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More than a decade of homelessness followed, at times spent sleeping in a median strip that stretches along the neighborhood’s main drag.

Many visitors littered, parked in driveways and in some cases dodged traffic to take photos from the bridge’s median strip, residents said in interviews.

That same year, encampments had taken over a median strip owned by the city at Cahuenga, Franklin and Wilcox Avenue — a triangle-shaped site featuring a vertical Hollywood sign and a veterans memorial.

“A few miles south of Madera, in the median strip of Highway 99, stand a palm and a pine — symbolic of Southern and Northern California and much beloved by all who know what they’re driving by. When Caltrans tried to cut them down, a great outcry put a stop to that. When the pine — actually a cedar — was later blown down in a windstorm, a replacement was planted.”

On Culver Boulevard in Del Rey, a median strip that was once home to dozens of people had a single tent last month.