Silver Lake is the heart of LA's hipster eastside, a hilly neighbourhood of midcentury modern houses, vintage shops, and third-wave coffee that locals reach for when they want to escape the tourist sheen of the Westside. Named for the reservoir at its centre — actually built by water-board commissioner Herman Silver, not for the colour of the water — it spent the postwar decades as an architects' and artists' enclave, home to Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra modernist landmarks, before its current incarnation as the city's indie-music and brunch capital.
The action concentrates around Sunset Junction, where Sunset Boulevard meets Santa Monica Boulevard. Here you will find the original Intelligentsia coffeebar, record stores, and a tight run of restaurants and bars that fill up every weekend. The Silver Lake Reservoir, ringed by a popular walking and jogging path, is the neighbourhood's green lung; the surrounding streets hide some of the best-preserved modernist residential architecture in the country, best explored slowly on foot or by bike.
It is less a place for landmarks than for atmosphere — a slow morning over coffee, a crate-dig through vinyl, a loop around the reservoir at dusk.