silver lake lore

Before the Name

Before it was Silver Lake, it was called Edendale. Before that, Ivanhoe Canyon — a developer's flourish of Scottish romanticism applied to hilly chaparral land that had been Tongva territory for millennia before Spanish missionaries arrived and dismantled the world that existed here. The Tongva people knew these hills and the river valley below them as their own. By the time the American city began laying water infrastructure across the basin in the late 1800s, their sovereignty had been erased through mission enslavement, Mexican secularization, American conquest, and a series of treaties signed in 1851 and 1852 that promised 8.5 million acres to California's native peoples — then were quietly buried in a Senate archive for fifty years without ratification. California didn't formally recognize the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe until 1994.

The streets of Silver Lake still carry the developers' Scottish dreams: Rowena, Angus, Elsinore, Kenilworth. The neighborhood they named with their borrowed romanticism turned out to be one of the most genuinely romantic — in the deepest sense of that word — in the city.

Mulholland's Water and Herman Silver's Name

In 1906 and 1907, William Mulholland — the self-taught Irish immigrant engineer who would go on to build the Los Angeles Aqueduct and, later, oversee the collapse of the St. Francis Dam — identified this canyon northwest of downtown as an ideal site for emergency water storage. The city was growing too fast for the Los Angeles River to keep pace. Two reservoirs were built here: the upper one named Ivanhoe, after the 1819 Sir Walter Scott novel, and the lower one named for Herman Silver, a former city councilman and Water Commissioner who had secured the land and the funding.

Silver Lake was not a lake. It never was. It was an earth-fill dam — concrete-lined, asphalt-sloped — that flooded a canyon and made an artificial body of water in the hills above a young city. When it opened in May 1908, there was no fence around it. The public was not just permitted at the reservoir — they were encouraged. The water was stocked with black bass. Annual fishing competitions were held on its banks. The city planted more than 2,000 trees along the shores, including groves of Australian eucalyptus that still harbor nesting Great Blue Herons today.

By around 1911, the surrounding community had stopped calling itself Ivanhoe or Edendale and started calling itself Silver Lake, after the reservoir. The name of a bureaucrat became the name of a neighborhood — and then of a way of life that had nothing to do with either.

The Architecture: A World Landmark Hidden in the Hills

Silver Lake is, by any serious measure, one of the most architecturally significant residential neighborhoods on earth. That is not hyperbole. In the 1920s and '30s, a group of Viennese-trained modernists arrived in Los Angeles and gravitated to these hills — drawn by the terrain, the light, the affordability, and the presence of one another. What they built here amounts to a living archive of the 20th century's most important domestic architecture.

It began with R.M. Schindler. Rudolf Michael Schindler was born in Vienna in 1887, came to the United States via Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin studio, and in 1923 designed his first Silver Lake commission — the McAlmon House on Waverly Drive. He went on to design nine structures in Silver Lake, often for clients who couldn't afford expensive lots and needed an architect who could work miracles with difficult hillside sites. Schindler's genius was spatial compression: the way a room that should feel small opens instead, the way a roof that looks flat from the street turns out to be gabled, the way a garage becomes a structural plinth elevating the whole house above the canyon.

Richard Neutra arrived next. Austrian-born, trained in Vienna and Zurich, Neutra built his own family home at 2300 Silver Lake Boulevard in 1932 — the VDL Research House, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and open to the public through Cal Poly Pomona. From that house, overlooking the reservoir, Neutra mentored a generation of architects who spread modernism through the neighborhood block by block. Gregory Ain, whose Avenel Cooperative Housing project of 1947 was designed with a collective of left-leaning cartoonists who'd read about modern architecture in magazines. John Lautner, who built his own home on Micheltorena Street in 1940 and later designed the swooping, cantilevered Silvertop — the Reiner-Burchill Residence — a structure so extraordinary it has been compared to Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in its impact on residential design. Harwell Hamilton Harris. Raphael Soriano. Eric Lloyd Wright. Together they made Silver Lake into what the Neutra VDL website describes as one of the densest concentrations of significant modernist residential architecture anywhere in the world.

You can drive these streets today and see their work: set into hillsides, cantilevered over canyons, perched above the reservoir. Most are still private homes. Many are still lived in by people who have no idea, or complete awareness, that they are inhabiting history.

The Bohemian Exodus: Radicals, Writers, and Russian Daughters

Silver Lake's architecture drew the attention of the progressive and the unconventional from the beginning. The hills were affordable. The terrain was hard to develop conventionally, which kept speculators away. The presence of artists and architects gave the neighborhood a social permission that more manicured parts of the city didn't offer. By the 1930s and '40s, Silver Lake had become a refuge for a layered community of radicals, writers, union organizers, European emigrés, and political exiles — overlapping with the same bohemian current that ran through Edendale and Echo Park, but with its own particular cast of characters.

Loren Miller lived on Micheltorena Street in a home designed by James Homer Garrott. Miller was a journalist and civil rights attorney, the son of a man born into slavery, who had moved from Kansas to Los Angeles in 1929 and dedicated his career to dismantling the racial covenants that kept Black families from buying homes across Southern California. In 1944, he won Fairchild v. Raines, cracking open Pasadena's restricted neighborhoods. In 1948, he was chief counsel in Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court case that declared racially restrictive housing covenants unconstitutional — one of the most important legal decisions in the history of civil rights in America. He lived in Silver Lake while he did it.

Anaïs Nin, the French-born diarist and novelist whose private journals are among the most intimate documents of 20th-century literary life, spent her final years in a Silver Lake house designed by Eric Lloyd Wright — Frank Lloyd Wright's grandson — perched above the reservoir. She died there in 1977. The detail that tends to stop people: she was simultaneously married to two men — Hugo Guiler in New York and Rupert Pole, a forest ranger sixteen years her junior, in Silver Lake. She kept the bigamy secret from both husbands until she was diagnosed with cancer. The reservoir was her view. The house was her double life's one fixed point.

Maria Rasputin — born Matryona Rasputina, daughter of the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, the "Mad Monk" who had captivated and infuriated the last Romanov court — fled Russia and eventually arrived in Silver Lake in 1937, when the neighborhood was already something of a refuge for Russian intellectuals and emigrés. In Silver Lake she lived quietly in a bungalow, supporting herself by performing in cabarets and working as a lion tamer for Ringling Brothers. During a performance in Indiana, she was mauled by a grizzly bear. She survived and returned to the bungalow. She died there in 1977 — the same year as Anaïs Nin — living peacefully until the end.

Raymond Chandler was here. Woody Guthrie was here. Judy Garland spent time in these hills as a child in the 1930s. The neighborhood was, for decades, the place where the strange and the serious came to be left alone together.

The Mattachine Steps and the Black Cat: Where Gay America Began

Silver Lake holds a place in LGBTQ history that is, by any honest accounting, as important as Stonewall — and far less well known.

In the summer of 1948, a gay activist named Harry Hay began meeting clandestinely with a small group of men in his home at 2328 Cove Avenue, just off Silver Lake Boulevard. Hay called the group "Bachelors Anonymous." By 1950, it had grown into the Mattachine Society — one of the first formal gay rights organizations in American history. The Mattachine Society's founding principle was radical for its moment: that homosexuals were not sinners or perverts or sick people in need of treatment, but an oppressed minority who deserved civil rights. This idea, articulated in a modest Silver Lake home above the reservoir, would eventually reshape American law, culture, and identity.

The stairway beside Hay's former home on Cove Avenue was officially named the Mattachine Steps by the city of Los Angeles in 2012. It's a set of outdoor public stairs — the kind Silver Lake has dozens of, built in the early 20th century to connect hillside homes to the streets below. 147 steps. Worth climbing for the history alone.

Less than two miles from the Mattachine Steps, on the Sunset Boulevard strip, stood the Black Cat Tavern. On New Year's Eve 1966, undercover LAPD officers infiltrated the bar and watched as patrons kissed at midnight to ring in 1967. The police moved in and began beating and arresting people. Fourteen were charged with "assault and public lewdness." When news of the raid spread, the Silver Lake gay community organized. On February 11, 1967 — two and a half years before the Stonewall uprising in New York — more than 200 people gathered outside the Black Cat for what became the largest documented LGBTQ civil rights demonstration in American history to that point. They carried signs. They demanded the right to exist in public. They were the first.

The building still stands on Sunset Boulevard, operating today as a restaurant and bar called The Black Cat — named in deliberate tribute to what happened there. A historic landmark marker was installed in 2008. The neighborhood that was once called the "Swish Alps" — a derisive nickname that the community reclaimed — had been a gay enclave for decades before the raid, and for decades after. Akbar. Circus of Books. The bars and bookstores and community spaces that formed the infrastructure of queer life in Los Angeles through the AIDS crisis and beyond, until gentrification finally dispersed what homophobia and illness had not.

The Music: Spaceland, Silversun, and Sunset Boulevard at Night

By the early 1990s, Silver Lake's affordability and its accumulated cultural permission had made it a natural landing spot for the generation of musicians who would define the sound of Los Angeles indie rock. Beck was living in the neighborhood around 1990. The Sunset Junction street fair — which had been closing off Sunset Boulevard between Fountain and Edgecliffe Drive each summer since the 1980s — was booking bands that brought people from all over the city.

In March 1995, a promoter named Mitchell Frank converted a venue on Glendale Boulevard called Dreams of L.A. into a live music club called Spaceland. The timing was perfect. The neighborhood was full of musicians who rehearsed at spaces like Hully Gully on Fletcher Drive and played house parties in the hills and needed somewhere to graduate to. Spaceland became that place. Over the next decade, it was the room where Silver Lake's music scene cohered into something nationally recognized — hosting early sets by Rilo Kiley, Elliott Smith, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Tame Impala, and Vampire Weekend before any of them were names outside of California. Spaceland is now The Satellite, and it still books shows.

Elliott Smith lived his final years in a Silver Lake bungalow. The tribute wall painted in his honor on Sunset Boulevard — outside a tanning salon — has been maintained by the community since his death in 2003. Silversun Pickups, who named themselves after a liquor store across from the Silverlake Lounge, became one of the most visible bands to emerge from the scene. Local Natives followed. The Silverlake Lounge, which had started as a drag and burlesque venue, became for years the weekday home of local indie acts booked by Scott Sterling's agency, The Fold. Bands played there before they could fill anything larger. It still operates today.

By the mid-2000s, national magazines had started calling Silver Lake "the hippest place in America." It was both true and the beginning of the end of whatever had made it that.

The Reservoir, Again and Again

Silver Lake's reservoir has had a complicated relationship with the city it was built to serve. For most of the 20th century it was a working piece of infrastructure, a backup water source that became, over the decades, a place for walking, jogging, and watching Great Blue Herons. A jogging path was officially added in the 1980s — pushed in part by a gay men's running club called the Frontrunners, who lobbied the city council for years to let people use the reservoir's perimeter as a route.

In 2008, the reservoir was drained due to bromate contamination. Refilled. Drained again in 2015 for pipeline construction. Refilled in 2017. Drained again in 2017. Refilled eventually. Through all of it, the community debated what the reservoir should be — drinking water supply, recreational park, open-air swimming pool. In 2013, the reservoirs were permanently disconnected from the city's drinking water system. The water you see when you walk the path today is no longer anyone's water supply. It's a lake now, in the way that matters: a thing people gather around.

The path around the reservoir — 2.2 miles, flat, lined with eucalyptus and palms, bookended by herons and joggers and people walking dogs — is the heartbeat of the neighborhood in a way that can't quite be explained to anyone who hasn't walked it at dusk on a clear evening, with the water going silver in the fading light and the downtown skyline visible to the south. You understand, doing that walk, why people who move here don't leave.

The Stairs

Silver Lake has more public outdoor stairways than almost any neighborhood in Los Angeles. They were built in the early 20th century to give hillside residents a way to reach the streetcar lines below — the Pacific Electric Railroad that ran through the area beginning in 1904. As the streetcars disappeared and the hills gentrified and the stairways fell into disuse, some were maintained by neighbors, some were forgotten, and some were painted. Swan Stairs, painted in 2015. Piano Stairs, 90 steps made to look like a keyboard. The Micheltorena Stairs. The Mattachine Steps. Each one is a pedestrian artifact — a reminder that Silver Lake was, before it was anything else, a neighborhood built on the premise that people should be able to get somewhere on foot, under their own power, even if the terrain says otherwise.

The Neighborhood Now

Silver Lake today is expensive, famous, and fought over in the way that places become when everyone wants to live there and not enough of them can afford to. The Latino and immigrant families who gave the neighborhood its texture for decades have been largely priced out. The gay bars and leather stores and queer infrastructure that defined the "Swish Alps" have mostly closed. What remains is a neighborhood that carries its history in its bones — the modernist houses still clinging to the hillsides, the reservoir still going silver at sunset, the Mattachine Steps still there for anyone who wants to climb them, the Black Cat still serving drinks in the room where history was made.

There is a reason Silver Lake keeps drawing people who need a city that will let them be something other than what they started as. It always has. The architects came here to build what hadn't been built before. The radicals came here to organize what hadn't been organized before. The gay community came here to exist on their own terms before those terms were recognized by law. The musicians came here to play music that didn't fit anywhere else. Something in the hills above the reservoir has always been hospitable to people who have something to figure out.

Notable past residents include Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, John Lautner, Harry Hay, Anaïs Nin, Loren Miller, Maria Rasputin, Woody Guthrie, Raymond Chandler, Judy Garland, Mabel Normand, Elliott Smith, and Beck.