West Hollywood was built to keep a secret.
It’s in the neon over the bars and clubs on Santa Monica Blvd in the Rainbow District: Trunks, Micky’s, Mattie’s, the patio at Beaches Tropicana. It’s in the valet lines outside the boutique hotels and outside the Troubadour and Dan Tana’s next door, where the same valets have been parking cars for decades. It’s in the way a stranger can walk into a club, a coffee shop, a gym, a small business here and, for a few hours, be no one’s business but their own.
This town started as Sherman, a railroad yard built by workers who came from somewhere else to lay track for somebody else’s fortune. You can still smell the sweat of brown hands that laid those tracks, and hear the Spanish and Chinese carried on the wind alongside the orange groves and olive trees, and beneath all of it, the marrow and ash and song of the Tongva people, who were here in this Cahuenga Valley long before any of it had a name. It was the operating headquarters for Moses Sherman’s Los Angeles Pacific Railway, until Henry Huntington folded it into the Pacific Electric in 1911. The same Red Cars rattled down the center of Santa Monica Boulevard until 1941. The rattle of myth began.
Long before it had a city government at all, this stretch of land ran on the same bargain: gambling clubs lined Sunset, and bars, Gold Coast, Motherlode, The Palms, kept their windows blackened, storefronts that turned their backs to the street on purpose so the people inside could stay hidden from Sheriff’s raids. Streetwalkers and hustlers worked the corners for a coin, and undercover deputies waited in the alleys, playing discreet right up until they weren’t, getting off with a man before arresting him for it.