On Sunday, Echo Park artist collective Machine Project organized a trek across the entirety of L.A.’s most notorious street, Sunset Boulevard. Well, not the entirety: a group gathered at Machine Project’s studio and walked 18 miles to the beach, where Sunset empties out onto the sandy lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, leaving out just a few miles on the eastern end where Sunset flows into Cesar Chavez Boulevard and strikes the L.A. River.
Few boulevards are as famous as Sunset: 5th Avenue and the Champs d’Elysees come to mind. But Sunset is famous as a legend of itself, a silver-screen simulacrum of a street that became the emblem of Hollywood, enshrined in the 1950 Billy Wilder classic that bore its name. Following a 1780s cattle trail along the arc of mountains on the north edge of the Los Angeles Basin, Sunset was extended in the 1920s to reach the Pacific Ocean. Stretching from the river to the beach, from downtown to the shore, it is Manifest Destiny in asphalt incarnate.
It is difficult, perhaps, to think of Sunset Boulevard as a place. As a spatial denotation it marks not one place but countless places, all points on a gracefully winding line. But its character is often summarized, even anthropomorphized, into a single form, which changes depending on the pedestrian (or, in most cases, driver). To many Sunset meant nightlife on the Strip, a libertine space outside of city jurisdiction that gave birth to West Coast rock n’ roll (memorialized in Ed Ruscha’s exhaustive series, Every Building on the Sunset Strip). To others it meant prohibition and the jazz age, with its clubs running liquor beneath the blacktop. For gay and lesbian residents of Silverlake it was the site of America’s first LGBT demonstrations, a local meeting place and cruising thoroughfare. One corner, at its intersection with Hollywood Boulevard, was the site of the vast set of Bablyon from D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance, left for decades to ruin–a portend perhaps of things to come.
No other street in Los Angeles provides as much contrast and as much scenery as Sunset. If you seek the carotid artery of the city, look no further than the boulevard.