Silver Lake
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Go Back to Los Angeles Home ~ Go Back to Echo Park ~ Jump Ahead to Little Armenia / Thai Town
Friday Night Cafe
Beauty with Baggage
The stretch of Sunset that connects…
…Echo Park to Silver Lake to Los Feliz has become one of the most sought after pieces of real estate in California that is not located on the water.
These neighborhoods are where Rainbow People, Immigrants, Vegans, 70-something Hippies, people down on their luck, people writing the next hit script and a few famous people who like cheap tacos like the rest of us all come together and somehow it works.
Some of the tastiest food in LA can be found here just blocks from the craziest sex toys you’ve ever seen and $10 organic chai lattes made with oat milk blessed by monks in Tibet. (OK I made that last part up but you can still get the $10 oat milk chai latte.)
Silver Lake is a place I had started visiting in 1999. It captivated me. I wanted to live there. Sure I have worked in Corporate America for ages but somehow I felt I belonged in the midst of this Battlestar Ecclectica. I know I’m not alone. This neighborhood is full of 9-5 suits that miraculously convert into community theater building / art creating / music making / pilates pros who balance the need to earn a living with a passion for creating life.
People like this exist in all neighborhoods but there is something about Silver Lake that is special, unique, trendsetting and that doesn’t conform to what the suburbs would have life become.
And so as my feet walked further,
I knew I found a Mecca for the Bohemian children of the 70’s and 80’s that I probably could never afford on my own. The commute to my job in Orange County would have killed me and I was in the midst of building my own Vie Bohème there. Even so, what the people who had come here back in the day had built, had turned into a fascinating few miles of community that my camera fell in love with photographing.
Someone’s Airstream trailer just parked behind a fence? A random birdhouse poking up into the sky? A mural encouraging the “Hollyweird” to find peace through falafel?
I just simply could not resist.
If you dig deeper into the history
of this neighborhood, you see a different version of what I had seen in my time coming there.
You see the story of a neighborhood built by Scottish immigrants in the early 1900’s and later filled by working and middle class Latin(x) in the 50’s and 60’s. As the LA economy fall apart in the 70’s as manufacturing jobs were shipped to Asia and the 80’s saw the “better schools and better lives” mantra of the ever-expanding suburbs, what families with money were left largely moved out.
Hollywood has long been here. Disney had its first studio on Hyperion. Laurel and Hardy filmed “The Music Box” on one of Silver Lake’s famous staircases.
And where there’s Hollywood, there’s always the LGBTQ community that is the backbone of any creative industry. Silver Lake in the 70’s became home to LA’s Gay Leather subculture. That in turn created some tensions as property values rose with the gentrification that almost always follows the Gay Community after it adopts a neighborhood. Cruising for sex in public spaces was frowned upon by the nouveau elite moving in and was pushed into the bars. Then the AIDS crisis of the 80’s and 90’s brought significant changes to the community due to the loss of so many lives that emptied so many houses of their owners. That in turn fed more gentrification.
Music has been a huge part
of Silver Lake. It is especially known for attracting alternative, electronic and indie rock musicians. These musicians and the fans that love them created several art and music festivals that used to draw huge crowds.
Similar to what happened in Palm Springs in the 80’s and 90’s with the banning of Spring Break, some Silver Lake residents fought these events to reduce noise, traffic and the presence of undesirables.
Two of these festivals in particular, Sunset Junction and the Silver Lake Jubilee would not survive the gentrification. Sunset Junction was last held in 2010 and the Silver Lake Jubilee moved to the Arts District southeast of Downtown and is now the Jubilee Music and Arts Festival.
It should be pointed out that hosting public parties requiring stages and a phalanx of porte-potties are expensive to produce and require lots of corporate sponsors if they are to be free. The public often expects free which makes such events nearly impossible to sustain.
So while she may want to point 100% of the blame in the demise of Silver Lake’s public music festival scene at the gentrified neighbors who want their peace and quiet, the truth is probably somewhere in between that and the reality that public events permits, planning and production just ain’t easy when no one wants to pay for them.
To read the account by local journalists on their take of these changes in Silver Lake, check out this story.
