Nothing says Laurel Canyon quite like the Canyon Country Store. Built in 1924 and described at the time as the canyons only business lot, the brick building has served as a neighborhood commercial anchor since Laurel Canyon was a collection of subdivided lots. By the 1950s, it was home to the Canyon Country Store, a local neighborhood market that would play an extraordinary role in the history of Laurel Canyon.

Built in 1924, the brick commercial building went up when the neighborhood was in a time of transition. Laurel Canyon was recently annexed to Los Angeles and growing from rural hillside to residential neighborhood aimed at workers from the nearby, booming film industry. Its first tenants were real estate offices, selling the lots that would turn Laurel Canyon into the neighborhood it is today. The building’s storefronts cycled through various businesses with a market operating there from the early 1930s. By 1956, the building was home to the Canyon Country Store, a local neighborhood market.

Laurel Canyon’s emergence as a countercultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s paralleled the hippie movement occurring in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, but its character was dependent on its context within the Los Angeles entertainment industry. The scene centered on a large concentration of young musicians who settled in the canyon’s rustic housing stock, among them were members of the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, the Doors, and Buffalo Springfield.

By the mid-1960s, the Canyon Country Store became the informal gathering place for the countercultural scene. Jim Morrison wrote the Doors’ “Love Street” after watching the scene at the Canyon Country Store from his house nearby. Its parking lot and deck became an all-hours meeting spot, described in a Toronto Daily Star article in 1969 as “alive with brightly dressed, flowing-haired young people most hours of the day or night.”