If Silver Lake isn’t in the Eastside, Where is it? - Ask Silver Lake by Eric Brightwell
- Eric Brightwell
- 7 days ago
- 9 min read
“Ask Silver Lake” is dedicated to exploring the history and insights of our community. If you have questions or ideas you’d like us to consider, please drop a comment or send them to outreach@silverlakenc.org.
INTRODUCTION
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.”
It passed with a vote of twelve “yays,” three “nays,” and one “present not voting.” The news that Silver Lake (according to the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council) was not in the Eastside was reported by The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, LAist, KCRW, and of course, The Eastsider (which continued to cover Silver Lake despite the non-binding resolution). Despondent Vice Chair, Rusty Millar, despaired, “Now how will we enforce this, for God’s sake?!”
Perhaps the issue would seem to have been resolved – but in addition to Millar’s apparently hypothetical inquiry, a burning unanswered question remained: if Silver Lake is not in the Eastside… where is it?
DEFINING DISTRICTS
Regardless of what anyone tells you, there are no official administrative divisions of Los Angeles along the lines of a borough, arrondissement, or gu/qū. There are no officially defined regions. The city adopted a ward system in 1870… but abandoned it for an “at-large” system in 1909. The methods with which Angelenos have divided their cities have, therefore, varied across individuals, bureaus, organizations, and agencies. They have also tended to change over time as borders, demographics, and perceptions have changed. This, of course, has resulted in differing views which, in turn, led to disagreements and unfailingly civil discourse about the topic. Los Angeles is, after all, the capital of casual – so let’s not get bent out of shape as we explore the history of what larger multi-neighborhood regions Silver Lake has variously been considered to be part of.
In 1880, Los Angeles was a small-ish town of about 28 square miles (73 square kilometers) and just 11,183 souls. It was divided into five wards. The original three had been joined by two more in 1878. In 1888, Los Angeles experienced its first real estate boom. During that decade, the town’s population grew by more than 350%. A map made in 1888 showed a city divided into two regions: East L.A. and West L.A. The dividing line between them was the river for which the town was named.
The area that would become Silver Lake straddled the northern border of the city, formed today by Fountain Avenue. The western edge of the city was at what’s today Hoover Street – which happens to be Silver Lake’s western border. The Silver Lake Reservoir wasn’t completed until 1908 and people wouldn’t begin to refer to the surrounding neighborhood as Silver Lake until around 1911.
NORTHWEST LOS ANGELES
From 1781 until 1909, the northwest corner of Los Angeles was situated at the intersection of Fountain and Hoover, behind Akbar. There is a plaque, although it’s not in the correct spot. Rather, it’s affixed to a boulder, nearby, which guards the entrance to the old Lubin Manufacturing Company Studio (now Scientology Media Productions) in Los Feliz. The Northwest Los Angeles Improvement Association was organized back in 1893 and the region was so known before there even was a Silver Lake. Even after the northwestern edge of the city spread all the way to Chatsworth in 1915, some continued to refer to Silver Lake and its neighbors as “Northwest Los Angeles” – even though, by the 1940s, that term was more often applied to the region of Northwest Los Angeles County. Nevertheless, a Wikipedia entry on Northwest Los Angeles that was penned in 2010 still lists Silver Lake and its neighbors as being located in that region.
THE WESTSIDE
Because Hoover marked the western edge of the city from 1781 until 1896 – and because everything west of the River had been referred to as “West L.A.” as early as 1888, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Silver Lake and its neighbors were also, very early on, referred to variously as the West Side, Westside, and West End. This was common at least as early as the 1910s. Even though, in 1916, Los Angeles spread west across the basin to the Pacific Palisades, not a few people continued to refer to everything from the River to the Santa Monica Bay as “the Westside.” Where exactly the Westside begins for most remains the topic of another discussion – although a Los Angeles Times poll found that La Cienega Boulevard was the most common response. Nevertheless, various Silver Lake gang members still sometimes throw up a “WS” for “Westside” and routinely include them in their placas.
NORTHEAST LOS ANGELES
The marker for the northeast corner of Los Angeles is located across the river in Ernest E. Debs Regional Park, in Montecito Heights. The descriptor, “Northeast Los Angeles,” was in use as early as 1882 and, in 1895, Los Angeles annexed two independent communities there, Sycamore Grove and Highland Park. Around 1970, the LAPD created the Northeast Division to protect and serve the residents of those communities – as well as East Hollywood, Echo Park, Los Feliz, and Silver Lake. Some Silver Lakers, in apparent obeisance, began referring to the region until then mostly characterized as either the Westside or Northwest Los Angeles as Northeast Los Angeles.
THE EASTSIDE
You will also hear self-appointed authorities on the subject counterfactually assert that it was transplants in the ‘90s and ‘00s who first began to refer to Silver Lake and its neighbors as the Eastside. Way back in 1985, LA Weekly food writer and native Angelena, Karen Kaplan, referred to Silver Lake as the “Eastside” in a review of a no-longer-extant restaurant in the building next to the Solutions! mural (aka the “Elliott Smith Mural”). What’s more, there are occasional references to Rowena Avenue businesses as being in “East Los Angeles” going back at least to the early 1950s – this despite the fact that nearly everyone, by the 1930s, reserved that term for the unincorporated communities located east of Boyle Heights (i.e., Belvedere, Eastwood, Montebello Park, and Maravilla). Eastside, for that matter, had been reserved by most for neighborhoods either east of the River (or, in South Los Angeles, east of Main Street) since at least the 1900s. It’s all geographically relative, one could argue. West Asia, to most Europeans, is the Middle East. To residents of Arabia, North Africa is the Maghreb – the place where the sun sets. Nothing to get hung about.
THE INNERNETTE
But people did get hung and even by 1988 (a year before the launch of the World Wide Web and the dawn of the first internet flame wars) people were writing in to newspapers to complain about Silver Lake being described as the Eastside; people like Lynne Hagerty, who wrote to the LA Weekly to protest that Echo Park and Silver Lake were the “gringo Eastside.” While “gringo Eastside” was, no doubt, meant to defend the “real” Eastside from erasure, the “gringo Eastside” was then overwhelmingly Latino, too, and for that reason and others, that designation wasn’t widely adopted.
In the early 2000s, the Los Angeles City Planning Commission began dividing the city into planning areas. A few, like the Northeast Los Angeles and South Los Angeles planning areas, corresponded to widely recognized informal regions. Silver Lake, though, was designated part of the clunkily named Silver Lake – Echo Park – Elysian Valley Community Planning Area, highlighting, in a way, the absence of a smart designation. The early ‘00s were also the heyday of blogs and local online media sites and those were the sorts of conversations one might expect to have on, say, Blogging Los Angeles (launched in 2003). It also happened on more hyperlocal sites like LA Eastside, which was launched in 2008 with the tagline, “Life Beyond The River” and which was followed, in 2010, by Eastsider LA, which includes Silver Lake and its neighbors in the “Greater Eastside.”
MAPPING LA
The Los Angeles Times finally entered the chat in 2009 with its ambitious but ultimately aborted Mapping LA project. A team of developers using input from readers attempted to create the first comprehensive neighborhood and regional maps of Los Angeles. There were inevitable disagreements and head-scratchers like not including Pasadena in the San Gabriel Valley or Compton in South Los Angeles. The San Gabriel Mountains region was named Angeles Forest — after the national forest that covers them… but also the Sierra Pelona in Northwest Los Angeles. Santa Catalina was lumped in with the Harbor District whilst the county’s other major island, San Clemente, was left out entirely. Silver Lake, meanwhile, was lumped in with Central L.A., a 58 square mile region with a population of 840,000 – or, an area larger and more populous than San Francisco. In other words, it failed to distinguish between the widely recognized regions of Downtown, Hollywood, and Midtown – meaning Silver Lake was considered by The Los Angeles Times to be part of the same region as the Arts District, Laurel Canyon, and the Miracle Mile. Those head-scratchers led to headaches and the Los Angeles Times abandoned the project in 2016.
ENTER THE NEW YORKERS
Around the same time, two New York-based blogs decided to weigh in. New Yorkers Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung started Gothamist in 2003. New Yorker Lockhart Steele started Curbed in 2004. Gothamist launched its Los Angeles outlet, LAist, in 2004. Curbed followed with Curbed LA in 2005. In 2010, Curbed asked readers to submit names for the mini-region of East Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. The editors favorite responses were East Sunset, Griffith Triangle, Hipster Heights, Middle Earth, Near East, North Central, Pluto, and The Upside. Los Angeles Times reporter Esmeralda Bermudez listed several more designations she found “making the rounds in cyberspace”: Eastside Lite, Hipsteria, The West Eastside, and LoFeSiLaEcPa.
North Central was declared the winner — an obvious play on South Central. Non-natives can be forgiven for not knowing that South Central is named after South Central Avenue, not its location within both the center and southern portions of the city. Even pedantic genius Alan Partridge wrote “It’s either South or Central, it can’t be both.” There is no North Central Avenue in the City of Los Angeles, though – South Central Avenue terminates in Little Tokyo.
The quest to brand the region continued. By 2011, New York-brained real estate developers were referring to Silver Lake as “the Williamsburg of the West,” which, one supposes, would make Echo Park, Elysian Valley, Filipinotown, Los Feliz, Pico-Union, and Westlake the Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Bushwick, East Williamsburg, and Greenpoint of the West. In 2012, no less an authority on all things hip than New York-founded/New Jersey-based Forbes Magazine named Silver Lake “America’s Best Hipster Neighborhood.”
Around 2013, “Tri-Hipster Area” entered the lexicon – this time to refer to Hollywood, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. Sorry Los Feliz. It was another New York reference. The “Tri-State Area” is a regional term for Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. Tri-Hipster Area was picked up by The Huffington Post but also local outlets like The Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly. The Snark Ages began to draw to a close shortly after. LAist, which embraced “Tri-Hipster Area,” ended operations in 2017. Curbed LA, who coined North Central, died in 2020. The New York-inspired terms seem to have died with them.
MIDEAST LOS ANGELES
I moved to Silver Lake in 1999, and like many people today, I then not only thought of Silver Lake as an Eastside neighborhood but, possibly, as the most Eastside of Eastside neighborhoods. I sometimes went to a night called “Eastside Mondays” that took place in Westlake – a neighborhood whose name began to get me wondering where exactly the Eastside was. My friend, Morten (then a resident of Elysian Heights) and I joked about starting a magazine called Eastside Living (a jokey homage to the fictional Newport Living magazine on The OC.). A friend from the other side of the River, Martin, seemed genuinely confused since, in his mind, Echo Park and Silver Lake were the Westside.
I tried my own hand at coining a name for this unnamed region. Some protested – saying to “just refer to the neighborhoods individually” – presumably, as in “Silver Lake is a neighborhood in the Alvarado Terrace-Angeleno Heights-City West-Crown Hill-Echo Park-Elysian Heights-Elysian Valley-Franklin Hills-Pico-Union-Solano Canyon- Temple-Beaudry-Victor Heights-Westlake-Silver Lake region.” Really rolls of the tongue. I came up, instead, with Mideast Side as a portmanteau of Midtown and Eastside that reflects its location between both – and the contentiousness of the whole thing. My friend, Sanjukta, suggested that I ditch the “side” since it isn’t a “side” of anything. I tweaked it to the elegant Mideast Los Angeles… or “MELA” if you’re into the whole brevity thing. I’ve seen and heard it picked up here and there but, sadly, it hasn’t seen widespread adoption.
WHO CARES?
“So who cares?” I hear you asking. I would suggest that all Angelenos should care. Even without rigid definitions, understanding and respecting distinct regional characteristics is crucial. It fosters a sense of belonging and pride, addresses disparities, and promotes effective community building In short, it kills Fascism… or at least anti-socialism.
So what do you call the region in which Silver Lake is located? Leave your answers in the comments. Be civil. Repeat to yourself that there is no right or wrong answer and don’t worry, no one will enforce this, for God’s sake!