The pandemic had some people climbing the walls. Me, I climbed stairs.
Of the 42 walks in “Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles,” it had taken me 10 years to accomplish just under half of them. Over the past year, with my weekends suddenly cleared of social or cultural engagements, I zoomed through the rest, as well as an equal number in the related book “Walking L.A.”
The self-guided, roughly one-hour “Secret Stairs” walks, largely around Echo Park, Silver Lake and the Hollywood Hills, were just the tonic I needed: a change of scene, outdoor exercise, a challenge, a goal.
I knew I was taking my “Secret Stairs” quest seriously when, for Labor Day weekend last year, I got a motel in Santa Monica in part to knock off walks in Rustic Canyon and Pacific Palisades.
After recently completing 41 of the 42 walks came the one I’d been saving for last: the Music Box Steps in Silver Lake. To make an occasion out of it, I extended an invitation to “Secret Stairs” author Charles Fleming to join me on my victory lap.
Fleming, L.A.’s stair master, meets me one morning last week at the walk’s starting point, Cafe Tropical on Sunset Boulevard, with his dog. Biscuit is 100% mutt but also 100% trouper, making the 2-mile loop, which included 689 steps up or down, without complaint.
A member of the Silver Lake Litter League, Fleming totes a grabber to pick up trash along the way, putting candy wrappers, cigarette butts, plastic bottles and discarded masks into a plastic bag clipped to his belt. He says he might as well improve the surroundings as he walks.
We go up or down six sets of stairs on the walk, which his book gives a 3 out of 5 rating for difficulty, and talk about the genesis of his book.
Hillside neighborhoods like these were built in the 1920s, with public stairs giving residents a way to get down to the main street to catch a streetcar or bus or walk to school or the market.
By the time Fleming, a Silver Lake resident, got interested in them in the 2000s, cars had long since taken over and the stairs had fallen into neglect. Still, he mapped them and was surprised how many there were.
A writer and journalist, he put together an L.A. version of the pub walk books he’d seen in England. Starting and ending at restaurants or coffeehouses, his 42 walks cover 235 individual staircases and about 21,000 individual stairs. I was taking the final ones.
In his research, Fleming found neighborhoods he’d never heard of, like Hermon, near Highland Park, and fascinating sights off the main boulevards.
“We tend to be such car people,” Fleming, 66, tells me as we set off. “The places cars don’t go tend to be unknown.”
On this walk alone, there’s an old air raid siren, a Moorish-style apartment building with minarets, a tiled fountain, a block of Craftsman houses, a deconsecrated church that’s now a residence and distant views of the downtown skyline.
What always wows me is the variety of architectural styles I encounter, from Tudor to Modernist, sometimes in the same block. Our flat, cookie-cutter suburbs can’t compete for visual interest.
When we get to Vendome Street, here are the Music Box stairs, marked with a city sign and a plaque. In the 1932 comedy “The Music Box,” Laurel and Hardy play movers attempting to lug an upright piano 133 steps — oof — to a house at the top of the hill.
“These aren’t the only stairs where they shot a movie,” Fleming says as we climb. A Three Stooges short, “An Ache in Every Stake,” has action on the Edendale stairs, also in Fleming’s book.
The Music Box steps land us on Descanso Drive, where Fleming empties his trash bag into a curbside garbage can and we push on.
I’m hardly the only person to have turned to “Secret Stairs” during the pandemic. “I heard from so many people: ‘I can’t thank you enough. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves,’” Fleming relates. “That’s been very gratifying.”
When the first edition of “Secret Stairs” was published in 2010, “I kept telling my publisher to lower his expectations: ‘I’ve been walking these stairs for five years and there’s nobody out there but me, my wife and a couple of knuckleheads,’” Fleming recalls.
A lot he knew. Through three editions, the most recent published last September to account for changes in the intervening years, “Secret Stairs” has sold about 30,000 copies — two of them to me. Other urban walking guides to L.A. have followed, and this in a city believed to be allergic to walking.
On Sunset at Micheltorena, we arrive at a set of 1925 stairs that gained prominence due to new condominiums and landscaping. Murals of hearts painted on the steps have been photographed by tourists from all over the world, Fleming says.
Up two flights of stairs, we land again on Descanso, where Fleming empties his bag for the second time. “The litter has definitely gotten worse during the pandemic,” he observes. “More people are out walking.”
We descend the Music Box stairs we’d climbed a half hour earlier. As we head back to our starting point, I see a paving stamp from the 1920s. Fleming often notes these in his book. It impresses me that some pavement has endured for a century.
I tell him he’s made folk heroes out of forgotten contractors and inspectors like George Nichols, C.W. Shafer and C.H. Johnston. He brings up his favorite stamp: “Rumble, City Inspector.” I counter with another great moniker: “G. Cake.” I like to think his first name was Gooey.
The city’s public stairs aren’t getting any younger, but overall they’re in better shape than in 2010, Fleming says, attributing that to increased appreciation and neighborhood drives to clean them or adopt them. They’re no longer quite so secret.
We end at Garcia Walk, a walkway lined on both sides by cottages, with no garages or driveways. “This seems so much to me like Raymond Chandler’s L.A.,” Fleming says.
He congratulates me on completing his stair walks. I thank him for the workout.
And I’m secretly relieved he and Biscuit hadn’t met me at the Music Box Steps with a piano.
David Allen escalates things Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
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