In 2007 my best friend and I moved into an ivy-covered fourplex near downtown in what I have since learned is known as Victor Heights, the latest stop on a progressively eastward exodus that began in Silver Lake just a few years earlier, back when the name Silver Lake elicited sour faces and actual concerns for my safety from anyone living west of Vermont. As a native Angeleno, I’ve felt pressed on principle alone to live somewhere – anywhere – else, but I am moored to this place, just a few miles from where my grandparents first settled upon arriving here from Mexico with my mother and her sister and three bothers in tow. I love that my neighborhood is a community and not just a row of boutiques and restaurants and things to do. There’s nothing really to do here; you just live here.
On a map, the dendrites of hilly, residential streets that make up Victor Heights shoot off a main curved avenue anchored to Sunset like a giant cartoon magnet. The mélange of crowded stucco complexes with hopeful names like Skyline Terrace, Spanish-style single family homes, janky bungalows, soulless condos, and eviscerated Victorians remains mostly hidden behind the sprawling, towering campus of Holy Hill Community Church. Riding the edge between Echo Park and Chinatown, this is a neighborhood in limbo, a vescia piscis endlessly in thrall to waves of development. It embodies both the glamorous mythology and the shit reality that lend Los Angeles its perfectly attenuated magic – it’s the attenuation that makes our magic real. There is a burned-out van that has been sitting at the top of the block for days now, a deadpan emissary of the apocalypse. Whether it’s retribution for some illicit gang-related activity or simply a prop left over from a shoot for the recently canceled Fox television show Gang Related, which regularly films in front of our house, I do not know—Los Angeles is constantly playing itself. Just across Sunset glows the neon-limned Paradise Motel, which is featured in Thom Andersen’s lyrical film essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself.
It embodies both the glamorous mythology and the shit reality that lend Los Angeles its perfectly attenuated magic – it’s the attenuation that makes our magic real. There is a burned-out van that has been sitting at the top of the block for days now, a deadpan emissary of the apocalypse.
Here cracked and sun-bleached surfaces support thrown-out mattresses spray-painted with maudlin one-liners. Elderly Chinese couples sit on distinctly un-outdoor furniture, having claimed the slim strip of greenish-brown crab grass between the street and the sidewalk as an ad hoc chess parlor. Pendulous bursts of bougainvillea compete with dog shit for olfactory ascendancy. Lyft drivers coo at our glittering view of downtown as their pink-mustachioed cars crest the vertiginous hill. Maybe there’s a toilet in the middle of the street. Kids play with dirty Nerf balls in front of desolate construction sites for the expensive lofts that will one day displace them. Wild peacocks perch on sagging telephone wires and make their terrifying call, a florid whine that sounds like crying children or fighting cats.
There are crying children and fighting cats too.
After a brief sojourn in the Bay Area to finish school, I was torn between staking a claim in a new city or returning to the one I had always called home. A bit of fluky Craigslist browsing led me to a listing for my old ivy-covered apartment – same building, same unit, available now – so I settled back in, this time with my sweetheart, and picked right up again with my former neighbors, Melvyn and Jeff. Melvyn was born in 1929 and has been hopping from apartment to apartment in Victor Heights since 1972. Jeff is “maybe almost 60,” Melvyn thinks, and has lived in the fourplex next to mine his entire life. He owns it. Our conversations rarely wander beyond idle chat, but the accretion of their small kindnesses helped me get through my early twenties. I recall holding my head in my hands over some perceived injustice and hearing him say, almost scolding, “Honey, this is Los Angeles. You’ve got to carry a gun. If not on your hip, then in your heart.” I don’t even remember what I was so upset about.
Victor Heights is named after Victor Beaudry, a French-Canadian California Gold Rush opportunist turned water magnate. The downtown street that bears his name actually refers to his brother, Prudent, who was the mayor of Los Angeles from 1874 to 1876. Together the brothers were responsible for much of the development in and around downtown in the later 19th century; Victor’s namesake hills are said to be some of the first residential areas with piped water systems, though it’s hard to imagine that the parched plots of land still dotting the neighborhood were once part of an urban oasis. Beyond that, the history of the place is an oral one. Jeff says Bruce Lee lived in the apartment above mine in the 1960s while filming the lone season of the Green Hornet TV series, round-housing in the driveway while his wife, Linda, held up pads for him to spar with.
These days your door is more likely to be pounded on by a beleaguered production assistant asking you to sign off on a permit for a movie or a film shoot. I’ve been told that these foot soldiers of the industry are equipped with fresh knots of C-notes to dispense at will, but any embellished gripe on my part has failed to produce one.
Although it’s located right off Sunset Boulevard, flanked by Dodger Stadium to the north and the busy 110 freeway to the east, my home is a geographical lacuna to even the most seasoned locals, which lends it an air of secrecy. But not in the way an inaccessible dive bar or hole-in-the-wall restaurant is a secret – I mean, the whole neighborhood is somehow invisible. Picking apart the contiguity of varied districts and municipalities in Los Angeles makes for nimble cocktail conversation, but trying to tell people where I live can sometimes breed incredulity. “I know the area”is a common refrain, as is “I just can’t picture what’s there.” By the 1990s, this incredulity became an issue of public safety, when residents trying to report the mounting occurrence of crimes were volleyed via telephone back and forth between the northeast and central divisions of the LAPD; when finally dispatched, some police officers simply couldn’t find the area. In response, longtime resident Betty Oyama founded the Forgotten Edge Neighborhood Watch in 1992, galvanizing the neighborhood by going door to door with police officers to hand out bilingual safety literature and check for unreported crimes. The name stuck and even appears on the LA City Council’s District 1 official home page. These days your door is more likely to be pounded on by a beleaguered production assistant asking you to sign off on a permit for a movie or a film shoot. I’ve been told that these foot soldiers of the industry are equipped with fresh knots of C-notes to dispense at will, but any embellished gripe on my part has failed to produce one. Sitting near the peak of the hill, the street known as Figueroa Terrace commands a thrillingly iconic view of the downtown skyline. Visitors literally gasp. Dodgers fireworks are a summer treat that just slightly makes up for the game-day traffic, but every Fourth of July, we are newly stunned by the sublime 360-degree view of fireworks raining down across the entire city.
Quid pro quo, the price for this spectacle is accommodating flanks of Star Waggons regularly blocking the street, waiting for curt second-unit directors to give me the thumbs-up to back out of my own driveway, and day lamps piercing through our bedroom windows well into the night. The sweeter side effect of this cinematic backdrop is the endless flow of couples and engagement photographers who trek up here every spring to capture their love in the aureate glow of magic hour. Native Angelenos become quickly inured to the sight of movie sets, but once in a while they catch you off guard in a frisson of the surreal. The burned-out van suddenly disappears without a trace.
This early area bears its marks as a living cross-section of history caught between districts. French street names spelled out in Chinese characters point the way to one of the best meatball sandwiches in the country at the Eastside Market Italian Deli, one of the few actual businesses in the area, which has been in business since Melvyn’s birth and which, on any given afternoon, is thronged with cops – the true litmus test of the quality of cholesterol-packed cuisine. Under the pretext of actually craving the cheap, watery coffee, I used to pop in some mornings and enjoy little slivers of cold cuts fresh off the slicer, but I'm afraid the majority of the menu, while delectable, is beyond my gastric tolerance. I just recently discovered that the counter’s backsplash is now desecrated with a stencil portrait of Guy Fieri, an egotistical calling card bestowed upon any establishment fortunate enough to be featured on his gastro-orgy road-trip spectacle.
Lately, the preservation of the incumbent buildings – most of which are two or three stories high, and none of which is higher than six – has become a point of contention between developers and filmmakers, for whom this view is inextricably linked to their livelihood.
Victor Heights has always held sway over the imaginations of developers as well as filmmakers, so I do not bemoan the latest wave of development here. In the 1960s, rows upon rows of Victorian mansions in Bunker Hill were razed to make room for the very skyline that is the crown jewel of our view. By the 1980s, the embedded Italian and Croatian population began to die off, and their progeny sold the plots to construction conglomerates for a hearty profit (I do not blame them). Some of the more recent Asian and Latino immigrants still actually own the duplexes they humbly occupy. Lately, the preservation of the incumbent buildings – most of which are two or three stories high, and none of which is higher than six – has become a point of contention between developers and filmmakers, for whom this view is inextricably linked to their livelihood.
Developers want to raise more towers in order sell the view to new residents. Filmmakers want to capture the view and sell it to everyone else. The packaging of something so abstract as a vantage point is well beyond the business acumen of anyone who actually lives on this hill; I just hope it stays this way a while longer. “The apparent ease of California life is an illusion,” Joan Didion wrote, “and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.” But of course, permanence itself is an illusion, and we’re happily living it.