Colorado Boulevard runs wide and flat past storefronts from the 1920s and 1930s, with hillside streets above and the rock formation at the north end.
What Eagle Rock looks like
runs through the neighborhood on four lanes, with a landscaped median, bike lanes and diagonal parking in front of the storefronts. The is an Art Deco storefront from 1931, now the restaurant Taco Social. The , a few blocks east, keeps the same flat roofline and fluted corner pilasters. , a bungalow court from 1924, sets two gabled cottages back behind a lawn and a row of trees.
is a Spanish Colonial Revival building from 1922, with a tile roof and an arched doorway. It stands a block from the Women's Twentieth Century Clubhouse, a brown shingle building on Hermosa Avenue. , on Merton Avenue south of the boulevard, has the same white stucco walls and a round window over its doors. and the streets around it climb north into the San Rafael Hills, with houses stacked on narrow lots looking down over the basin.
The is a bare sandstone dome near the north end of Figueroa Street. It rises above the 134 freeway, brush covering the slope below it, with houses showing through the trees on the hillside behind it.
Shot in Eagle Rock
Four productions used Eagle Rock for a single scene each. Reservoir Dogs opens with its crew eating breakfast at Pat and Lorraine's Coffee Shop, 4720 Eagle Rock Boulevard, then walking past All-Star Lanes a few blocks north on the same street. Face/Off shot the concrete interior of its fictional Erewhon Prison inside the Eagle Rock Substation, a Southern California Edison facility at the neighborhood's north end whose bare concrete halls have also stood in for industrial interiors in Demolition Man and Ed Wood. Argo used a private house at 2154 Hill Drive, then home to Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council president Michael Nogueira, as CIA officer Tony Mendez's house in its 1980 scenes.
Clueless, 1995
Played Bronson Alcott High School, Beverly Hills, California, 1995
The Johnson Student Center and Freeman College Union sits on the Occidental College campus. Its south entrance stood in for Cher's high school and appears repeatedly through the film. The same building's arcaded loggia also worked as the cafeteria's outside entrance.
York Boulevard has the same run of one and two storey brick storefronts from the 1920s building boom. The Highland Park Police Station, built in 1926, is among the landmarks along it. York Boulevard has more overhead wires and narrower sidewalks than Colorado's landscaped median, so a tighter storefront frame holds the match better than a wide street shot. Try searching 1920s brick storefronts now.
Main Street in Alhambra, California
Main Street near Garfield Avenue still has early twentieth century storefronts under later facades, from the same building boom decade as Colorado Boulevard's own corners. Many storefronts wear a 1950s update over the original front, so a production needs a block where the earlier facade is exposed, same as Eagle Rock's own Art Deco corners. Try searching 1920s storefronts under later facades now.
