The neighborhood is built around two reservoirs, with modernist houses in the hills above them and public stairways connecting the streets.
What Silver Lake looks like
Silver Lake is built around two fenced reservoirs, ringed today by a two and a fifth mile paved path. Hillside houses climb the slopes on both sides, and the Hollywood Sign is visible on the ridge above Baxter Street.
The sits on a narrow lot beside the reservoir, a two story glass and steel house with a eucalyptus trunk close against its wall. Inside, the upstairs library opens through glass onto a small courtyard. An open stair climbs to a rooftop penthouse.
Public stairways climb the hills where the streets do not connect. The run 133 steps between Vendome Street and Descanso Drive, a narrow concrete run edged in ivy and bright pink bougainvillea. The , a few blocks northeast, run a longer straight climb up a steeper grade.
On Sunset Boulevard at the bottom of the hill, the building still has its original sign, a black cat on a white background over the door. On Micheltorena Street, the sits behind high walls and gates, a Mediterranean Revival mansion built in 1923.
Shot in Silver Lake
Laurel and Hardy shot two comedy shorts on a public stairway above Vendome Street. Under the Silver Lake filmed an overnight scene along the reservoir decades later.
The Music Box, 1932
The Music Box Steps
Laurel and Hardy haul a crated piano up all 133 steps in the short, which won the first Academy Award for a live action comedy short and was added to the National Film Registry in 1997. A plaque set into the third step names the film.
Hats Off!, 1927
The same plaque credits Laurel and Hardy's earlier short Hats Off! to this staircase too, calling out that both films were made by the Hal Roach Studio. The steps run from Vendome Street at the bottom of the hill to Descanso Drive at the top.
Under the Silver Lake, 2018
Played the reservoir
Director David Robert Mitchell got the idea for the film walking around the reservoir and looking up at the houses on the hill. The production shot an overnight scene along the bluffs on the reservoir's southwest side and on Silver Lake Drive. The reservoir had been drained again in 2015, this time to build a new pipeline, so its water was added digitally afterward.
What Silver Lake can double for
Mill Valley in Marin County, California
Mill Valley's steep hillside lots have midcentury modern houses, each house stepped down the slope on multiple levels with decks facing the view, the same hillside massing Silver Lake's own modernist houses use. Marin's houses look out over water and marina masts rather than a fenced reservoir, so a shot that includes the shoreline needs careful framing to avoid giving away the bay. Try searching midcentury modern hillside house now.
Twin Peaks in San Francisco, California
Twin Peaks has some of San Francisco's longest and steepest public stairways, built up a steep hillside where streets do not otherwise meet, the same kind of pedestrian shortcut as the Music Box Steps. Most of the housing on the hill is Victorian or 1950s and 1960s concrete apartment blocks rather than modernist single family houses, so a stairway shot works better than a wide house shot. Try searching steep public stairway street now.
The South Side Slopes have close to a tenth of Pittsburgh's seven hundred public stairways, built up a hillside too steep for streets, the same purpose the Music Box Steps serve here. Pittsburgh's stairway houses are brick and wood frame rather than California modernist, so a tight shot on the steps themselves reads better than one that includes the houses around them. Try searching public stairway hillside houses now.
