Last week my sister celebrated her birthday at Barnsdall Art Park, a flat-topped hill in the middle of East Hollywood. Sometime in the last century, a wealthy woman named Alice Barnsdall commandeered said hill and hired Frank Lloyd Wright to build her a house on the spot. Build he did, creating the eponymous Hollyhock House—a masterpiece of poured concrete gentility. Barnsdall “originally intended the house to be part of an arts and live-theater complex on a property known as Olive Hill, but the larger project was never completed.” Apparently, old Frankie really dropped the ball on the whole shebang and Barnsdall fired him (yes queen!). The house was donated to the city or something and became Los Angeles’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site (yes queen!). Today it is most famous (to me) as the place where all those lies got started on Big Little Lies (yes queens!).
Today, Alice would be happy to know, the park actually is an arts complex AKA a nice spot for urban bohemians to host birthday picnics on summer days. We arrived at around six PM; after the heat had crested for the day. Children, adults, and those caught in between settled onto the lawn in front of the house overlooking the city to the West. On a clear day, you can catch a glimmer of the ocean off in the distance and wonder why you don’t live closer to it.
As feasted on cheese- and tomato-based snacks, I took pleasure in observing the parties around us. Of particular interest was a couple napping on a blanket, their copy of Attached tossed to the side, conspicuously untouched, perhaps indicating the source of their woes. I hope they’re doing well.
Not everyone kept to themselves. There was a large party directly in front of us that was getting notably drunker throughout the evening. They had several dogs in the mix, who (based on some intermittent yelps) didn’t seem to be the best of friends. Eventually one of these dogs, sweet and wooly, began freelancing. He went from picnic blanket to picnic blanket in search of treats. In the process, he linked up with a little girl (not his owner) who would explain to each new group he approached that he wasn’t her dog but he would try to eat your food. The actual owner, a straight white man in his 40s, predictably let this play out with minimal intervention, which drove my friend Megan increasingly crazy. You’re so infrequently around the madding crowd in this city you can forget that they’re madding for a reason.
We then ate a delicious cake made by my husband and a delicious pie made by a friend until the sun disappeared behind the almost invisible sliver of sea. The lights of Hollywood were now ablaze at our feet. No wonder Alice picked this spot! There’s nothing more priceless than looking down at the tastemakers and the go-getters and the gatekeepers that think they run the city. Finally, us artistes were where we belonged—above it all.
Eventually, it got chilly (one can forget what that feels like) and we rolled up our blankets and went to our own houses, which as far as we know were not named after flowers. The Hollyhock House stayed up on the hill, empty and alone. At least until tomorrow, when the lawns would once again populate with people fulfilling the vision of a woman who had the cajones to fire Frank Lloyd Wright.