If you live in Los Angeles you quickly realize that most of the people here are not from Los Angeles. In fact, if you live here and are reading this, you probably aren't from LA either. You also hear words like gentrification and hipster often lumped together, it's more than likely that you run in a circle that contributes to these changes. Nothing wrong with that, such is life, and over time certain things like gentrification are inevitable. But it's important to understand that Silver Lake is quite possibly the origin of the heartbeat of the city. Home to many of the early Hollywood studios now re-located such as ABC & Walt Disney as well as some of the early creations from many now famous architects like Neutra, Schindler, Lautner and Wright, Silver Lake is way more than just an area dominated by Hipsters. Even though last year Forbes magazine named Silver Lake the "hippest hipster neighborhood in America," I wonder if they cared to notice that the median resident age is nearly 45 years old, an average that is 12 years higher than the rest of Los Angeles. That doesn't sound so hip, unless the majority of the baby boomer residents are running around Silver Lake in their multicolored ponchos handmade in Peru talking about how the Short Stop is so not in Silver Lake and dancing at Akbar is better anyway, but not as good as their yoga class at YAS. Truth is, Silver Lake has history, Silver Lake is old, Silver Lake is Mexican for Christ's sake. Just because a bunch of Yupsters (I prefer this term nowadays) are running around Sunset Blvd in their high-wasted jeans doesn't mean Silver Lake is a hipster community. Silver Lake is Silver Lake. Hell, in the 70's Silver Lake was the epi-center of the Gay leather subculture, equivalent to the SoMA neighborhood in San Francisco. And, if you knock on most of the doors there, the residents could probably tell you that. But if you stand in front of Intelligentsia with a clipboard and ask those kind of questions, of course those Kombucha loving coffee drinkers will have no idea what the hell was happening back then. They barely know what was happening five minutes ago if it didn't happen on Instagram. With that said, here is some content for you to digest and hopefully later read on social media.
