HOLLYWOOD — There are, by Ellen Marsh’s count, 4,812 steps in the public stairways that stitch the Hollywood hills together, and she has walked all of them, some hundreds of times, a few she wishes she could forget.
Marsh, 67, a retired schoolteacher who lives near Beachwood Drive, is one of a small, informal fraternity of hillside walkers who treat the stairways less as infrastructure than as a shared possession. This month the city gave that possession something it has lacked for years: a repair budget. The Bureau of Engineering confirmed it has set aside roughly $600,000 to rebuild or stabilize eight of the hillside stairways, the first meaningful money aimed at them in more than a decade.
The stairways are a legacy of the hills’ early streetcar era, when developers cut concrete shortcuts so residents could climb from the car stops to houses the roads reached only by long switchbacks. Dozens survive across Beachwood, Whitley Heights and the streets below the sign. Some are immaculate. Others have buckled where roots got under them, lost handrails to rust, or filled with the slow debris of a hillside that never stops moving downhill.
“People think of them as scenic. They are also the only flat-out shortcut some of us have to a bus,” said Marsh, who keeps a laminated map of the network and a notebook logging cracked treads by stairway. She submitted a version of that notebook to the bureau last winter, unasked.
Which eight get fixed first is the live question. The bureau says it ranked the stairways by a mix of structural risk and daily use, giving weight to the ones that serve as genuine through-routes rather than dead-end views. A project manager, Desmond Ochoa, said the worst case on the list is a stairway off Woodhaven Drive where a section of retaining wall has separated enough that the crew will rebuild it rather than patch it. “That one isn’t cosmetic,” Ochoa said. “That one, we close if we wait much longer.”
Not everyone agrees with the ranking. A walker named Rudy Salas, 72, who climbs a stairway near Deronda Drive most mornings, argued the list favors the busy routes over the dangerous ones and left off a flight he considers a broken ankle waiting to happen. He has emailed the bureau twice. Ochoa said the list is not final until the survey work is done this summer, and that complaints like Salas’s are exactly what the survey is meant to test.
The repairs are scheduled to begin in the fall and run into next year, one stairway at a time, with each closed while the crew works it. Marsh has already asked whether she can walk the finished flights before they reopen, to check the step count against her notebook. Nobody has told her no.