If you live on one of the Doña streets and you've walked across Laurel Canyon Boulevard toward Mulholland for a morning loop, you may not have noticed anything different in recent months. The small lot near the Nancy Hoover Pohl Overlook still takes about twenty cars, still fills on weekends, still spills onto Mulholland Drive itself when it does. No pay station. No new signage. Nothing changed at your door.
Three-quarters of a mile south, at the other entrance to the same trail system, something did change, and it changed hard enough to make the local news. The question worth asking from a Doñas porch isn't whether that change affects you today. It's whether a fee at one end of a connected canyon ever stays where it lands.
Two Doors Into the Same Canyon
Fryman Canyon isn't one trailhead, it's two, and they lead to the same ridge from opposite sides of the same 128-and-122-acre park system managed by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority. The upper entrance sits on the north side of Mulholland Drive at the Nancy Hoover Pohl Overlook, a short walk from the Doñas' own streets, with a small paved lot and street parking along Mulholland when that lot is full. The lower entrance is Wilacre Park, at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Fryman Road, about three-quarters of a mile south of Ventura Boulevard and a mile and a half south of the 101.
Both feed the Betty B. Dearing Trail, the wide fire road that climbs through walnut woodland and chaparral and connects Wilacre Park to Fryman Canyon Park to Coldwater Canyon Park and on to Franklin Canyon. Hike from either direction and you can end up on the same ridge. Park at either end and, until recently, you paid nothing at all.
That stopped being true at one of the two doors this year.
What Changed at the Bottom Door in 2026
Los Angeles County had subsidized free parking at the Wilacre lot since 2014, a full decade with no pay station at the gate. That subsidy ended this year, and the MRCA brought the fee back: seven dollars for two hours, fourteen for four. NBC Los Angeles reported the change in early July, noting that a lot that has been "typically full, often with a line of cars trying to snag a parking spot" for years had gone mostly empty within weeks of the new signage going up.
The reaction on the ground matched the numbers. One hiker told NBC the fee felt like "a really big shock to all of us in the community." Another, speaking to Audacy's KNX News, put it more plainly: the lot used to be "packed full of people," and now it sits nearly empty because the parking, which had been free and close and easy, no longer is. A third hiker told the same station she'd started parking on the street instead.
That last detail is the one worth sitting with if you live nearby, because it isn't new. It's the third time this exact trailhead has run this exact experiment.
The Neighborhood Has Fought This Fight Twice Before
Back in 2011, the Wilacre lot's fee climbed from free to a dollar to three dollars, and residents on Iredell Road, the street the loop trail actually passes through, organized against what came next. One resident described hikers walking the street "five in a line," blocking driveways and nearly causing a collision. Another said cars parked to dodge the fee gave cover for daytime break-ins. The Studio City Neighborhood Council responded by unanimously backing immediate inclusion in Preferred Parking District 111, a permit zone meant to keep hikers off those specific blocks.
Seven years later, with the lot free again after the county subsidy kicked in, the opposite problem showed up. A free lot filled instantly and overflowed anyway, and in December 2018 the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a new resolution restricting parking in the neighborhoods around the park, again because residents kept complaining about the spillover.
Read those two episodes side by side and the lesson isn't about fees specifically. It's that whenever the Wilacre lot falls out of balance with demand, in either direction, the overflow finds a residential street. Charge too much and drivers hunt for free curb space. Charge nothing and the lot fills before nine on a Saturday and the overflow does exactly the same thing.
The difference this time is that the streets immediately around Wilacre already carry the scar tissue from both earlier fights. Iredell and its neighbors have permit protections and restrictions layered in from 2011 and 2018 that didn't exist the first time this happened. A driver circling for free parking near the lower entrance today has fewer open streets to try.
Why the Free Lot on Mulholland Is the One to Watch
Which is what makes the upper entrance worth paying attention to, even though nothing has changed there yet. If the fee at Wilacre keeps pushing cars away from that lot, and the streets around Wilacre are harder to park on than they were in 2011, the next logical stop for a driver who doesn't want to pay is the other entrance to the same trail system, a few minutes up the hill on Mulholland, where the lot is smaller, unmetered, and backed only by ordinary street parking rather than a permit district.
Nothing in the current reporting says that's happening yet. The MRCA has not announced any change to the Mulholland side, and the small lot there has operated on the same terms for years. But the pattern is fifteen years old and it has never resolved itself quietly. If you live on a Doña street and have wondered why cars occasionally line Mulholland on a weekend morning, that's worth a second look this fall, not because anything has been decided, but because this is exactly the kind of shift that shows up on the street before it shows up in a headline.
The Reward at the Bottom of the Hill
Whichever door you use, the walk back down usually ends on Ventura Boulevard, and that stretch has had a busier year than the trailhead. In the past several months, the Boulevard has added Alto Fire to Table, an open-flame Argentine room that turns the cooking itself into the evening's entertainment, and Rosetta Osteria & Crudo Bar, a coastal Italian room built around a crudo bar that fills a gap the strip has had for years. Vignette, a California bistro built by three friends with backgrounds in farming, butchery, and bartending, opened in April at 12023 Ventura, close enough to the Studio City Farmers Market that the kitchen sources straight from it on Sundays.
A few blocks east, The Last Canteen took over the old Gray Tavern space at 10964 Ventura and rebuilt it as an immersive, post-apocalyptic cocktail bar with sarsaparilla on draft, a short walk from the Universal/Studio City Metro stop. Highly Likely landed across from Granville as an all-day cafe. Little Lenny's, a kosher Mexican counter, runs on its own calendar entirely, closing Friday afternoon and reopening Saturday after sundown. Marine Layer opened at The Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge in late May, adding daytime retail traffic to the eastern end of the corridor.
None of it displaces the reason people already knew this stretch. Katsu-ya has anchored Sushi Row since 1997, Asanebo still holds its Michelin recognition, and Teru Sushi has kept its koi pond running for 47 years. What's changed is the range on either side of that reputation. A dinner that used to mean driving over the hill now has a real answer within walking distance of both trailheads.
If you're weighing what a home on one of these streets is actually worth now that the corridor around it keeps changing, from the trail rules at the top of the hill to the storefronts at the bottom, that's the kind of block-by-block reading Steve Frankel has spent decades doing across the Westside and the hills above it. A conversation costs nothing, and it starts with knowing the streets, not just the comps.
