Visited Paradise Hill
One of the hilltops in NELA I visited over the last few weeks was Paradise Hill - another non-park parklike space made up of undeveloped land.
There are a couple ways to approach the hillside - I drove toward it from the north and parked on Amethyst Street. If I did it again, I'd do the same thing - it was uncomplicated and there was space. After getting out of our car, we walked south toward the hill past a few remaining houses - one of which has large farm animals (sheep? cows? I couldn't quite tell) in a pen right next to the road. It's always very crazy how rural some of these streets up at the top of NELA hills feel.
I've done my best to figure out who currently owns the land past the gate on the west side of the hill, and I'm just not up to the task today, unfortunately. (To Felix: I should just take a GIS class and change my career and be done with it!!) Since 2021, the area has appeared in local news several times. Its previous owners wanted to build a gated community, but they ran out of money and the land was subsequently targeted by MRCA - a California government entity that manages parkland - for a potential purchase and conversion into an open space park. The most recent news I could find about that was from 2024, here. It didn't seem optimistic? I can't find anything more recent. This kind of stuff seems to take years. It does not seem to have changed much in 2025 but I am sure there's a little more info to find here - I am just too busy to complete the hunt, haha.
There's a big gate open at the end of Amethyst street. Next to it, you'll find a sign with a QR code and url for this website put together by people who oppose development on the hill.
They're correct - it's currently zoned for "light agriculture," not housing. I'm really curious what phrase was painted out on the sign - I think I can see an "it" and an "a".
Paradise Hill is within eyeshot of Flat Top Park, which I wrote about here. The more of these hilltops I visit, the weirder and weirder shots I get of each park from all the neighboring parks. Flat Top is particularly easy to photograph - there's that big radio tower on it, which makes it very easy to pick out. I now have photos of it from two or three other locations. Here's the Flat Top radio tower from Paradise:
The most notable view you'll get from Paradise, though, is a view of downtown that is instantly recognizable as The One View Of Downtown You've Seen Everywhere. It's immediately clear that this is the hilltop where people take professional photos and videos of the skyline. It was absolutely crazy to face the city and suddenly realize that I've seen this view probably dozens of times.
Unfortunately, the day we were there was unbelievably hazy!!!
Here's my phone camera, zoomed in, doing its best (without my permission) to juice the vibrancy of every color:
I've absolutely seen photos of downtown with that exact near hillside sloping from right to left. Wild shit. I think some people might be going down the hillside - now completely covered with wild oat plants - to take their photos more level with the opposing hillside.
Paradise Drive is a dirt road with a couple pull-outs where people are clearly stopping their cars for the view. We saw several other people walking around while we took pictures. There are houses at the southwest end of the road, and we could hear people who live there going about their business. Dead center in the dirt road at the top of the hill, though, was a completely dilapidated construction site. It's been here for decades:
I found some people on Facebook debating why this house exists and what happened to it. The theories range from ghost stories to relatively realistic-sounding foundation and stability issues.
this was my spot where i would kick it with my buddies back in the days but the old man in the white van always kicked us out
Why does everybody got to be so negative
I always thought someone died there because the front windows were boarded up
After going up to the hilltop, I realized that I could see this house from a ton of nearby neighborhoods and vantage points. Over the following week, I started looking for it more intentionally. It's been a very strange feeling to slowly develop an instinctual sense of the geography of this area! This house is now one of the landmarks I look out for.
We could see a lot more than I expected, actually. I could see what looked like possibly the Wilshire corridor/Koreatown??? behind the Dodger Stadium lights:
We've also been noticing this enormous "monolith" from a variety of hilltops. After poking around in Google Earth for a while, I am certain that it's a new apartment building in the Arts District. This is the one geographical thing that's really throwing me off - for some reason it seems farther away from downtown than I expected the Arts District to be?? My downtown geography is still not very good.
My only other major personal news about this hilltop is that we saw a coyote here while we were leaving. This was a midafternoon coyote!! Very brave!!
While reading articles about this place and trying to figure out who owns it, I came across several old articles from 2008 about a guy (who has since died) installing a gate across one of the roads that leads to the top of Paradise Hill in order to enrage and endanger his neighbors.
I'll admit, after reading that article, I found myself thinking, "ahh, this makes sense." Living up here seems like putting yourself into a situation where you will have constant fraught knowledge of your neighbors. The roads are impossibly steep and tiny, and you have to honk your horn before going around some of the corners. The land ownership issues seem crazy, and the threat of fire, landslide, infrastructure crisis, etc. is infinitely more serious up here than it is only three or four blocks away further down the hill. Some of the houses are modern concrete cubes with a construction blast radius around them, while some have yards so overgrown with trees, cacti, and flowering shrubs that it's clear they haven't adjusted their landscaping in forty years. It seems like a real... crucible of human behavior. Driving your car up a dirt road every day to live on a 45 degree angle next to a person who owns a cow could be a very particular way of existing in Los Angeles. I am glad I've taken the time to come up here and see it happening.