The Technicolor Walls of Highland Park
Highland Park is the forerunner of next generation youth culture in Los Angeles. Yet despite its meteoric rise, this neighborhood of Chicano traditionalists and avant-garde hipsters poses an enigma to the outsider: under what conditions does gentrification occur, and what circumstances here (or in any district, for that matter) have fostered a local renaissance?
Highland Park is divided. From one vantage point, the neighborhood appears to be an ethnic enclave of Mexican and Salvadoran culture, a community firmly rooted in its traditions and decorated by vivid murals of shared history. From another vantage point, Highland Park is LA Weekly’s “greatest neighborhood in Los Angeles”; the home of Scoop’s Ice Cream and Café de Leché; it’s a synthesized community of aspiring young people latching on to the rapid re-development of the once working-class neighborhood. But as bike lanes and $5-a-cup coffee houses replace crowded lanes of traffic and 98¢-and-up stores, one element of the neighborhood remains the same: the technicolor walls of Highland Park are vivid as ever.
York Boulevard, ground zero of Highland Park’s rebirth. It is here that the first wave of thrift stores, yoga and art studios, and antique and vintage dealers (you name it) propelled a certain brand of hipster into the limelight. The influx of new ownership in the past decade is undoubtedly “cool” – one can pick up flashy new threads at Urchin, specs from Society of the Spectacle to match and a chili-powdered Donut Friend doughnut without walking two blocks. Yet these spots don’t make Highland Park unique. The neighborhood in its current state seems more like a descendant of Echo Park and Silver Lake than a district in its own right.
But walk down farther from the grouping of stores in gentrified Highland Park to Figueroa Street. Fig snakes down from the foothills deep into Los Angeles, but for a brief section between Avenues 50 and 70, the street is alive with paintings. Beneath the imposing figure of Chicken Boy (the ever-watchful “Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles”) lies a wealth of authentic art unrivaled by the new establishments of the neighborhood. In alleys and side streets beneath his very feet, street art swirls relics of Aztec lineage and Christian imagery beside the more standard contemporary fare. Between Avenues 61 and 55, relics of the 1970’s Chicano Art movement have joined forces with arts-studio proponents and have challenged gentrification with beautification. Young establishments like Donut Friend and Scoops will continue to draw crowds until their novelty wears away, but the source of Highland Park’s undeniable aura of authenticity flows not from expensive novelty food, but from true community icons. Some of the traditional establishments are struggling. But a select few of the old guard – Galco’s Old World Market and Elsa’s Bakery among others – have weathered the changes in Highland Park’s residents. As longtime inhabitants have felt the squeeze of rent raises and foreclosure, so too have the stores they grew up with faced the pressure of new ownership. Galco’s has remained under family proprietorship; Elsa’s changed hands this past July, but has retained its entire veteran staff.
Still, the heritage of the neighborhood abounds around these landmarks’ joyful permanence. The aging community can rest assured their murals remain an important element of LA culture. New businesses on York do not have the same relationship with paint: many now tend to expect the spray-painted message, “WE ARE NOT A DISPOSABLE COMMUNITY” on their front windows. New business owners have re-opened many doors that closed in the wake of the recession, but the colors outside remind us of what Highland Park’s community is made of at its core. Across from parklets and coffee shops, the writing on the wall tells in no uncertain terms who laid the foundation for the creation of a successfully integrated community.
