In the latter part of 1894 or early 1895, the Sunset Boulevard streetcar line was extended from Downtown Los Angeles to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. This extension was built by the owners of the Cahuenga Valley Railroad, E.G. Hurd and S.A. Mattison, who initiated construction without securing a franchise due to opposition from local property owners. The line was completed over a weekend and ready for operation by the following morning.
Development in the area accelerated in 1894 when the Los Angeles and Pacific Railroad Company built a train yard, powerhouse and mechanical shop down the hill from the Ponet property. The facility was built alongside a streetcar line operated by the company that ran between Los Angeles and Santa Monica. An industrial village grew up around the plant that was called Sherman, after trolley line owner Moses Sherman. By 1900, the village had a population of around 150 people, with 300 receiving mail at the Sherman post office. There was a store, a Congregational church, a school on Laurel Avenue. In the 1920s, the residents of Sherman voted to change the name of their unincorporated community to West Hollywood.
In 1893, Major Henry Hancock, the owner of Rancho La Brea, died. A few years later, his widow, Ida Hancock, granted the Salt Lake Oil Company a twenty-year lease on one-thousand acres north of the tar pits. The company hit pay dirt right away and was soon producing millions of barrels of oil each year. Within a few years, Ida and her son Allan drilled seventy-one wells of their own north of the family’s ranch house and the La Brea Tar Pits – around present-day Park La Brea. Every well struck oil, and the Hancocks became immensely wealthy overnight. Among many other projects, Allan Hancock used his newfound resources to subdivide the easternmost section of Rancho La Brea into the Hancock Park district, one of Los Angeles’ toniest neighborhoods.
In 1906, Sunset Boulevard was extended along the ancient Tongva path from Laurel Canyon Boulevard to the Ponet estate. Graded and graveled, the extension snaked around the foot of the Hollywood Hills and would eventually cut through Beverly Hills and onward to the coast. The announcement came on April 29, 1906, in the Los Angeles Times:
There has just been placed on the market a tract of 140 acres of land lying the in foothills, west of Laurel Canon, between those beautiful homes of A.C. Harper and Victor Ponet … This piece extends up the foothills embracing a couple of large canons, and a fine slope to the southeast, and is most appropriately called Hacienda Park … Sunset Boulevard, an eighty-foot street, is being extended through the land and through Mr. Ponet’s property, which will make a very attractive scenic drive along the foothills.
The Sunset Boulevard extension, now the eastern leg of the Sunset Strip, was graded and graveled in 1906, but it won’t be paved until the mid-1930’s.