The soul of Highland Park — why people stay

There's a particular quality of light that arrives in Highland Park around four in the afternoon, when the sun drops behind the San Gabriels and everything along Figueroa goes the color of old honey. If you've ever stood on that stretch between York and Avenue 57 at that hour, coffee in hand, nowhere urgent to be, you already understand why people who move here tend to stay. Not just stay, but root. Plant themselves so deeply that leaving starts to feel like a kind of small death.

I've been trying to explain this neighborhood to people for years. The explanation never quite works in the abstract. So let me try it in the specific.

Start at Wax Paper on Knox, a side street that rewards the people paying attention. The sandwiches there are the kind of thing that ruins you for ordinary sandwiches, not because of any single ingredient, but because of the philosophy behind the whole operation. The house-made condiments alone suggest someone thought seriously about what lunch could be. You eat outside if you can, on a good day, and you notice that the people around you are also eating slowly. That's Highland Park in a sentence. People here eat slowly. They linger. The neighborhood has somehow resisted the velocity that eats other parts of the city alive.

Walk north on Figueroa and the blocks reveal themselves like chapters. There's Villa's Tacos, where the patio fills up with the easy, mixed energy of a neighborhood that still actually mixes, families, musicians, people with laptops, people who've lived here for thirty years watching people who've lived here for three. The tacos are what they should be: honest, specific, made with some inherited understanding of what a taco is supposed to do to you. Nearby, Tropical Juice LA operates at a frequency that feels almost defiant in its cheerfulness, the kind of place where you order something cold and bright and walk out feeling like the afternoon has been redeemed.

What Highland Park has always had, even through all its changes, is a refusal to be curated into blandness. Self Help Graphics & Art over on Mission Road is one reason why. Founded in 1970, it has outlasted trends and recessions and the relentless churn of the art world by staying committed to something older and more serious than cool, to community, to Chicano artistic tradition, to the idea that a neighborhood's visual culture belongs to the people who live there. Walking through during one of their events, you feel the weight of that continuity. This is what it looks like when a place knows who it is.

There are pleasures here that are quieter and just as essential. Galco's Soda Pop Stop on York is one of the great eccentric institutions of Los Angeles, which is saying something in a city that runs on eccentric institutions. Five hundred varieties of soda. Walls of glass bottles. Mexican Coke that tastes the way Mexican Coke is supposed to taste, which is different from the way you think it tastes until you actually have one. The owner, John Nese, turned what could have been a struggling corner grocery into a destination by following a single principle: stock what's interesting. The neighborhood has been doing the same thing for decades.

The Quiet Life, a few blocks up on Figueroa, has a similar instinct, a shop that carries things selected with genuine taste rather than demographic targeting. You go in for a hat and come out having discovered something you didn't know you needed. Gold Line, the bar with the patio a few doors down, is where the evening begins and sometimes where it ends, the cocktails good and the crowd better, the kind of place where conversations start between strangers and nobody seems to be performing for anyone else.

Then there is Lodge Room, which is perhaps the truest expression of what this neighborhood values. A standing-room concert venue in a century-old Masonic hall on Avenue 56, it books national touring acts with the intimacy of a living room. The sound is extraordinary. The sight lines are extraordinary. But what's most extraordinary is that a room this good exists inside a neighborhood that most people outside LA couldn't find on a map. It exists because someone believed the neighborhood deserved it. And the neighborhood, in turn, keeps showing up.

On weekends, Flying Pigeon LA animates the parking lot on Figueroa, a bike shop that doubles as a community hub, the kind of place that organizes rides and hosts events and generally operates as proof that commerce and civic life don't have to be separate things. It's also just a good place to spend an hour if you like bicycles, or people who like bicycles, which in this neighborhood often means the same thing.

If you want to understand the neighborhood's relationship with its own past, spend an afternoon at Heritage Square Museum on Homer Street, where Victorian houses saved from demolition elsewhere in the city have been reassembled into a kind of frozen chorus. The Hale House, built in 1887, is painted in colors that would have been considered garish in its era and somehow look exactly right now. It is a strange and beautiful place, Los Angeles preserving a version of itself that had almost no interest in being preserved. That tension is very Highland Park.

And then there is Casa Bianca on Colorado, which has been making thin-crust pizza since 1955 and has never once felt the need to update its brand, because it understood long ago that some things are correct and should be left alone. The pepperoni pizza is the platonic form of a certain kind of pizza. The wait is sometimes long. Nobody minds.

What I keep coming back to, when I try to explain why people stay, is that Highland Park has managed to hold two things at once that most neighborhoods lose as they change: memory and vitality. The murals on the underpasses carry something forward. The new coffee shops carry something forward too. Kitchen Mouse, with its avocado toast and vegan grain bowls and weekend brunch crowds spilling onto the patio, represents a genuine addition to the neighborhood rather than a replacement of it, partly because it's been around long enough to become its own kind of institution, its own fixture in the local grammar.

The neighborhood's soul is not located in any single place. It's located in the gap between them, in the walk from Wax Paper to Galco's, in the decision to stop at Villa's even though you weren't hungry, in the way the light changes on Figueroa and for a moment makes everyone on the street look like they belong in a painting someone made about a city that turned out fine. Highland Park is a neighborhood that rewards the kind of attention that slows you down. And if you let it, it will slow you all the way to a stop. You'll look up one day and realize you've been here for years. You'll look around and realize you don't particularly want to leave.

That, as best I can explain it, is why people stay.