Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles

Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
Neighborhood of Los Angeles
Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles Location within Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley Show map of San Fernando Valley Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles (the Los Angeles metropolitan area) Show map of the Los Angeles metropolitan area
Coordinates: 34°07′02″N 118°22′31″W / 34.11722°N 118.37528°W / 34.11722; -118.37528
Country	United States of America
State	California
County	Los Angeles
City	Los Angeles
Named for	California bay laurel
Elevation [1]	264 m (866 ft)
Time zone	UTC-8 (PST)
• Summer (DST)	UTC-7 (PDT)

Laurel Canyon is a mountainous neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills region of the Santa Monica Mountains, within the Hollywood Hills West district of Los Angeles, California. The main thoroughfare of Laurel Canyon Boulevard connects the neighborhood with the more urbanized parts of Los Angeles to the north and south, between Ventura Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard.

Originally inhabited by the Tongva people, by the early 20th century real estate developers situated a vacation site along the slope of neighboring Lookout Mountain; this formed the nucleus of what would become the Laurel Canyon neighborhood. It later developed into a celebrity enclave: the remote, rugged nature of the land and its proximity to many of the movie studios in nearby Hollywood made it an ideal location for many movie stars to site their homes, especially during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Raymond Chandler's first novel The Big Sleep sets lurid scenes there, and in The Long Goodbye (1953), his private detective Philip Marlowe is residing in 'the Laurel Canyon district'.

By the 1960s, the neighborhood had become a local center for counterculture, and many prominent folk and rock musicians moved into the area, making it a nexus for musical collaboration. By the late 1970s, criminal activity in the neighborhood, including distribution of drugs, was controlled by the Wonderland Gang (named for a Laurel Canyon thoroughfare), and the neighborhood became associated with the Wonderland murders, a grisly quadruple homicide in 1981.