Silver Lake neighborhoods
Silver Lake · Neighborhoods
Silver Lake's pockets at a glance
Silver Lake is one Los Angeles neighborhood made of several distinct pockets: the reservoir and the Meadow at its center; the Neutra Colony along the reservoir's east shore; Moreno Highlands and the steep hills to the west and north; Ivanhoe, the 1887 tract whose streets are named for Sir Walter Scott; Sunset Junction, where Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards meet; the Glendale Boulevard side, once called Edendale; and the public stairways that stitch the hills together. Echo Park, Los Feliz and Northeast Los Angeles are its neighbors, each with its own guide.
Silver Lake is small, about two and three-quarter square miles, but it does not feel like one place. A flat block near Sunset Boulevard, a hillside street above the reservoir and a cul-de-sac of mid-century glass houses sit within a short walk of each other, and they were built in different decades for different ways of living. This guide walks the pockets inside Silver Lake and says plainly what each one is: how it began, what the houses look like, and the streets and landmarks that define it.
It leans toward architecture and history because that is what lasts, and Silver Lake has an unusual amount of both. For the places worth knowing, see Silver Lake places; for the houses themselves and what comes with owning one, see Silver Lake real estate. For architect-designed and historic homes across California, Debbie Pisaro's practice is at debbiepisaro.com.
The reservoir and the Meadow
The neighborhood is named for its water. William Mulholland's Water Department built the upper Ivanhoe Reservoir in 1906 and the larger Silver Lake Reservoir in 1907, flooding a canyon of the old Ivanhoe tract. The lower reservoir was named for Herman Silver, the water commissioner who championed the land purchase, and the name spread to everything around it. The Silver Lake and Ivanhoe Reservoirs are together a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, designated in 1989.
Both reservoirs have since been taken out of drinking-water service, and the land around them has slowly become the neighborhood's park. The Silver Lake Recreation Center, run by LA Recreation and Parks, sits on Silver Lake Drive, with the dog park nearby; the Silver Lake Meadow, a broad lawn beside the water, opened in 2011 after years of community advocacy; and a walking path circles the water. The LADWP's Silver Lake Reservoir Complex page follows the long-range plan for the site. Homes facing the reservoir, on Silver Lake Boulevard, West Silver Lake Drive and the streets just above, are among the most sought-after in the neighborhood.
The Neutra Colony
No street in Los Angeles holds more Richard Neutra houses than the stretch of Silver Lake Boulevard on the reservoir's east shore and Neutra Place, the short street just above it. It begins with Neutra's own home and studio, the VDL Research House, built in 1932, largely destroyed by fire in 1963 and rebuilt by Neutra and his son Dion in the mid-1960s on the original foundation. It is a City Historic-Cultural Monument, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009 and was named a National Historic Landmark in 2016. Cal Poly Pomona's College of Environmental Design stewards it, and it is the rare Neutra house that is open for public tours; check the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences site for times.
Along the boulevard and up on Neutra Place stand roughly ten more Neutra houses from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, private homes on narrow hillside lots, glass to the water and closed to the street. The Reunion House on Neutra Place, where Dion Neutra lived for decades, was added to the City's list of Historic-Cultural Monuments in 2021.
These are private residences; see them from the sidewalk.
Meet the architects in Faces of Silver Lake
Moreno Highlands
Moreno Highlands is the hillside pocket on the west side of the reservoir, around Micheltorena Street and the winding streets above it. It takes its name from the silent film star Antonio Moreno, though the money and the vision belonged to his wife, the socialite Daisy Canfield, who developed the area in the 1920s and 1930s. Their estate, Crestmount, designed by architect Robert D. Farquhar and completed in 1923, still crowns the hill. Known today as the Canfield-Moreno Estate, and also as the Paramour, it was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1988.
The rest of Moreno Highlands is quieter: period revival houses and mid-century modern homes on steep lots, many with long views across the reservoir. Several important modern houses are nearby along Micheltorena Street, including John Lautner's Silvertop, designed in 1956, and R. M. Schindler's Oliver House. Moreno Highlands suits buyers who want a hillside house with a view and are comfortable with narrow, curving streets.
The Silver Lake hills
Much of Silver Lake is hillside, and locals and listings tend to use "the Silver Lake hills" loosely for the steep residential streets that climb away from the reservoir and Sunset Boulevard, such as Redcliff Street, Kenilworth Avenue, Dillon Street and Hidalgo Avenue. This is where the neighborhood's reputation for modern architecture was made. In the 1930s, architects designed houses for clients of modest means on lots nobody else wanted, and the hills became a proving ground.
The City has recognized several of those houses as Historic-Cultural Monuments: R. M. Schindler's Wilson House on Redcliff Street, from 1938, and his Droste House on Kenilworth Avenue, from 1940; Raphael Soriano's Lipetz House on Dillon Street, from 1936, his first residential work; and the Nin-Pole Residence on Hidalgo Avenue, designed by Eric Lloyd Wright for the writer Anaïs Nin and Rupert Pole and completed in 1962. Gregory Ain and Harwell Hamilton Harris, both of whom started out in Neutra's office, also built in Silver Lake. Expect hillside houses of every era here, from 1920s Spanish to post-and-beam to new construction, with steep driveways, retaining walls and views.
Lots nobody else wanted, clients of modest means. The hills became a proving ground.
Ivanhoe
Before there was a Silver Lake, there was Ivanhoe. The Ivanhoe tract was introduced in 1887 by John C. Byram and Robert W. Poindexter and named for Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel, and its streets still carry Scott's world: Rowena, Kenilworth, Locksley, Herkimer, Avenel and Waverly among them. The Ivanhoe Reservoir, the upper of the two basins, kept the name.
Today Ivanhoe is the gentler, greener ground north of the reservoir, around Rowena Avenue and the streets that rise toward the Los Feliz line. The old Engine Company No. 56 firehouse on Rowena Avenue is a City Historic-Cultural Monument. Houses run from 1920s Spanish and Craftsman bungalows to mid-century homes on rolling lots. Ivanhoe suits buyers who want Silver Lake with a little more yard and a little less climbing.
The Silver Lake List
Debbie Pisaro writes Just Silver Lake, on the neighborhood's streets, its architecture and its houses.
Join the list or call (310) 362-6429Sunset Junction
Sunset Junction is the commercial heart of Silver Lake, named for the meeting of Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, two of the city's great streets, both of which run from here toward the ocean. The name is a streetcar name. Rail service along what is now Santa Monica Boulevard arrived in 1896, and in 1905 a second line continued up Sunset toward Hollywood, making the spot a true junction, marked on rail maps as Sanborn Junction. Streetcars on Sunset ran until 1954, when buses replaced them.
The junction also holds a landmark of American civil rights history. The Black Cat Tavern on Sunset Boulevard was the site of a protest in February 1967, after a New Year's police raid, that preceded the Stonewall uprising in New York by more than two years; the building was designated a Historic-Cultural Monument in 2008. Around the junction, the blocks are a mix of storefronts, 1920s apartment courts and small houses on flat streets. Sunset Junction suits people who want to walk to coffee, dinner and the Saturday errands.
Places to know around Sunset Junction
The stairway streets
Silver Lake's hills were subdivided before most people had cars, and the City built public stairways so residents could walk between the hillside streets, many of them leading down toward the streetcar lines below. Dozens survive, and they are one of the best ways to understand the neighborhood. The most famous is the Music Box Steps, the long public stair between Vendome Street and Descanso Drive where Laurel and Hardy hauled a piano in The Music Box, the 1932 short that won the first Academy Award for a live-action comedy short. A plaque at the base marks it, and the small park across the street is named for the pair.
On Cove Avenue, the stairway beside the former home of Harry Hay, who founded the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organization, in 1950, was renamed the Mattachine Steps by the City Council in 2012. Other stairways climb from Sunset Boulevard and Silver Lake Boulevard into the hills, a few of them brightly painted. Houses on stairway streets can have little or no street frontage, so access, parking and how furniture gets in are real questions; most buyers who love them would not live anywhere else.
Dozens of public stairways stitch the hills together. Walk them, and the neighborhood makes sense.
Edendale and the Glendale Boulevard side
The southeast edge of Silver Lake, along Glendale Boulevard toward Echo Park, was known in the early twentieth century as Edendale, and it was one of the first homes of the Los Angeles film industry. The Mack Sennett Studios building on Bates Avenue, built in 1916, survives from those years. Further up the boulevard, Richard Neutra's own 1950 office building, still a modern landmark, is also a Historic-Cultural Monument.
A short drive north, at Hyperion Avenue and Griffith Park Boulevard, Walt Disney ran his studio from 1926 until the move to Burbank at the turn of 1940; Mickey Mouse was born and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was made there. The studio buildings are gone, and a supermarket stands on the site. This side of Silver Lake mixes small houses, duplexes and apartment courts with older commercial buildings, and Debbie Pisaro's office is just over the line in Echo Park, minutes from the reservoir.
How to choose among Silver Lake's pockets
Start with the house, then find the pocket that built it. Mid-century modern is everywhere, but the densest Neutra block is on the reservoir's east shore, and the 1930s modern houses cluster in the hills. Period revival estates are strongest in Moreno Highlands. Craftsman and Spanish bungalows fill much of Ivanhoe and the flatter streets near Sunset Junction and Glendale Boulevard.
Then think about the ground. Flat streets near Sunset mean walkability and easier parking; the hills mean views, quiet and steep driveways, and stairway streets mean both the best walks and the hardest moves. Silver Lake has no Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, but its individual Historic-Cultural Monuments carry City review for exterior changes, and hillside lots come with their own rules. The Silver Lake real estate guide covers both.
Coastline 840 is the brand Debbie Pisaro founded for this kind of house-by-house work across California. Read more on coastline840.com, or see selling a Silver Lake home.
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See the off-market listSilver Lake neighborhoods: questions and answers
What are the neighborhoods within Silver Lake?
Silver Lake is a single Los Angeles neighborhood with several informal pockets: the reservoir and Meadow area, the Neutra Colony on the reservoir's east shore, Moreno Highlands, the Silver Lake hills, Ivanhoe north of the reservoir, Sunset Junction, the stairway streets, and the Glendale Boulevard side once known as Edendale.
Why is it called Silver Lake?
The neighborhood takes its name from the Silver Lake Reservoir, completed in 1907 and named for Herman Silver, the Los Angeles water commissioner who championed the project. Before the reservoir, the area was part of the Ivanhoe tract.
Where is the Neutra Colony in Silver Lake?
The Neutra Colony is the group of Richard Neutra houses on Silver Lake Boulevard along the reservoir's east shore and on Neutra Place just above it. It includes the VDL Research House, a National Historic Landmark run by Cal Poly Pomona and open for tours, and the Reunion House, a City Historic-Cultural Monument since 2021. The other houses are private homes.
Where are the Music Box Steps?
The Music Box Steps are a public stairway in Silver Lake between Vendome Street and Descanso Drive, a short walk south of Sunset Boulevard. Laurel and Hardy filmed The Music Box there in 1932, and the short won the first Academy Award for a live-action comedy short.
Is there a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone in Silver Lake?
No. Silver Lake is not among the City of Los Angeles Historic Preservation Overlay Zones; the nearest is Angelino Heights in Echo Park. Silver Lake does have many individually designated Historic-Cultural Monuments, including the reservoirs, the Canfield-Moreno Estate, the VDL Research House and several houses by Schindler and Soriano.
Is Los Feliz or Echo Park part of Silver Lake?
No. Los Feliz and Echo Park are separate neighborhoods that border Silver Lake. Echo Park is covered on Just Echo Park, Los Feliz on Los Feliz Living, and Atwater Village and the rest of Northeast Los Angeles on Just NELA.
Does Debbie Pisaro work in Silver Lake?
Yes. Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year California real estate agent and the founder of Coastline 840, with an office on Glendale Boulevard just over the line in Echo Park. She represents buyers and sellers in Silver Lake and across California, with a focus on architectural and historic homes.
Work With Debbie
Know the pocket, know the house
Where a home sits in Silver Lake, on the flat, in the hills or on a stairway street, shapes how it lives. Debbie Pisaro represents buyers and sellers in Silver Lake and across California, with a focus on architectural and historic homes.
Reach DebbieDebbie Pisaro is a California real estate agent, California DRE #01369110, a 24-year California real estate veteran, an Inman Luxury Leader, and the founder of Coastline 840. Coastline 840 is a brand of Side, Inc., CA DRE #02014153, responsible broker. Read more about Debbie or get in touch. CA DRE #01369110 · Coastline 840 · Side, Inc. CA DRE #02014153