The house in Benedict Canyon went up in 1942, originally constructed for French actress Michèle Morgan. Hollywood money and Hollywood glamour flowed through it for decades. Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon honeymooned there in 1965. Terry Melcher — the music producer and son of Doris Day — lived there with actress Candice Bergen from 1967 to 1969, during which time he met and ultimately declined to sign a singer-songwriter named Charles Manson. Melcher moved out in January 1969. Within weeks, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, moved in.

Four Manson Family members arrived in the early hours: Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel on the night of August 8 moving into August 9, and Linda Kasabian waiting in the car. They killed Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent — a teenager who had simply been visiting the property's caretaker. Sharon Tate was 26 years old. She asked her killers to let her have her baby before they killed her. They refused. Her unborn son, whom she and Polanski planned to name Paul Richard, died with her.

The murders sealed the address in American memory, but life continued around it in strange ways. In 1992, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails rented the house and set up a recording studio — which he named "Le Pig" — in what had been the living room. He recorded most of The Downward Spiral album there, along with the EP Broken. He later said that working in the house haunted him, that he found himself asking, as Sharon Tate must have asked, whether the people coming that night meant him harm. He eventually left, relocating his studio to New Orleans, and the property's owner demolished the house two years later. A new structure went up in its place — larger, grander, and deliberately anonymous.

The Tate murders, followed the next night by the LaBianca killings across town, ended something — the particular California optimism of the late 1960s, the sense that Laurel Canyon and communal living and flower power represented some new and better way. Joan Didion wrote that the Sixties ended abruptly on that night in Benedict Canyon. Whether or not that's too neat a reading of history, it captures what many people felt: that something had broken, that the address at the end of Cielo Drive was the place where it broke. The perpetrators were convicted in 1971. Charles Manson died in prison in 2017.

Today the winding road up into Benedict Canyon looks much as it did in 1969 — eucalyptus and oak overhead, the city spreading out below as you climb. The house that replaced the original sits behind walls and cameras, its owners presumably accustomed to the occasional visitor who parks at the gate and stares. There is no historical marker. The city of Los Angeles has never designated the site, perhaps reasoning that some histories are better left without plaques. But the road is still called Cielo Drive. Sky Drive. Even the name carries irony now.