Market May Lose Its Sign of Another Time

Another local landmark will soon be passing into memory with the takeover by Trader Joe’s of the Hub market on Hyperion Avenue in Silver Lake. I enthusiastically welcome Trader Joe’s to our neighborhood, but the old Hub will be missed.

For those of us who grew up in the neighborhood, the Hub was where we shopped before the days of the supermarkets. The checkers knew your name--because they’d watched you grow up, and had been working there longer than you’d been alive! The Hub was there when Disney Studios was across the street. The butcher counter did not have any prepackaged products, and did have real live butchers. The deli counter was more akin to Langer’s than to the trendy deli across the street at the Mayfair where you can get Chinese chicken salad but not pastrami. A trip to the Hub, in the heat of summer vacation or on the way home from school, was the way we’d cure our sweet tooth and quench our thirst.

Most of us have seen the world, and many of us have returned to the old neighborhood to live and raise families, and perhaps to recapture the feeling of community and continuity that comes with the familiar old landmarks--Marshall High, Griffith Park and the Observatory, the Mulholland Fountain, the Hyperion Bridge and the Hub Market.

I have suggested to Mr. Mike Parker of Trader Joe’s Markets, that perhaps the market could now be called Trader Joe’s Hub Market, with the hope that the large neon sign atop the building could be preserved as a reminder of those days when you could live in Los Angeles and still feel like you belonged to a community.

Anyone interested in preserving the Hub sign should contact Trader Joe’s corporate offices in Pasadena.

STEVEN M. VOLPIN

Silver Lake