Summer is here. As we now embrace (or brace ourselves for — depending on your orientation) months of unrelenting sunshine and heat, many of us will, no doubt, dream of cooling off in a pool or at the beach. Of course, Silver Lake has neither public pools nor beaches… but it does, rather famously, have a certain reservoir for which it’s both  well-known and named. Morning Tribue, 1912 Everyone who visits the Silver Lake Reservoir knows that there is no access to the water toda

his month’s “Ask Silver Lake” is about bungalow courts, which several readers requested as a topic. Bungalow courts are a type of multi-dwelling housing development that were a very popular construction design in the 1920s and ‘30s. A bungalow court consists of multiple dwellings on a single lot.

Today Silver Lake is, by most accounts, moderately well served by mass transit. The website, Walk Score, gives Silver Lake a transit...

On 5 February 2014, the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council considered a motion introduced by councilmembers Anne-Marie Johnson and Dorit Dowler-Guerrero, and stakeholder Al Guerrero, Jr. The motion called for the addition to the Standing Rules a clarification stating that “Silver Lake is not located in the ‘East Side’ of Los Angeles nor is it accurate to refer to Silver Lake as a [sic] ‘East Side’ neighborhood or community.”

Silver Lake‘s connection to music runs almost as deep as its well-known ties to film. There are live music venues, like El Cid, which hosted its first performances in 1962. There are studios, like Pulse, which opened as Soundcastle in the ‘70s.

Silver Lake is widely known, among other things, for its residential architecture. There are many fine examples of California Craftsman, Streamline Moderne, and all sorts of revival styles. Perhaps no style is more celebrated and more closely associated with the neighborhood, though, than Modernism.

The Silver Lake skyline is punctuated by several striking hill-top homes, such as Crestmount, Silvertop, Villa Capistrano, Villa del Lago, and Villa Monaco. Perhaps the most striking is the gargantuan Garbutt House, a hulking citadel built in the 1920s by and for wealthy capitalist, Frank Garbutt.