Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area

This guide to Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in Los Angeles opens on a December Saturday in 1963, when a teenage news cameraman climbed into a KTLA helicopter over the Baldwin Hills Reservoir, right where the park now sits, after residents reported water seeping from the earthen dam. It follows the slow county response that afternoon and what investigators later traced the seepage back to, plus the county supervisor who spent years afterward turning the site into the parkland you're standing in. Climb toward the ridge for the clearest view of downtown, the Pacific, and the Hollywood sign.