Sunset Strip

Because of this, the Sunset Strip and all of West Hollywood gained a reputation for being a loosely regulated area, in large part because it was not under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department.

owned by gangsters like Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel, earning Sunset Strip a place in Raymond Chandler's 1949 Philip Marlowe novel, The Little Sister.

Also on Sunset Strip are the Garden of Allah apartments—Hollywood quarters for transplanted writers like Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and Schwab's Drug Store.

By the early 1960s, Sunset Strip had lost favor with the majority of movie people, but its restaurants, bars and clubs continued to serve as an attraction for locals and tourists.

In the mid-1960s it became a major gathering place for the counterculture and was the scene of the Sunset Strip curfew riots in November 1966, involving police and crowds of young club-goers.

Bands such as Led Zeppelin, the Doors,[2] the Byrds, Love, the Seeds, Frank Zappa, and others played at clubs like Gazzarri's, the Whisky a Go Go, the Roxy, Pandora's Box and the London Fog.

Thirteen-year-old girls could walk in dressed like sexy 25-year-olds, and kids could sidle up to the bar and order a cocktail, so it wasn't a big stretch for us to get up and play there", recalled Quiet Riot founder Kelly Garni.

[5] The clubs on the Sunset Strip such as the Whisky a Go Go and The Roxy, became home to numerous LA-based heavy metal bands such as Van Halen, Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Ratt and Guns N' Roses.