The Strip

A mile and a half of Sunset Boulevard, Doheny to Crescent Heights. Its full name is the Sunset Strip and nobody uses it; on this wiki and at the table it's the Strip. It does not belong to the district around it. West Hollywood is apartment buildings, a working council and a security contract residents can fire. The Strip is hotels, towers, membership clubs, out-of-town money and security that belongs to the venues rather than to the city. Two blocks south it's apartment buildings again.

That gap is why it has its own page. Everywhere else in Los Angeles, who do I have to get past has a district-shaped answer. Here the answer is shaped like a venue, and it changes every four hundred metres.

It came through because it was never for the people who live here. This street has been selling an idea of Los Angeles to people from somewhere else since the 1930s, and that turned out to be disaster-proof: the money arrives from outside, so what happened to the coast didn't matter.

What the crew knows

• Every door is a private jurisdiction. No permit, no district authority, no appeal. The venue decides who comes in, what they may carry, and what happens in the back room. District officers don't go inside unless a venue asks, and venues almost never ask.
• The rooms, and what each is for. The Whisky and the Roxy take volume and check weapons at the door. The Troubadour, just south and technically off the Strip, is where anybody who matters actually goes. The Chateau Marmont and the Sunset Tower are for people who'd rather not be seen paying, which makes them the two most useful buildings here.
• Weapons are checked, not banned, and the check is a cloakroom rather than a scanner. What you hand over comes back. What you didn't hand over is your problem if it turns up.
• It's the easiest place in the city to meet somebody who won't give a name. Everyone here is anonymous by design and nobody looks twice at a booth.
• The people who run the venues are not the people who run the district, and both would rather you understood that. Ask a councilman about the Strip and watch the subject change.
• Simsense sells openly and legally, at prices that pay for the lighting, and it's recorded here constantly, by venues that own the take.
• You're on camera from the moment you turn onto Sunset, and that footage belongs to whoever owns the frontage rather than to anybody you could subpoena. Which cuts both ways.

Getting in

Walk on or drive on; Sunset runs straight through and the pavement is public.

The doors are the border. Admission is discretionary and dress-coded, guest lists are real, and a refusal leaves no record you can contest: the same shape of problem as Fun City's gate, at the scale of one building. A crew that looks like a crew gets turned away from the good rooms and welcomed by the bad ones.

Parking is valet, so somebody else has your vehicle and its keys for the evening. Plan around that or park south and walk up.