This Friday is going to be bittersweet for “Bosch” fans. The latest season of the Amazon Prime procedural will finally be hitting the streamer, but the day also marks the popular series’ end. Season seven is, sadly, the show’s last. Based upon the bestselling book franchise by author Michael Connelly, “Bosch” has been a staple of the Amazon lineup since its debut in 2014 and is the platform’s longest-running original program, accumulating legions of devotees throughout the seven years it has been on the air.
The modern-day noir (of which a spinoff is currently in the works) follows tenacious LAPD detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch (Titus Welliver) as he traverses the City of Angels relentlessly protecting and serving its many citizens, living by the credo “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”
Set and filmed in L.A., the drama showcases the city perhaps better than any other production in television history. That is largely thanks to Connelly, who serves as series creator and executive producer and is fastidious about portraying a realistic Los Angeles onscreen. As writer/producer Tom Bernardo told Curbed, “He was in this really privileged position to be able to say, there’s certain non-negotiable terms. And one of them is, we have to shoot in L.A., and we have to capture L.A.” The reality of the city is so tantamount to the show that the exterior and parking lot of Hollywood Community Police Station (an active, working LAPD station!) regularly plays itself in episodes! (For interior scenes, the production team painstakingly re-created the inside of the building – “right down to the scuff marks on the walls” according to the Los Angeles Times – at Red Studios Hollywood.)
Other famed local spots used include Hollywood’s oldest restaurant Musso & Frank Grill, the oft-filmed Boardner’s bar, which as its website states has been “a Hollywood institution since 1942,” Grand Central Marketplace, the downtown L.A. food emporium originally founded in 1917, and the iconic Biltmore Los Angeles, one of the city’s most beautiful and historic hotels.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake But no “Bosch” location is as revered as the hilltop home where Harry lives. Said to be on Woodrow Wilson Dr., the detective’s house is described in the 1992 book “The Black Echo” as “a wood-framed, one-bedroom cantilever, not much bigger than a Beverly Hills garage. It hung out over the edge of the hill and was supported by three steel pylons at its mid-point. It was a scary place to be during earthquakes, daring Mother Nature to twang those beams and send the house down the hill like a sled. But the view was the tradeoff.”
The show’s production team found the perfect embodiment of that description in a glass-walled architectural marvel that dramatically cantilevers over the Hollywood Hills at 1870 Blue Heights Dr. (Please remember this is a private home. Do not trespass or bother the residents or the property in any way.)
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Per building permits, the striking property was the creation of architect Frank L. Stiff and civil engineer Arthur Levin. Of the latter, the Online Archives of California fittingly states, “If you’ve ever seen a building hanging off a hillside in Southern California, chances are Arthur Levin designed the structural engineering.” The dwelling, which encompasses two bedrooms and two baths in 1,513 square feet, was commissioned by contractor Sidney Lance and his wife, Cecelia, and was completed in January 1959.
Standing on a scant 0.26-acre sloping lot, the home’s outdoor amenities are few, though I can’t imagine they’re much missed considering the place boasts wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows offering unparalleled jetliner views of the Sunset Strip, Culver City, downtown L.A. and beyond. The pad also has a spacious outdoor deck situated on its west side that showcases those same sweeping vistas.
The residence last sold in 2001 for $789,000 and the kitchen and both baths were subsequently renovated by architect Francesca Perazzeli in 2014. Today, the pad is worth a little over $2.1 million, according to Zillow.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake In the penultimate episode of “Bosch’s” fourth season, titled “Rojo Profundo,” Harry, ever the protector of his family, says of the house, “I didn’t buy it for the view. I bought it because there’s only one way in and out.”
For Connelly, it was all about the pad’s positioning above the city, though. As he explained in the “Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles” DVD special, he envisioned his leading man’s residence in the hills of Hollywood because, “What I try to do in the books is have him contemplate the city and his place in it. And the perfect place to do that is the back deck of his house.” Indeed, the deck of 1870 Blue Heights Dr. has to be one of the best in all of L.A.!
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake How does a detective afford such pricey digs, you ask? Per the storyline of both the books and the series, Paramount Studios made a movie based upon one of Harry’s cases, for which he was paid handsomely and he used the funds to buy the stellar property.
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Image Credit: Amazon Studios The actual interior of 1870 Blue Heights Dr. was utilized in “Bosch’s” pilot, as detailed in this video lensed by Connelly during the shoot. At some point following, an exacting replica of that interior was built on a soundstage at Red Studios for all subsequent filming.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures The property’s role on “Bosch” came about quite circuitously thanks to co-executive producer Pieter Jan Brugge, who also helmed the 1995 action classic “Heat.” Astute fans of that movie should recognize Harry’s house as it was used to portray the “above Sunset Plaza” residence of Neil McCauley’s (Robert De Niro) love interest, Eady (Amy Brenneman). Though outside of the views, not much of it was shown onscreen, it certainly made an impression and when it came time to start shooting “Bosch,” Brugge remembered it, figured it would be the ideal spot to portray Harry’s homestead and the rest is history!
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures According to “Heat’s” co-location manager Lori Balton, director Michael Mann initially scouted the property while flying around Los Angeles in a helicopter with the first AD. “They had no technology at the time to mark it . . . so I had only a general idea of the area and some blurry pictures to work off of.” She was finally able to track the place down, though, via some painstaking legwork and secured its role in the film. While “Heat” utilized over 60 locations across the city, as is the case with “Bosch,” 1870 Blue Heights Rd. is easily the most memorable.