greatly exacerbated by tourists ignoring the stern “Smokey Bear” no-smoking signs and tossing their butts into the tinder-dry brush of Mt Lee.  For four years, residents have been growing more exasperated with their city councilman and with public agencies who have either denied the problem exists or pointed the finger at each other instead of getting together to solve it. Now the residents have decided enough is enough, and called in the lawyers.  “It’s a matter of time before we’re burned out or someone is hit by a car. We’re a time bomb,” says Sarajane Schwartz, a former actress who lives near the top of the hill with her husband and devotes herself full-time to what has become an epic battle with City Hall.  “If Disneyland had this sort of operation, they would close it in 10 seconds. No other neighborhood would put up with it. Why should we?”  Schwartz is spearheading one of two lawsuits to accuse the city of repeatedly violating its own regulations and actively encouraging the tourists to come by building a roadside viewing site and opening a new pedestrian access point to the sign. One was filed last December, the other earlier this month.  Everything is a violation, Schwartz says: the tour buses that exceed the 6,000lb vehicle weight limit for the neighbourhood, the smokers who ignore the no-smoking signs, the cars that park in front of fire hydrants or block driveways. Just last Sunday, a tourist was seen tossing a match over a fence, taking a selfie in front of the small fire he started and then driving away.  “I’m afraid it’s going to take a death to change things up here,” says another activist resident, Tony Fisch. “We’ve put the city on notice – the mayor and every city department head. If someone dies, they can expect us to file a liability lawsuit seeking maximum punitive damages for their egregious conduct and wilful dereliction of their responsibilities.”  For a long time, the Beachwood Canyon residents were treated as classic not-in-my-backyard whiners: enjoying their own close-up views of the Hollywood sign and resenting anyone else who sought out the same thing. But in the corridors of city hall at least, the tone is now changing.  The Los Angeles fire department, in official letters and in private conversations, is now acknowledging there is a serious problem – not least because Mt Lee is also the staging ground for the city’s most sensitive emergency equipment and they need to access it.  Beachwood Canyon is considered a high-risk fire zone – it was here that the author Aldous Huxley lost his house and many of his papers in a 1961 fire – and the fear of another major conflagration has been deepened by a 40-year build-up of combustible chaparral andCalifornia’s four-year-old drought.  The Recreation and Parks department is considering opening up a completely different access road to give tourists a view of the Hollywood sign and running shuttle buses from the Griffith Observatory four miles away to get them there. A pilot program, minus the shuttle buses, was tried last spring and proved hugely popular.  The wheels of city bureaucracy move slowly, however, and the councilman responsible for the area over the past 15 years, Tom LaBonge, has issued a series of statements and executive decisions that have seemed baffling and contradictory.  LaBonge, who stepped down 10 days ago because of local term-limit rules, has often said the congestion in Beachwood Canyon was created by GPS technology and claimed that it was local residents who requested the viewing site and the other modifications he has made over the past four years.  Residents, however, place blame for the problem squarely on him, saying he held repeated press conferences beneath the Hollywood sign and all but invited the public to come up and enjoy it for themselves.  “Every time he’d speak, it would create three times the traffic in the immediate aftermath and about twice the traffic over the long term,” Fisch alleged. “Tom tied his political brand to the sign. He’d talk about finding a balance between safety and access, but that’s not what he’s done.”  According to the residents, LaBonge considered sending shuttle buses up Beachwood Drive and wanted to ban parking on one side of the 22ft-wide road to make more room for tour groups. LaBonge was not available to comment on this story, but the written record shows that in January 2014 LaBonge himself acknowledged the situation was unsustainable and proposed closing the hiking trails to the Hollywood sign for six months – something that never happened.  In January of this year, in a press release announcing the opening of the new pedestrian access, he was quoted inviting “all visitors” to use it. He didn’t mention the Hollywood sign, only the vast expanse of Griffith Park on whose edge it sits. The release went on to recommend that visitors to the sign park at the Observatory instead.  “There have been so many mixed messages,” Schwartz said.  LaBonge had hoped to be succeeded by his chief of staff, Carolyn Ramsay, but Ramsay ran into a wall of furious opposition from Beachwood Canyon residents who voted instead for a political unknown, David Ryu, who pledged a change of tone and to work for their safety. Ryu took up his post at the beginning of the month.  Almost nobody from the city wanted to go on the record because of the lawsuits, saying the matter was now in the hands of the attorneys. Privately, however, officials acknowledged that LaBonge had undertaken some projects without the usual collaboration with city agencies.  It appears that some of the mixed messages have been the result of head-butting between different city agencies. The broad contours of a solution seem relatively obvious: create a safe viewing area elsewhere inside GriffithPark and crack down on the tour buses, illegal parkers and smokers until they are duly deterred.  Residents say law enforcement has been more visible in the last 10 days already. There are several difficulties to confront, however. The city has just three rangers available for the entire expanse of GriffithPark, which includes a zoo, several children’s play areas and more than 4,000 acres of wilderness. The proposed new viewing site on Mt Hollywood Drive is popular with mountain bikers who have already grumbled about the place being overrun with tourists. And the view of the sign from the new sight is at a slight angle, not full on.  All eyes are now on David Ryu, the new councilman, whose chief of staff told the Guardian the situation was “dysfunctional” and that the proposals up to now had been “Band-Aid solutions” at best.  “You can’t please everyone,” Sarah Dusseault said, “but we need to find a holistic solution that puts the safety of the residents and tourists first.”  She put no timeline on how long that solution would take.
Residents of LA’s Beachwood Canyon prepare to take on City Hall as years of pointing fingers over violations now in the hands of lawyers