"We've been running this park a whole long time without bathrooms."
That's Anastasia Mann, president of the Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council, describing years of neighborhood polling on a question nobody expected to become a fight: whether Runyon Canyon needed a permanent restroom. The neighborhood said no, repeatedly. The city built one anyway, in February, at a cost of nearly a million dollars. Two miles up the road on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, something stranger happened around the same stretch of months. The century-old Canyon Country Store, the market where Jim Morrison once lived across the street and Mama Cass slept in the basement, changed hands twice in less than five months, and the man who'd run it for 44 years found out he'd been removed from his own liquor license before he found out who bought it.
Two Hollywood Hills institutions. Two completely different mechanisms, a parks grant on one end and an alcohol license transfer on the other. Same shape. In both cases, the paperwork moved before anyone who actually hikes the trail or grabs a sandwich on the store's porch had a real say, and in both cases the neighborhood learned what happened only after a crane showed up or a notice got taped to a wall.
The Bathroom Nobody Voted For
Runyon Canyon's West Ridge Trail closed in January 2025 after the Sunset Fire burned 60 acres of the Hollywood Hills. It stayed closed for more than a year while the hillside recovered, a long stretch for a trail that ordinarily sees close to 2 million visitors annually. It reopened at the end of February 2026, and hikers came back to it the same weekend, according to local coverage of the reopening.
That same month, a different kind of change arrived at the Fuller Avenue entrance. A crane delivered a prefabricated, two-stall restroom with two drinking fountains, the first permanent facility in the park's history after roughly four decades of port-a-potties. The project ran close to a million dollars, funded through park fees and federal grant money rather than the city's general fund, which is part of why it moved forward on its own timeline regardless of neighborhood sentiment.
The Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council had polled its members for years and found consistent opposition, driven by worries about smell, foot traffic, and the kind of problems that show up around public restrooms in other parks. A group calling itself the Runyon Canyon Guardians pushed to halt the project outright, calling it fiscally irresponsible. On the other side, Friends of Runyon Canyon Foundation vice president Paul Moore made the case that restrooms had ranked as the top or second most requested park amenity for over a decade, and that placing them in a visible, heavily trafficked spot at the entrance actually discourages the loitering neighbors feared. City officials described the funding as time-limited under federal rules, which meant the project had a clock on it no matter how the local polling came out.
Both things are true at once. The trail is open again because a burned hillside had time to recover. The bathroom exists because a grant cycle closed. Neither outcome ran through a neighborhood vote that could have stopped it.
The Store That Changed Hands Twice Before Anyone Noticed
The Canyon Country Store at 2108 Laurel Canyon Boulevard has been the neighborhood's unofficial living room since Tommy Bina took it over in 1982, the small market with the mural-covered walls where locals grab firewood and a sandwich without the drive down the hill. Its cultural weight goes back further than Bina, to a building that started as a 1919 hunting lodge and later became the corner store immortalized in a Doors lyric, with the space in its basement, now home to the Italian restaurant Pace, once serving as a temporary home for Mama Cass Elliot.
What changed in 2025 and 2026 had nothing to do with music history and everything to do with a liquor license.
- September 5, 2025: The store's original 1982 alcohol license transferred to a new entity called Canyon Country Corporation. The transfer kept most of the original licensees in place but added new stockholders, Eli Bina and Shirley Bina, with David Manoutcher Shamsa listed as the new president.
- January 21, 2026: A second license was issued, this time to Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc, a group with no overlap to the September filing. Officers Donald Hannoun and Brandon Hannoun took over as CEO and CFO.
- Late April 2026: Tommy Bina posted publicly that he'd been removed from the corporation, the store, and the license itself, with no advance notice, and that longtime employees had lost their jobs in the transition.
Bina says he learned about the sale from a posted alcohol license transfer notice near the store's juice and coffee bar, the same kind of public filing anyone can look up through California's Alcoholic Beverage Control records. Reporters trying to reach the other named owners for comment couldn't get through. As of an August 2026 business listing, the store is still open under its regular hours, seven days a week, still selling sandwiches and firewood bundles off the same patio that's drawn canyon residents for decades. Whether that continuity holds under ownership that has changed twice in under a year is the open question the license filings can't answer.
The Same Mechanism, Twice
What connects a parks department restroom and a liquor license transfer is not the subject matter. It's the order of operations. In both cases, the paper process ran ahead of anything visible on the ground, and in both cases the neighborhood found out only once the physical change was already underway or already done. The Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council could poll its members for years and still not have standing to stop a federally funded grant project once it cleared the city's own approval process. Tommy Bina could run a store for 44 years and still not have a say once a license transfer cleared the state's Alcoholic Beverage Control process without his active participation.
If there's a lesson in that for anyone who actually lives in this stretch of canyon, it isn't really about restrooms or sandwiches. It's about where the real signal lives. The neighborhood grapevine caught up to both stories only after the crane arrived and after the notice went up. The actual advance warning, in both cases, sat in public records that most residents never think to check: a city parks grant announcement, an ABC license transfer posting taped to a shop window. Those records are public and searchable. They're also the only place either story showed up before it was already finished.
What This Means for Your Next Walk
The West Ridge Trail is open, the burn scar from the Sunset Fire has had a year and a half to recover, and the restroom controversy has mostly quieted into acceptance now that the facility is in the ground and working. The Canyon Country Store is still slinging sandwiches and firewood bundles off the same porch where actor Jill Hennessy reportedly stops for an iced coffee. Both places still work the way they're supposed to on any given Saturday.
What's different is who's actually behind the counter and who signed off on the changes nobody in the canyon got to vote on. That's worth knowing before your next hike down to Fuller Avenue, and it's worth knowing if you're the kind of person who pays attention to who runs the places that make a neighborhood feel like a neighborhood.
If this is the kind of detail you want someone tracking on your behalf, whether it's a trail closure, a business change, or the quieter shifts that shape what it actually feels like to live in the Hollywood Hills, that's the kind of local attention Sarah Minka Jackson brings to every conversation about this canyon. Let's Connect (Start Your Curated Search).