The neighborhood’s hip -- because they say so

No one has ever accused me of being chic. Or hip. I’ve never lived in one of those ZIP Codes that includes what I think of as the “ritzy Bs”-- Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Bel-Air -- nor, for that matter, in their upmarket sisters, Malibu and Pacific Palisades. I’ve never even inhabited the less exalted but Very Hip precincts of Venice and West Hollywood.

I grew up in Compton and have spent the last 29 years on the determinedly unchic Eastside -- east, even, of Vermont Avenue, in an era during which the parents of some of my son’s private school classmates seem to think that traveling east of La Brea requires a pith helmet.

But suddenly, over the past year or two, the media have decided that my neighborhood -- Silver Lake, where I live (on the east or “wrong” side of the lake, no less), and Echo Park, right next door -- is chic and hip and cool ... and even pricey.

Los Angeles magazine referred to our “hipster revival” in one recent issue -- and speaks of us as “trendsetters” in the January issue. The Times referred to us as both “chic” and a “hip curio.” Money magazine announced that we are “part of the urban renaissance taking place just outside downtown.” Silver Lake, the Money story said, is “attracting bourgeois bohemians.”

Most surprising of all, the Los Angeles Business Journal said Echo Park had pushed its way into the top 10 ZIP Codes in Los Angeles County “in terms of median per-square-foot home price appreciation over the past three years.”

Echo Park? Expensive? Get outta here.

“Echo Park has had a barrio stigma,” one real estate agent in the Business Journal story acknowledged. Yes, indeed. And Echo Park is still Echo Park, while Beverly Hills is still Beverly Hills; Echo Park housing appreciated 53.4% compared with 49.2% for Beverly Hills in the period under study, but it’s easier to have a big percentage increase when your starting point is low. Echo Park began that period at $120.90 per square foot; Beverly Hills started at $288.71.

No wonder a Brentwood real estate agent was quoted in the story as saying, “Those figures are meaningless. It makes them sound so great, but on this side of town, who cares.”

And yet and yet. “Echo Park is one of those little hip areas,” another real estate agent said. “It’s a cool place to be.”

Clubs, dining, Starbucks

So how do the news media decide an area is “cool”?

“It takes three things,” says Kit Rachlis, editor of Los Angeles magazine, “a bohemian art scene, good restaurants and the fact that the publication has never mentioned it before” (or at least not in the recent memory of today’s short-attention-span readers).

City magazines in particular are determined to appear on top of things, ahead of the curve -- to create buzz, to attract and bond with readers by telling them what’s new, what’s “in,” what’s “hot” -- even if the newest, hottest “in” place, person, look or whatever is really only lukewarm.

But Echo Park does have a burgeoning pop music scene -- “building toward critical mass ... now generating some of the smartest, most diverse and unpredictable music in Los Angeles,” according to a Times story in November. And Silver Lake -- which has periodically been deemed hip in the past -- now has a vibrant, late-night club life, two hot new restaurants, three gourmet food shops, its own Starbucks, its own farmers market and its own movie festival.

Our local Mayfair is being remodeled to become a Gelson’s, and the proprietor of the new Cheese Store of Silver Lake -- Chris Pollan, a refugee from the Cheese Store of Beverly Hills -- tells me he hopes to have a Silver Lake wine festival later this year.

“I started looking at Silver Lake for my shop about four years ago,” he says, “but it wasn’t ready yet. Now there’s a restaurant and a wine bar next door, and there’s going to be some art galleries down the street, and I decided Silver Lake is ready.”

So I guess there’s at least a modicum of validity to the media’s new characterization of our part of town. After all, Playboy Enterprises is leaving Beverly Hills to move even farther east than my home, into Glassell Park, in a new complex named -- I can hardly believe this -- Media Center.

Of course, Playboy hasn’t really been hip since about 1964 -- if it was ever really hip (as opposed to merely risque) -- but still, I’d rather be welcoming Hef and his 400 pairs of silk pajamas to the Eastside than yet another emporium of yoga and yogurt.

At some level, it’s exciting to go from living on the other side of the tracks to living in the epicenter of media Cool/Chic/Hip. My wife says it’s also lucrative; she’s sure our house is worth twice what it was six or eight or 10 years ago.

Maybe. But I’m not selling. I love my neighborhood. I love its ethnic diversity, its eclectic architectural mix and its blend of gay and straight lifestyles. I love the fact that my son plays in a local park’s basketball and baseball league where many of his teammates’ parents are immigrants and blue-collar workers. But as someone who was once teased about buying his underwear at J.C. Penney -- and whose automotive choices run more to bummer than Beemer -- I’m not sure how I’m supposed to act now that I live in a media-anointed capital of cool.

My accountant, a media skeptic who also lives in the neighborhood, says he wonders if “maybe I should react like I do when Time magazine says the stock market is going through the roof. That’s when I know it’s time to get out.”

On the other hand, given the speed with which the media now reveal -- and then replace -- new hot spots, icons and trends, they’ll probably decide Bell Gardens or (shudder!) Buena Park is the latest outpost of chic before I can get signed up for my first yoga class. In fact, I already I see that the January issue of Los Angeles magazine -- the same issue that calls us “trendsetters” and that says one of our main streets has “become a neo-bohemian hub” -- does not include Silver Lake or Echo Park among its “10 Best Neighborhoods You’ve Never Heard Of.”

Of course, it’s hard to be simultaneously unheard of and a chic, hip, neo-bohemian trendsetter.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.