The Height of L.A. Living

All over Los Angeles, there are neighborhoods declaring themselves The Heights: Avocado Heights, Montecito Heights, Ladera Heights and many more. In some cases, the name reflects the topography; other times it’s more a state of mind. Early settlers might have been escaping the heat or rising above the riffraff. But most were just looking for the romance of a fantastic view. Here are some of our favorites.

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Angelino Heights

As the French say, it was coup de foudre--love at first sight--when we found Angelino Heights. My husband, Andy, and I had moved to L.A. from New York in 1973 and were living in the sleek Bunker Hill Towers. We received artist Leo Politi’s book, “Bunker Hill,” as a gift, and its paintings of vanished Victorians inspired us to look for old houses in unfamiliar neighborhoods. One Sunday, we followed the old cable car route west on Temple Street and then turned up East Edgeware to the crest of a hill. We were treated to an unexpected view: a row of shabby but still stately Queen Anne and Eastlake Victorians in the 1300 block of Carroll Avenue, paint peeling and suffering from years of neglect.

In some frontyards, derelict cars rusted on blocks; at curbsides, sofas oozed padding. Gang graffiti was everywhere. Yet the view was magic. Were it not for the towering palms, the neighborhood seemed more San Francisco than Southland, and we were only minutes from downtown.

Inspired, we reconnoitered the area, roughly bounded by Sunset Boulevard on the north, the Hollywood Freeway on the south and the Kensington Road crescent on the east and west. On the streets we saw Craftsman, Mission Revival, bungalows, courts and Streamline Modernes. They reflected the architectural development of the city in a microcosm.

Our first love were the Victorians, evoking memories of ladies with parasols alighting from horse-drawn phaetons. Later, these same streets served as backdrops for Keystone Kops chases plotted nearby in the old Mack Sennett Studios.

We bought a house on Carroll Avenue, disregarding the conventional wisdom of “location, location, location.” On our first night there, I thought I heard fireworks and would have run to the window, but my husband stopped me with the warning: “It’s gunfire.” Police helicopters swooshed overhead nightly for years, probing streets and backyards with their searchlights.

Angelino Heights is a vastly different place these days, thanks to efforts by residents and catalytic neighborhood organizations. The 1300 block of Carroll Avenue has the distinction of being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1983 the entire area qualified as Los Angeles’ first historic district. Artists and photography students frequent the streets, along with movie location scouts. Buses regularly pass by, depositing tourists who ask, “Is that the house where they shot ‘Charmed’?”

For us, Angelino Heights’ appeal is that it is an old-fashioned community. Neighbors pick up our mail when we are away. They tell us when our Great Dane, Cleo, is roaming the street. On summer nights we sit on our porch, dine alfresco or chat with friends.

Lately, a new generation has discovered our neighborhood. A hip Eastside and proximity to a revitalized downtown are part of the draw, but there are less tangible qualities that make a neighborhood a magnet. As we were three decades ago, the newcomers are struck by Angelino Heights’ many charms--a coup de foudre if I ever saw one.

-- Barbara Thornburg

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View Heights

When I listen to the Louis Armstrong classic “What a Wonderful World,” I hear my neighborhood. From my upstairs office window I see what Louis sees: trees of green, skies of blue, “the bright blessed day and dark sacred night.” And I hum to myself, “What a wonderful view.” I live in the beloved, if less bling, sister of Ladera Heights, Baldwin Hills, Windsor Hills and View Park--the hilly neighborhoods between downtown and LAX that make up South L.A.’s extended black middle-class mecca. (Less bling ‘cause you know there are way more Clipper and Spark fans here.)

My friend Janet, who bought a house here a few years before I did, told me that her Realtor called View Heights the best-kept secret in all of Los Angeles. So I guess I should feel guilty about letting the word out, but I just gotta celebrate this place.

I love it, and not only for the views. There is a freedom to the landscape here, no tract-house uniformity. There are large, gorgeous Spanish-style homes from the late ‘20s and ‘30s; chic ‘50s bungalows where you’d expect to see Dorothy Dandridge cooking chitterlings for Otto Preminger; and plenty of ‘60s and ‘70s “Brady Bunch”-looking places.

Strolling these hills you see well-kept, in many cases beautifully tended, yards. You see Mexican tile steps leading to Pier 1-accented porches. You see palm trees that conjure up the Caribbean in one direction and cypress trees that recall Van Gogh in another.

And the neighborhood is actually quiet enough to hear these beauties sway. We are close to the airport but luckily not assaulted by the sound of jet engines; rather, our dark sacred nights are lighted by the floating star-like lanterns of 747s lined up to land.

View Heights is mostly black, but by no means exclusively black. There are a number of white families that have lived here for generations, and there are Asians and Latinos and a handful of interracial households. Still, there’s something touching about the old-school black love, black community feeling in this neighborhood.

There’s something Southern about the way we speak to one another. There’s a warmth in the gazes, especially of the elders who seem to whisper a kind of pride that a young black woman like me was able in times like these to buy a house in this neighborhood. Makes me so wish my Depression-era born Mississippi papa was still alive to hang out on my porch with me.

A few years before he passed, we went to see Carl Franklin’s film version of Walter Mosley’s “Devil in a Blue Dress.” The way Denzel, as Easy Rawlins, peacefully walked back to the home he owned in a healthy, thriving, black Los Angeles neighborhood and said these closing words--”[I] sat with my friend, on my porch, at my house and we laughed a long time”--made my dad burst into tears.

I like thinking about my pops, on my porch, in my easy chair, looking out on View Heights. I laugh, get a little choked up and I think to myself, “What a wonderful view.”

-- Josslyn Luckett

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Boyle Heights

‘Ta-maaa-lehhs! Ta-maaa-lehhs!” The strolling sidewalk vendor wakes me with sweet memories of my youth as the neighborhood rooster joins in, welcoming the day. “Dos de pollo!” I yell out, thanking my ancestors for inventing the tamale, beautifully symbolizing the body and heart of humanity.

That is my breakfast in Boyle Heights. Afterward, I walk to the corner of Mott and Cesar Chavez to pick up the morning paper, and I hear the pachuco boogie of Lalo Guerrero from the ‘40s, the Eastside Sound of Thee Midniters and Cannibal and the Headhunters from the ‘60s, and the punk of Brat and Thee Undertakers from the ‘80s--all of them linked by mariachis serenading at quincea--eras and endless wedding dances. The Paramount Ballroom (now Casa Grande), home to these legendary performers, was, and still is, the epicenter of Eastside memories.

Heading west on Cesar Chavez, I stop at the Bahia, a restaurant where the cooking recalls my dear grandmother’s love. I hear rockin’ sounds coming from the Ollin Music Conservatory as I pass a 24-hour pawnshop, a wedding chapel, a punk boutique, a tattoo parlor, a health food store and a Chinese restaurant.

At the corner of Soto and Cesar Chavez, the heart of “East Los,” presides the mural “El Corrido de Boyle Heights” by the East Los Streetscapers. Months ago the mural was tagged beyond recognition. What disrespectful idiocy! But, on this day, a miracle: Painter-muralist Paul Botello is faithfully restoring it.

I used to live on Boyle Avenue, named for Andrew Boyle. In 1858, he bought a parcel of the land that had been the 1781 Mexican settlement called El Pueblo de Los Angeles, and built a home on what became this avenue. After his death in 1871, his son-in-law, William H. Workman, subdivided the area and named it Boyle Heights.

My Boyle Avenue apartment was down the street from Mariachi Plaza, where I hired mariachis for my son’s first birthday party. (Easy to do, but not cheap. They don’t play for beer like garage rock bands.) Also on Boyle is the International Institute, founded in 1914 to help Russians, Italians, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese and Jews get established. Its mission reflects the neighborhood’s distinction as Los Angeles’ most multiethnic community from the ‘20s through the ‘50s.

Now I live on Pennsylvania near Mott, surrounded by elegant Victorians and humble homes, some with frontyards of cactus, chickens and corn. Gentle, strong people, inspiring murals and music mix with a turbulent social history that includes the forced “repatriation” of Mexican Americans in the ‘30s and the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans in the ‘40s. Hail Marys, Buddhist chants, Jewish prayers, gospel hallelujahs, oldies, hip-hop, corridos and rancheras--they all lift and carry broken spirits, memories and dreams.

My barrio speaks truth as it sings of love and betrayal. And, if you listen closely to its tenacious, fragile legacy, its scarred heart touches you, and heals. -- Ruben Guevara

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Whitley Heights

The best time I’ve ever had in Los Angeles was the three months I lived in Whitley Heights. It was last summer. I had just moved from a town of 354 in New Mexico, and Los Angeles was daunting. Luckily, I had friends living on what locals call The Hill, and they sent out drum beats on my behalf. The next thing I knew, a Danish model--I kid you not--offered me her home while she summered abroad.

Surrounded by an English-style garden, the little Cape Cod house on Emmet Terrace was a shabby chic oasis, a forested retreat just a few feet off Franklin. Before long, I began counting the minutes at work until I could make a dignified escape and get back to The Hill to squeeze as much out of the evening as possible: sitting in the garden reading, sipping cocktails at Barbara’s, swimming at Brian and Patty’s, listening to one of Caroline’s ribald tales as she promenaded with her infant around Whitley Circle.

As the summer wore on, I found it increasingly difficult to leave at all.

From above, Whitley Heights looks like an island--bordered by the Hollywood Bowl to the west, Hollywood Boulevard’s

Walk of Stars to the south, the ever-rumbling 101 Freeway to the north and, to the east, the hot club scene on the Cahuenga corridor.

When developer Hobart J. Whitley created his eponymous ‘burb in 1918, what he had in mind was a bucolic Mediterranean hilltop town with winding streets, stucco walls and terra-cotta tile roofs. It wasn’t an unusual vision. Long before the most unifying characteristic of Los Angeles developments was their mind-numbing conformity, visionaries such as Whitley and Abbott Kinney (who sought to re-create Venice in the playa marshlands) saw the Southland as a blank canvas on which to paint their whimsical schemes.

Whitley was lucky because his whimsy appealed to motion-picture pioneers. The hillside development provided an easy commute to both studios and favored watering holes. It’s not difficult to imagine W.C. Fields, William Faulkner and Marlene Dietrich gossiping about the neighbors while their dogs did their business on the corner of Grace and Whitley.

In spite of the star power then and now, there is a coziness and camaraderie on The Hill. At several dinner parties to which I was invited, neighbors just stopped by and grabbed themselves a plate. It reminded me of my little New Mexico village.

As summer waned, I was determined to participate in a Whitley Heights ritual. The Danish model had given me a set of keys before she left, and one night I packed a picnic, walked up to the end of Emmet Terrace, opened the private gate and stepped onto a pathway to the Hollywood Bowl.

But as I caught sight of the throngs below headed to the concert, I felt wistful about the few days I had left on The Hill. And so I turned around and headed home. I ate the picnic in the garden, muted strains of Tchaikovsky hovering at the edges of the oasis.

-- Kent Black