Quote:
Originally Posted by H.L.P
yeah it's definitely a rough neighborhood, but i love it, i wouldn't want it any other way. As for the hipster thing, i kind of hope its a fad that will fade away in time. i live in Alhambra right now, and i cant wait till the day i move back to Highland Park, imma be like...  |
HxLxPx represent! Highland Park can thankfully accommodate both hipster and 'banger and does so very well, better here than anywhere I'd say. If its main problem is that it's gangy (esp now with those Avenues Drew St bust pops gettin' sprung and having to fight it out with Dogtown, who've taken over some turf), big whoop. One can only go to latimes.com, find "Crime" in the masthead, hit "Crime Alerts" or that "Crime Neighborhood Rankings" top ten and you'll find Highland Park
not represented therein. Of course, if HlP's main problem is hipsters, big whoop squared; though I hate their Neil Young guitar riffs at 3pm on a Tuesday, can they be heard over the conjunto? To beat their collective band, HlP is LA's fastest-growing black community, as our neighbors from below the border push historically African-American neighborhoods northward.
Sorry, diverted into diversity where I should stay on the subject of architecture: I steward an ample 1907 Tudor/Craftsman, double lot, original fixtures and built-ins and servants' bells and laundry chutes and the greater nine yards, purchased for a song. Half a song. No, literally, a third of a song. Point being: Highland Park is, as the first great suburb of downtown (I said
great suburb, Lincoln Heights!) a) the last place, as one treks inexorably east, to buy a primo pad in this burg with maximum bang for the buck and b) where LA's preservation community has the biggest and most watchful stick up its shingled butt when it comes to vigilance over this, our largest HPOZ.
As long as we're on the subject...
Squint your eyes at
this 
and argue that it's not a weirdly groundbreaking modernist building...here in Garvanza when Gill and Wright were still in short-pants.
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/assets.../view/CHS-5206
Catapult yourself forward fifty-three years to...the local Optimist Home!
http://jpg1.lapl.org/pics49/00044463.jpg
...of 1953, at 6957 Figueroa.
I could (read: can and will) go on, but you get the idea. Highland Park is Old LA in extremis. Easy to get uppity when reading the derision heaped upon her in, say,
CurbedLA. Ours is the most ridiculed and profiled area in town. Cui bono?