HOLLYWOOD — From the ninth-floor deck of the newest bar on Cahuenga, you can count three other rooftop bars, and on a clear night the wash of light off the plunge pool on top of each.
By a Times tally, at least eleven rooftop bars and restaurants have opened above or within a few blocks of Hollywood Boulevard since 2022. Two more are permitted and under construction. The logic behind the wave is not hard to follow: a hotel or an office tower already owns its roof, and putting a bar up there converts dead square footage into the most expensive seats in the building.
“The view is the product,” said Dominic Reyes, 44, a hospitality consultant who has worked on four of the openings. “Nobody’s really paying twenty-two dollars for the cocktail. They’re paying for forty-five minutes of being above the city instead of stuck in it. Altitude carries a premium, and up here you can charge it.”
The economics look sunnier from the roof than from the floor. Most of the jobs the boom creates — servers, bartenders, barbacks, the runners who move trays up service elevators until two in the morning — are tipped positions, which ties a worker’s take to the size and mood of the crowd.
“A good Saturday in October, I’ll clear in one shift what a dead Tuesday in February needs a whole week to reach,” said Talia Okonkwo, 27, who has tended bar on two Hollywood rooftops and asked that neither be identified. “The hourly is the hourly. Everything that matters is the tip pool, and the tip pool is just the weather and how many tourists came up the elevator.”
That volatility is the quiet term of employment across the sector. Rooftops live and die on foot traffic and fair skies, and both are seasonal. Several managers said they staff up hard from May through the fall and then cut shifts through the winter, when a cold snap can empty a deck by nine.
There is also the matter of the ground below. Residents in the apartments behind Cahuenga and Selma have filed a steady trickle of noise complaints, especially over the low thud of DJ sets, which carries farther at height than promoters seem to expect.
“Sound goes up, and then it comes back down on us,” said Marguerite Yee, 58, who has lived in a rent-stabilized building near one of the newer venues for two decades. “They built a party on the ninth floor and I get the bass in my bedroom on the third. Nobody asked the third floor.”
Reyes acknowledged the friction and said the better operators are learning to angle their speakers inward and cut the volume after a certain hour, if only to keep their permits. Whether that holds through a busy summer is, he allowed, “a question the neighbors will answer before I do.”
For now the roofs keep opening. On the Cahuenga deck at dusk, the first tables filled, the elevator ran full in both directions, and a barback named Hector wheeled up the night’s third load of ice, having taken two buses to get there.