HOLLYWOOD — At 6:20 on a Tuesday evening, the woman in the folding chair at the top of the driveway is not enjoying the weather. She is holding the space.
“It’s my driveway,” said Marguerite Delacroix-Pyne, 76, who has lived on the same street off Highland since 1979 and who spends perhaps twenty evenings a summer sitting at the foot of her own curb cut with a paperback. “If I’m not out here, somebody parks across it, and then I am the one calling a tow truck at eleven at night and waiting an hour for it. The chair is easier than the phone call.”
This is high season in the canyon. The Hollywood Bowl’s summer schedule runs through September, and on a full night it puts something close to 17,000 people into an amphitheater reachable, in practical terms, by one road. The venue has spent decades engineering around that fact: stacked parking, park-and-ride buses from a dozen lots around the county, shuttles from the Metro station at Hollywood and Highland, and a fleet of traffic officers who reverse the flow on Highland after the last encore. On the whole, the machinery works. What it cannot do is prevent the last few hundred drivers from deciding, somewhere around Odin Street, to try their luck uphill.
The uphill streets are narrow, mostly unstriped, and lined on both sides with houses whose garages were built for a Model A. Several are preferential-parking districts, which means residents display a permit and everyone else theoretically does not park. Enforcement on a concert night is a question of how many officers exist.
“There are four kinds of nights,” said Ambrose Kettleman, who has kept notes for a hillside neighborhood association since 2011 with an engineer’s grim thoroughness. “A weeknight classical program, which is fine. A pops weekend, which is busy. A sold-out headliner, which is bad. And the fireworks nights, which are their own category and which I have stopped trying to describe to people who don’t live here.”
His association’s long-standing requests are modest and mostly unfulfilled: two more enforcement officers on high-attendance nights, a physical barrier at one specific corner where drivers attempt a turn the road does not permit, and a public posting of expected attendance so residents can plan their own evenings. The venue publishes its schedule; it does not publish its projections.
The venue’s own position, delivered through a spokesman, is that it moves a majority of its audience by shuttle and bus precisely to keep cars out of the canyon, that ridership on those services is at its highest in years, and that it has funded neighborhood traffic mitigation for decades. All of that is true. Residents’ reply is also true, and narrower: the mitigation is measured across an audience of 17,000, and the problem is experienced one blocked driveway at a time.
Between those two truths, an informal accommodation has grown up over forty years, and it is genuinely more cordial than the annual complaints suggest. Neighbors on one street have an arrangement with the drivers who come every season, a nod and a spot behind the retaining wall. Two households rent their driveways for the summer to the same subscribers, at rates they decline to discuss on the record. A man on Bolton has been directing strangers to legal parking two blocks down since 1994, on the theory that a person who is told where to go stops circling.
And there is the other side of the ledger, which nobody in the canyon forgets to mention. On a quiet Tuesday in August, with the windows open, the music comes up the hill for free.
“I heard the Ninth from my kitchen,” Ms. Delacroix-Pyne said. “I did the dishes to the whole fourth movement. Then I came out here and sat in the chair, because somebody always tries the driveway during the applause.”