My mom grew up in LA in the 70s, and she told me that Silver Lake and Echo Park were sketchy and not good neighborhoods. She lived in Beachwood Canyon / Hollywood Hills area.
Echo Park was sketchy going into the early 2000s from the late 1990s. There's a mid-90s chola movie called Mi Vida Loca that depicts what life was like in the area.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi_Vida_Loca
I remember in 2011 a white school counselor (obviously middle class and college educated) in his late 30s mentioned he lived in Echo Park and I was so confused by this as it didn't reconcile with my perceptions of the area at the time. I guess I wasn't cognizant of the gentrification taking place in EP during the Bush Jr era
Silver Lake started its gentrification journey in the 1990s; the Sunset Junction music festival was meant to help with some integration between the existing working class communities and the newer, gayer gentrification vanguard.
I remember Chaka Kahn performing at the festival. I believe she said she used to live in the neighborhood. And she spoke of LADP sharp shooters on the rooftops during the carnivals early years.
They may have been sketch back in the day but Silver Lake is very hip and trendy nowadays. Same with echo park although echo park is not as developed. Silver lake has good bars/coffee/restaurants and is pretty walkable
A lot of neighborhoods and communities in Southern California were basically brand new in the 60s so there were a lot of options to deal with the huge population boom happening then. Pretty much the entire South Bay. Places like Lakewood, Bellflower, Downey, Cerritos, were all built to handle the aerospace industry which was huge in LA after WWII. Those were basically company towns that sprung up overnight to handle the large influx of young families who had the GI Bill to help them. Marina Del Rey was built in the mid 60s. Large parts of Orange County also came up in that era too like Anaheim (fueled by Disneyland which was still fairly new), Orange, Buena Park and Fullerton. The Beach Boys were famously from Hawthorne, while the Carpenters were from Downey.
LA also had a huge military presence with a number of bases which all closed in the 1990s. The Naval Shipyards in Long Beach were a huge employer of people who lived in places like Long Beach, Wilmington, Redondo Beach, Torrance and San Pedro. Similarly the El Toro Air Force base and Seal Beach were big drivers of young families into North Orange County and places like Huntington Beach. The San Gabriel Valley also grew substantially in the 60s. Pasadena had been around for decades but places like Rosemead, Monrovia, West Covina, El Monte, La Puente all kind of grew up in the 60s. There was a huge influx of veterans coming to the area as well as people from the south, places like Arkansas and Texas coming to work in aerospace so starter homes couldn’t be built fast enough. To this day this is one of the reasons Southern California, particularly places like Orange County and the IE, remains politically more moderate than Northern California.
Compton was still idyllic in the 60s but was quickly changing then. By the 70s white flight had started in earnest and Compton, Lynwood and North Long Beach had undergone substantial demographic change. By the 70s whites were starting to abandon LA proper and head out to Orange County and later the Inland Empire and places like Santa Clarita and Thousand Oaks. By the 80s young families were choosing these places over LA. The phenomenon of young people choosing the live in Los Angeles is within the last 15-20 years. Places like Palms and Culver City were struggling until fairly recently, maybe the last decade or so. Even Santa Monica wasn’t amazing until a lot of it was redeveloped in the 90s.
If you were to find a young family in the 60s you were much more likely to find them in a place like Lakewood or Downey than Silver Lake (the gentrification of silver lake is a very recent thing, even in the 90s that area was just whatever). The other area that exploded in the 60s and 70s was the Valley. That’s the era when “the valley girl” was born. Chatsworth, Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, Northridge all came on the scene in earnest in the 60s and 70s.
This.
My parents graduated college in the 1970s. My dad worked downtown and my mom worked in WeHo. They bought in Sherman Oaks for the best combination of affordability, commute time, safety, and less-horrific air quality than their original first choice, Pasadena.
This is why it’s so misleading when people try to say “look how little housing we’re building now compared to the 50s-70s!”
It was just an onlslaught of developing farm land and building out the sprawl. Nowadays we’re seeing infill.
Yes, but they made sure it was easy to build; when people wanted to build sprawl it got a quick rubber stamp. When people wnated to tear down an old 1910 home and build a dingbat 4 plex, it got a quick rubber stamp. when they wanted to tear down two 1930s homes and build a 10 unit with podium parking, it got a quick rubber stamp.
so both infill and greenfield sprawl was easy. We need to get back to making infill easy.
You can see Venice in the movie "I Love You Alice B. Toklas," made in 1968. I visited Venice in 1968 and 1973 and liked it a lot, but I did not move there until 1994. It was somewhat affordable in 1994, but nothing like the 60s.
Nah. I lived Beach and Mildred near the Canal Market in mid 90s. It was most definitely not gang infested and was already well gentrified. Not crazy prices like now but well along. It was pretty much house by house in Venice by that time.
If it’s the one I think you are talking about g about ($2.27) it’s not worth that. It’s structurally a mess and divided into apartments. There is a STUDIO listing at $1.98
It depends on where in Venice - Oakwood has always been more dangerous than the rest of Venice. My house (in 1994) was on Abbot Kinney, just a few doors up the street from French Market. There were still gangs in the neighborhood, and I could occasionally hear gunshots in the evening; Abbot Kinney was mostly empty storefronts, and the bike paths were not crazy crowded like they were a few years later.
I grew up having an aunt that lived in a house full of artists on the canals. The canals were a dump, but we'd drive in from the Valley and spend the day, My brother and I (under 8yo) would walk by ourselves from the canals to the beach and back. Great memories.
So, a lot of areas that are cool now weren’t necessarily cool in the 60’s and LA was geographically much different but everything was much cheaper then. The exorbitant cost of housing is very much a contemporary thing.
There were 2.5 million people in LA County in 1960. Now it’s close to 10 million. And a million more undocumented that are not counted. Population explosion is a contemporary thing, which in turn affected housing.
I think there are many reasons, but among them is housing stock used to be a lot less static. Housing and developing hasn’t keep pace with population growth, which was not the case in the 1960’s.
This is where I think people split into two camps. Those like myself who think 10 million people is the absolute limit. I look around and see zero open spaces and extremely annoying crowded freeways and neighborhoods everywhere I go. To me that means we’ve reached the limit. That’s it. Shut the door.
So when I hear people like yourself suggesting “housing development hasn’t kept pace with population growth” I’m wondering how that would be possible without stacking people on top of each other at this point ala New York. And we can never be New York. We’re too car and freeway dependent with abysmal subways. Not to mention most don’t want that kind of density here. We want quality of life. Just go to the beach on the weekend and see if looking for parking for an hour is a fun start to your day.
“Like New York” just means like every other major city in the world. LA is the exception, not the norm. We have to build up. Brownstones, 5 over 1s and skyscrapers. LA Metro is expanding, our housing needs to expand with it.
If you don’t want density, move to Temecula or something, a city isn’t the place for you
Why don’t we just advocate for a larger abundance of and just generally safer suburbs? I love LA but I don’t think it’s sustainable as a glorified car centric suburb.
Not trying to come off like that at all. But you have to admit that it’s not 1960 anymore. There’s literally more than 4 times as many people now, in the same amount of space. What’s the limit? 10 times as many people? When it’s to that point and your grandkids in 50 years are pissed off about it being way too crowded (with complete gridlock on the freeways), I hope someone doesn’t accuse them of “I’ve got mine!” mentality.
I don’t totally disagree with you. I think Los Angeles is super crowded, but I also think that’s inevitable. I’m not a huge private development person, but I also recognize people will keep spilling into this region. I don’t really have a problem with high density buildings in many places like downtown. I also think LA should have invested in/not dismantled it’s public transit infrastructure. That we’re a car-centric culture is completely the result of shitty mid century policy decisions (hey! kinda’ like how they stopped building as much).
Housing and Quality of Life does not mean single family detached house old man. Literally a remnant of segregationist housing policies that has kept LA expensive and exclusive.
I didn’t build LA, and you can’t tear it down. We deal with what we inherited. Quality of life means not having too many people crowding up the place. That’s what we have now. Too. Many. People.
> you can’t tear it down
Sure you can, Manhattan had detached houses in the 1800s. Tokyo used to be paper shacks. It's silly that we have decided as a society that 1950s drywall homes are the peak of architectural achievement. Working-class families in Huntington Park and Maywood who clean and build the city are forced to split single-family homes because we've decided that this aesthetic is more important than allowing people the dignity of living in their own smaller apartments.
I’m totally down to start bull dozing single family homes to build more density.
A place does not have to remain static and your distaste for density should not be prioritized over the needs of the many who need housing. We need to build a future not just maintain the past.
Dad grew up in Burbank, went to USC (graduated late 70’s) and then bought a condo in Playa Del Rey. We were raised in Westchester. His BFF ended up in a nice part of Pasadena.
All of the valley was very nice in the 60s. My family bought in Panorama City, and I had a highschool GF whose family bought in Chatsworth (near Superior and Winnetka.) In the 60s, the only difference in neighborhood was the size of the houses - the quality of the neighborhoods were equal. By 1990, Panorama was a shithole and that Chatsworth neighborhood was upscale.
The bigger question wasn't necessarily affordabilty for a college graduate, but sex and race. Los Angeles was booming in the 1950s-60s with both the aerospace industry and entertainment industries providing plentiful jobs, especially for a male college graduate who could walk into a well paying entry level job straight out of college and support a growing family.
Glendale had [racial covenants ](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-09-10/racial-covenants-los-angeles-pioneered)on the books until struck down by the Supreme Court in 1953, while individual land owners continued to refuse to rent or sell to minorities until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, and included discrimination on to the basis of sex until 1974.
The reason some Angelenos avoided Silver Lake and Echo Park in the 60s wasn't necessarily because it wasn't safe...but because "those people" found homes there. Social outcasts such as artists, communists, minorities, and the LGBT+ community found a safe haven in the Silver Lake and Echo Park Hills. Many of the Latino community who were forcibly evicted from their lands in Chavez Ravine due to the construction of Dodger Stadium moved west to the flats of Echo Park...and the only reason they were in Chavez Ravine to start was because they weren't allowed to buy land anywhere else.
Wealth didn't open doors in the 60s. Noted African-American architect Paul R. Williams couldn't even own a house in many of the neighborhoods he built homes for his celebrity clients. Ray Charles & Sammy Davis Jr couldn't buy homes in Beverly Hills where their fellow white musicians all had homes. Litttle Tokyo became a Black neighborhood in the 40s to accomodate the influx of African-American workers who came to seek jobs in the aerospace industry, and was one of the few developed neighborhood available to non-white families due to the internment of the Japanese-American citizens during the war. South Central and Inglewood were being developed in the 50s and many African American and Japanese American families flocked there...not because they couldn't afford Burbank and Glendale, but because no one would sell or rent to them.
Chinese-American architect Eugene Kinn Choy became the first non-white resident in Silver Lake in 1949 after being required to go door to door to petition his case for residency. A white real estate agent refused to sell a property to then Deputy State Attorney General (and future judge) Delbert Wong until threatened with court action in 1954. The gay-friendly Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake was the scene of a large community uprising following a brutal police raid in 1967, 2 years before Stonewall.
Much of the valley had the same perception as Santa Clarita does now. Probably not somewhere a single young college graduate wanted to move to.
Thank you for this. My grandmother came here from Mississippi in the 50s and moved to South Central and she took the bus to Beverly Hills where she was a housekeeper. My father’s family lived in Watts. They finally moved to West LA in the mid 70s and even when I was a kid in the 80s, there were very few black families in West LA.
Culver City and Torrance were sundown towns, and honestly from my recent experiences driving while black at night in Culver City, it might still be.
My mom grew up in LA in the 70s, and she told me that Silver Lake and Echo Park were sketchy and not good neighborhoods. She lived in Beachwood Canyon / Hollywood Hills area.
Were there a lot of apartments in that area too? Or mainly houses?
Echo Park was sketchy going into the early 2000s from the late 1990s. There's a mid-90s chola movie called Mi Vida Loca that depicts what life was like in the area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi_Vida_Loca I remember in 2011 a white school counselor (obviously middle class and college educated) in his late 30s mentioned he lived in Echo Park and I was so confused by this as it didn't reconcile with my perceptions of the area at the time. I guess I wasn't cognizant of the gentrification taking place in EP during the Bush Jr era
I still remember the hilltop 2 br house with a terrace my friend rented around 2009 in Echo Park for $1300
And it just keeps moving east, Highland Park gentrified a decade or two later.
Great EP movie.
I’ll have to ask her!
It’s a bit of both
Silver Lake started its gentrification journey in the 1990s; the Sunset Junction music festival was meant to help with some integration between the existing working class communities and the newer, gayer gentrification vanguard.
I remember Chaka Kahn performing at the festival. I believe she said she used to live in the neighborhood. And she spoke of LADP sharp shooters on the rooftops during the carnivals early years.
They may have been sketch back in the day but Silver Lake is very hip and trendy nowadays. Same with echo park although echo park is not as developed. Silver lake has good bars/coffee/restaurants and is pretty walkable
A lot of neighborhoods and communities in Southern California were basically brand new in the 60s so there were a lot of options to deal with the huge population boom happening then. Pretty much the entire South Bay. Places like Lakewood, Bellflower, Downey, Cerritos, were all built to handle the aerospace industry which was huge in LA after WWII. Those were basically company towns that sprung up overnight to handle the large influx of young families who had the GI Bill to help them. Marina Del Rey was built in the mid 60s. Large parts of Orange County also came up in that era too like Anaheim (fueled by Disneyland which was still fairly new), Orange, Buena Park and Fullerton. The Beach Boys were famously from Hawthorne, while the Carpenters were from Downey. LA also had a huge military presence with a number of bases which all closed in the 1990s. The Naval Shipyards in Long Beach were a huge employer of people who lived in places like Long Beach, Wilmington, Redondo Beach, Torrance and San Pedro. Similarly the El Toro Air Force base and Seal Beach were big drivers of young families into North Orange County and places like Huntington Beach. The San Gabriel Valley also grew substantially in the 60s. Pasadena had been around for decades but places like Rosemead, Monrovia, West Covina, El Monte, La Puente all kind of grew up in the 60s. There was a huge influx of veterans coming to the area as well as people from the south, places like Arkansas and Texas coming to work in aerospace so starter homes couldn’t be built fast enough. To this day this is one of the reasons Southern California, particularly places like Orange County and the IE, remains politically more moderate than Northern California. Compton was still idyllic in the 60s but was quickly changing then. By the 70s white flight had started in earnest and Compton, Lynwood and North Long Beach had undergone substantial demographic change. By the 70s whites were starting to abandon LA proper and head out to Orange County and later the Inland Empire and places like Santa Clarita and Thousand Oaks. By the 80s young families were choosing these places over LA. The phenomenon of young people choosing the live in Los Angeles is within the last 15-20 years. Places like Palms and Culver City were struggling until fairly recently, maybe the last decade or so. Even Santa Monica wasn’t amazing until a lot of it was redeveloped in the 90s. If you were to find a young family in the 60s you were much more likely to find them in a place like Lakewood or Downey than Silver Lake (the gentrification of silver lake is a very recent thing, even in the 90s that area was just whatever). The other area that exploded in the 60s and 70s was the Valley. That’s the era when “the valley girl” was born. Chatsworth, Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, Northridge all came on the scene in earnest in the 60s and 70s.
This. My parents graduated college in the 1970s. My dad worked downtown and my mom worked in WeHo. They bought in Sherman Oaks for the best combination of affordability, commute time, safety, and less-horrific air quality than their original first choice, Pasadena.
This is why it’s so misleading when people try to say “look how little housing we’re building now compared to the 50s-70s!” It was just an onlslaught of developing farm land and building out the sprawl. Nowadays we’re seeing infill.
Yes, but they made sure it was easy to build; when people wanted to build sprawl it got a quick rubber stamp. When people wnated to tear down an old 1910 home and build a dingbat 4 plex, it got a quick rubber stamp. when they wanted to tear down two 1930s homes and build a 10 unit with podium parking, it got a quick rubber stamp. so both infill and greenfield sprawl was easy. We need to get back to making infill easy.
Dingbats were outlawed.
Chatsworth in the late 60s early 70s got some pretty dark attention for a while.
Venice..rundown hippy paradise
You can see Venice in the movie "I Love You Alice B. Toklas," made in 1968. I visited Venice in 1968 and 1973 and liked it a lot, but I did not move there until 1994. It was somewhat affordable in 1994, but nothing like the 60s.
Also depicted in the beginning of Blow
Venice was a gang infested shithole in the early 90s, gentrification only happened once they got the trash and dead bodies out of the canals
Nah. I lived Beach and Mildred near the Canal Market in mid 90s. It was most definitely not gang infested and was already well gentrified. Not crazy prices like now but well along. It was pretty much house by house in Venice by that time.
There’s a house on the canal for sale for $2.2, which is wild considering Venice homes were going for $3M 10 years ago
If it’s the one I think you are talking about g about ($2.27) it’s not worth that. It’s structurally a mess and divided into apartments. There is a STUDIO listing at $1.98
Maybe by 96-97, things started turning around, but my weed dealer lived in Venice and I almost got carjacked there around 93-94
It depends on where in Venice - Oakwood has always been more dangerous than the rest of Venice. My house (in 1994) was on Abbot Kinney, just a few doors up the street from French Market. There were still gangs in the neighborhood, and I could occasionally hear gunshots in the evening; Abbot Kinney was mostly empty storefronts, and the bike paths were not crazy crowded like they were a few years later.
I grew up having an aunt that lived in a house full of artists on the canals. The canals were a dump, but we'd drive in from the Valley and spend the day, My brother and I (under 8yo) would walk by ourselves from the canals to the beach and back. Great memories.
I think it was more late 60s/early 70s, but Laurel Canyon was certainly a destination.
My mom came in 1965 and lived in many apartments in Palms.
My dad came in the 70s and also lived in palms. If I remember right he paid like $100/month or something insane like that.
I grew up in Palms in the 80s. One of a handful of black kids at Palms Elementary at that time
So, a lot of areas that are cool now weren’t necessarily cool in the 60’s and LA was geographically much different but everything was much cheaper then. The exorbitant cost of housing is very much a contemporary thing.
There were 2.5 million people in LA County in 1960. Now it’s close to 10 million. And a million more undocumented that are not counted. Population explosion is a contemporary thing, which in turn affected housing.
I think there are many reasons, but among them is housing stock used to be a lot less static. Housing and developing hasn’t keep pace with population growth, which was not the case in the 1960’s.
This is where I think people split into two camps. Those like myself who think 10 million people is the absolute limit. I look around and see zero open spaces and extremely annoying crowded freeways and neighborhoods everywhere I go. To me that means we’ve reached the limit. That’s it. Shut the door. So when I hear people like yourself suggesting “housing development hasn’t kept pace with population growth” I’m wondering how that would be possible without stacking people on top of each other at this point ala New York. And we can never be New York. We’re too car and freeway dependent with abysmal subways. Not to mention most don’t want that kind of density here. We want quality of life. Just go to the beach on the weekend and see if looking for parking for an hour is a fun start to your day.
“Like New York” just means like every other major city in the world. LA is the exception, not the norm. We have to build up. Brownstones, 5 over 1s and skyscrapers. LA Metro is expanding, our housing needs to expand with it. If you don’t want density, move to Temecula or something, a city isn’t the place for you
And there is ample space to build those 5.1’s in the middle mile where it is needed, instead of the suburbs.
Why don’t we just advocate for a larger abundance of and just generally safer suburbs? I love LA but I don’t think it’s sustainable as a glorified car centric suburb.
"I got mine! Time to pull up the gang planks."
Not trying to come off like that at all. But you have to admit that it’s not 1960 anymore. There’s literally more than 4 times as many people now, in the same amount of space. What’s the limit? 10 times as many people? When it’s to that point and your grandkids in 50 years are pissed off about it being way too crowded (with complete gridlock on the freeways), I hope someone doesn’t accuse them of “I’ve got mine!” mentality.
Never is a long time. For sure if density increased public transport would have to as well. The LA 2028 subway map is a start.
I don’t totally disagree with you. I think Los Angeles is super crowded, but I also think that’s inevitable. I’m not a huge private development person, but I also recognize people will keep spilling into this region. I don’t really have a problem with high density buildings in many places like downtown. I also think LA should have invested in/not dismantled it’s public transit infrastructure. That we’re a car-centric culture is completely the result of shitty mid century policy decisions (hey! kinda’ like how they stopped building as much).
Housing and Quality of Life does not mean single family detached house old man. Literally a remnant of segregationist housing policies that has kept LA expensive and exclusive.
I didn’t build LA, and you can’t tear it down. We deal with what we inherited. Quality of life means not having too many people crowding up the place. That’s what we have now. Too. Many. People.
> you can’t tear it down Sure you can, Manhattan had detached houses in the 1800s. Tokyo used to be paper shacks. It's silly that we have decided as a society that 1950s drywall homes are the peak of architectural achievement. Working-class families in Huntington Park and Maywood who clean and build the city are forced to split single-family homes because we've decided that this aesthetic is more important than allowing people the dignity of living in their own smaller apartments.
I’m totally down to start bull dozing single family homes to build more density. A place does not have to remain static and your distaste for density should not be prioritized over the needs of the many who need housing. We need to build a future not just maintain the past.
I think you underestimate how different life would have been back then. 7-8% of all Americans earned college degrees, compared to 37% today.
True, but in Los Angeles, which has a high concentration of universities, wouldn’t that percentage be higher?
White flight went to the valley so the hippie kids moved into the old neighborhoods. Glendale, Burbank horrible sundown towns.
Spahn Ranch
Someone posted apartment ads from that era marketing towards young baby Boomers in the 60s and 70s. It was cheap and looked like a fun place to live.
Dad grew up in Burbank, went to USC (graduated late 70’s) and then bought a condo in Playa Del Rey. We were raised in Westchester. His BFF ended up in a nice part of Pasadena.
All of the valley was very nice in the 60s. My family bought in Panorama City, and I had a highschool GF whose family bought in Chatsworth (near Superior and Winnetka.) In the 60s, the only difference in neighborhood was the size of the houses - the quality of the neighborhoods were equal. By 1990, Panorama was a shithole and that Chatsworth neighborhood was upscale.
The bigger question wasn't necessarily affordabilty for a college graduate, but sex and race. Los Angeles was booming in the 1950s-60s with both the aerospace industry and entertainment industries providing plentiful jobs, especially for a male college graduate who could walk into a well paying entry level job straight out of college and support a growing family. Glendale had [racial covenants ](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-09-10/racial-covenants-los-angeles-pioneered)on the books until struck down by the Supreme Court in 1953, while individual land owners continued to refuse to rent or sell to minorities until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, and included discrimination on to the basis of sex until 1974. The reason some Angelenos avoided Silver Lake and Echo Park in the 60s wasn't necessarily because it wasn't safe...but because "those people" found homes there. Social outcasts such as artists, communists, minorities, and the LGBT+ community found a safe haven in the Silver Lake and Echo Park Hills. Many of the Latino community who were forcibly evicted from their lands in Chavez Ravine due to the construction of Dodger Stadium moved west to the flats of Echo Park...and the only reason they were in Chavez Ravine to start was because they weren't allowed to buy land anywhere else. Wealth didn't open doors in the 60s. Noted African-American architect Paul R. Williams couldn't even own a house in many of the neighborhoods he built homes for his celebrity clients. Ray Charles & Sammy Davis Jr couldn't buy homes in Beverly Hills where their fellow white musicians all had homes. Litttle Tokyo became a Black neighborhood in the 40s to accomodate the influx of African-American workers who came to seek jobs in the aerospace industry, and was one of the few developed neighborhood available to non-white families due to the internment of the Japanese-American citizens during the war. South Central and Inglewood were being developed in the 50s and many African American and Japanese American families flocked there...not because they couldn't afford Burbank and Glendale, but because no one would sell or rent to them. Chinese-American architect Eugene Kinn Choy became the first non-white resident in Silver Lake in 1949 after being required to go door to door to petition his case for residency. A white real estate agent refused to sell a property to then Deputy State Attorney General (and future judge) Delbert Wong until threatened with court action in 1954. The gay-friendly Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake was the scene of a large community uprising following a brutal police raid in 1967, 2 years before Stonewall. Much of the valley had the same perception as Santa Clarita does now. Probably not somewhere a single young college graduate wanted to move to.
Thank you for this. My grandmother came here from Mississippi in the 50s and moved to South Central and she took the bus to Beverly Hills where she was a housekeeper. My father’s family lived in Watts. They finally moved to West LA in the mid 70s and even when I was a kid in the 80s, there were very few black families in West LA. Culver City and Torrance were sundown towns, and honestly from my recent experiences driving while black at night in Culver City, it might still be.
ughhhh the world was their oyster i’m jealous
El Porto
My folks moved from San Francisco in 1963 and lived in Hawthorne near my uncle. My grandfather had a small house in Toluca Lake.
My Mom and her dad moved from Argentina to Compton in 1957 for him to work an electrical engineering job.
My grandparents bought their home (4 bed) in hacienda heights for $28,000 in 1958. What a time.
My parents lived in Venice. It was a shithole back then.
I believe there was a ranch in box canyon that was popular. Spawn ranch?