Los Angeles Highland Park: Murals, Vintage and the New Eastside Renaissance

Highland Park is the neighbourhood that Los Angeles's creative class discovered when Silver Lake and Echo Park became too expensive — an Eastside suburb along the Figueroa Corridor whose Victorian houses, Art Deco commercial strips, and the Latino community that had lived here since the 1970s provided the combination of affordability and character that creative professionals require. The commercial strip along York Boulevard and the adjacent streets contains the bookshops, vinyl record dealers, ceramics studios, specialty coffee shops, and natural wine bars that have become the signature infrastructure of every neighbourhood where artists and designers arrive before the property prices follow them. The Highland Park mural scene — particularly the extraordinary concentration of Chicano and contemporary murals along Figueroa and the side streets of Cypress Park — gives the neighbourhood a visual culture that resists the homogenising pressure of the creative-class arrival.

The York Boulevard strip has emerged as one of Los Angeles's most interesting restaurant destinations over the past decade: the combination of long-established Mexican restaurants serving the neighbourhood's Latino community and the new wave of chef-driven small restaurants targeting the incoming creative population has created a dining street of unusual range and quality. The Kitchen Mouse vegan restaurant, the Joy in the DTLA area, and the Korean-Mexican fusion operations that reflect the East LA demographic complexity represent the newer food culture; the carnitas tacos and birria from the taco trucks that have operated on Figueroa Street since before Highland Park became a destination represent the food culture that actually sustains the neighbourhood's majority population. The tension between these two food worlds is managed in Highland Park with more grace than in most Los Angeles gentrification zones.

The Heritage Square Museum in Highland Park — a collection of Victorian houses moved to a single site to preserve them from demolition, open on weekends for tours — gives the neighbourhood its most unusual heritage attraction: an open-air museum of Los Angeles Victorian domestic architecture from the 1860s–1905, representing the WASP bourgeois culture that dominated the city before the 20th century's successive demographic transformations. The Southwest Museum of the American Indian (now part of the Autry Museum system) on Museum Drive above the neighbourhood holds one of North America's most significant collections of Native American art and material culture — a collection assembled by Charles Fletcher Lummis in the late 19th century that now faces the institutional challenges of representing cultures whose perspective was not considered when the collecting began.