Just last weekend, I found myself in Silver Lake attending the closing party of Brightwell, my friend (and fellow KCET Departures columnist) Eric’s gentlemen’s shop. He may have opened the first such business in modern Silver Lake, but I guarantee you he won’t have opened the last. The neighborhood has over the past couple of decades grown only more dense with the relatively young, and thus with that great current fascination of America’s relatively young, artisanal retail. Then again, Japan’s twenty- and thirty-somethings have joined both the shop-small and neo-gentleman movements with even greater zeal; scouts from the Tokyo-basedPopeye, “the Magazine for City Boys,” dropped in on Brightwell while researching their Los Angeles issue. From foreign style journalists to shoppers in need of a respectable aftershave or tie clip, we act like Renaissance scholars poring over ancient Greek texts, deliberately and almost desperately attempting reconstruct the old aesthetics and practices of true manhood. Though Eric’s shop may have gone, I imagine the streets of Silver Lake will remain an advantageous place to set out on your own quest for this lost wisdom.
Recent years have so strengthened the area’s association with creative, style-conscious, do-it-yourselfism that, when I first moved to Los Angeles as a twenty-six-year-old without any particular prospects for a traditional job, friends simply assumed I would land in Silver Lake. They did so for understandable reasons, but they assumed wrong; I chose Koreatown instead, barely giving “the Portland of Los Angeles” consideration at all, mostly because of the bewildering thinness of its connection to the rest of the city. How, I wondered, did Silver Lake become such a center of “cool” when rail doesn’t even reach it? When the buses keep you waiting for ten minutes at a stretch? When even walking from one end of the neighborhood to the other can feel, on a sufficiently hot day, like a grueling ordeal? The journey from Brightwell to the local library comes to almost a mile, and heaven help he who then wants to stop for lunch in the fashionable Sunset Junction — named, ironically, for its convergence of two streetcar lines in the early 20th century — which necessitates two miles’ further schlep.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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