Sunset Strip Music Festival

Sunset Strip is the mile-and-a-half (2.4 km) stretch of Sunset Boulevard that passes through West Hollywood, California. It extends from West Hollywood's eastern border with Hollywood at Crescent Heights Boulevard to its western border with Beverly Hills at Sierra Drive. Sunset Strip is probably the best-known portion of Sunset Boulevard, with boutiques, restaurants, rock clubs, and nightclubs. It is also known for its array of huge, colorful billboards.

As Sunset Strip lay outside of the Los Angeles city limits in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County, it fell under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, less vigilant than the Los Angeles Police Department. It was illegal to gamble in the city, but legal in the county, which fostered the development of rather wilder nightlife than was found in Los Angeles.

In the 1920s a number of nightclubs and casinos moved in along Sunset Strip, which attracted movie people; alcohol was served in back rooms during Prohibition.

In the 1930s and the 1940s, restaurants and nightclubs on Sunset Strip, like Ciro's, the Mocambo and the Trocadero, became playgrounds for people in the movie industry. Some of its expensive nightclubs and restaurants were said to be 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.

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Wikipedia