Car-Free Los Angeles and Southern California by Nathan Landau

Author:Nathan Landau
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9780899976570
Publisher: Wilderness Press
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

At Figueroa Street, almost the western edge of downtown, the street changes names—Cesar E. Chavez to the east and Sunset Boulevard to the west. This tells you something about where eastern LA and western LA are psychologically located. The rather artsy pile on the left at Grand Avenue is Los Angeles’s new performing arts high school.

Crossing the Harbor (110) Freeway, you leave the well-organized, thoroughly redeveloped downtown zone. Just past the freeway and Bellevue Avenue is the Paradise Motel. It looks like a non-Edenic place to stay, but its neon is kept in lovely working order, and it’s sometimes used for filming. Sunset seems like a street from some other place or time here—a street of tumbledown repair shops and garages and a canyon between two hills. Occasional public stairways, originally built for the Sunset streetcar, climb the hills to the neighborhoods above (the Echo Park Historical Society leads walks on these stair streets).

Sunset as Fun Street really begins in the Echo Park neighborhood (the park itself is just a couple blocks to the south, to the left). Working-class Latinos and hip young Anglos share the neighborhood, depicted in films such as Quinceañera. At 1716 Sunset Blvd. at Lemoyne St., Stories bookstore/café combines two of life’s great pleasures. It’s next to 826 LA East, a writing program for kids modeled on San Francisco’s famed 826 Valencia Street writing center.

The artsy presence in the neighborhood is not new—in the early 20th century an artistic and intellectual community, with a strong gay element, was located in what was then called Edendale. The name Edendale is rarely used now, except at the attractive new Edendale Public Library branch on Sunset Boulevard just east of Alvarado Street. Just around the corner on Alvarado Street is the Echo Park Film Center, a hub of do-it-yourself filmmaking.

Retail stores briefly thin out west of Echo Park Avenue but pick up again by Silver Lake Boulevard. The highly decorated Café Tropical at that corner serves you Cuban sandwiches and coffee strong enough to see you through any journey. North (right) on Silver Lake about 0.5 mile is LA Mill (1636 Silver Lake Blvd.), a temple of single-origin coffee that could probably produce the coffee grower in person if you asked. LA Mill is in a groovy little commercial district that also includes the Spaceland rock club (1717 Silver Lake Blvd.).

The epicenter of Sunset’s hip commercial strip is in the Sunset Junction area, starting at approximately Maltman Avenue, centered on Hyperion Avenue, and out to about Fountain Avenue and Hoover Street, a roughly 0.5-mile segment. The area has trendy restaurants, bars, and the scene-heavy coffeehouse Intelligentsia (3922 Sunset Blvd.; also in Venice and Pasadena). An older flavor of the neighborhood can be found up the block at Circus of Books (also in West Hollywood), a pioneering gay erotica store (4001 Sunset Blvd.). Sunset Junction is also the home of a now enormous street fair with rock concerts each August.

West of Sunset Junction, at Hillhurst Avenue, Sunset ends its curving and angling path and heads due west across a flatter landscape.

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