The stories of certain Los Angeles neighborhoods seem easy to tell. Sometimes their geography, architecture, and apparent population practically tell it for you. Boyle Heights, for instance, located just east of downtown over the river, looks and feels like a district that has drifted far from its original purposes. Like Westlake, the neighborhood around MacArthur Park, Boyle Heights built up its identity in the early- to mid-twentieth century as a more or less Jewish community, original home of Canter’s Delicatessen. More recently it has, also like Westlake (which remains the home of Canter’s distant rival Langer’s Delicatessen), gone overwhelmingly Latino. While this has, speaking on the most superficial but nonetheless most accessible level, filled it with choice places to eat, most of my recent trips to have started or ended with visits to Libros Schmibros, the used bookstore founded by bookseller David Kipen, who refers to himself as “the first Jew in decades” to move back to Boyle Heights. If more have followed, they haven’t made themselves commercially known. None of my trans-river lunches have brought me to a new-wave delicatessen, though I have noticed a spot called Thai Deli on Cesar Chavez Avenue, well known for its teriyaki plates and macaroni salad. Clearly, the tale of Boyle Heights has more nuance than we assume.
The employees of the nearby White Memorial Medical Center know Thai Deli well, anyway; those coming from anywhere farther away would presumably feel put off by its uncomfortable proximity to Interstate 5. Yet keep walking east on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, the continuation of Los Angeles’ wearily iconic Sunset Boulevard, and you find what architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne calls “a model for other neighborhoods eager to make their major thoroughfares friendlier to pedestrians, cyclists and local business” with “all the urban-design amenities the average L.A. boulevard is desperately missing.” My mind has come to conceive of this particularly welcoming mile, along with the parallel run of First Street two blocks to its south, as Boyle Heights — its core, if not its entirety. Certainly not its entirety: set out to see the entire neighborhood, and you could find yourself walking across it for nearly two hours. Like Los Angeles itself, Boyle Heights looks big; you just don’t realize exactly how big until you decide you want to see it up close.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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