Silver Lake is flanked on the northeast by Atwater Village and Elysian Valley, on the southeast by Echo Park, on the southwest by Westlake, on the west by East Hollywood and on the northwest by Los Feliz.

Street and other boundaries are: the Los Angeles River between Glendale Boulevard and Fletcher Drive and Riverside Drive on the northeast, the Glendale Freeway on the east, Effie Street, Coronado Street, Berkeley Avenue and Fletcher Drive on the southeast, the Hollywood Freeway on the south, Virgil Avenue on the west and Fountain Avenue and Hyperion Avenue on the northwest. The prime real estate around the lake is known by realtors as the “Moreno Highlands.”

Silver Lake, is known as one of “the city’s hippest neighborhoods”, has many bars, nightclubs and restaurants. Since the 1990s, the neighborhood has become the center of the alternative and indie rock scene in Los Angeles. It was home to two major yearly street festivals: the Silver Lake Jubilee, held in May and the Sunset Junction Street Fair, held in August. The last Sunset Junction festival was held in 2010 and abruptly cancelled in 2011 just days before it was supposed to take place, after years of neighborhood controversy. The Silver Lake Jubilee, the more recent addition, featured live music by local musicians, local artists and community businesses. It moved out of the neighborhood to private grounds near the Los Angeles River and changed its name as of 2013.

Since the indie rock music scene is particularly prominent in this neighborhood, comparisons are often drawn between Silver Lake and New York City’s Williamsburg district. As a result, it is sometimes referred to as the “Williamsburg of the West”.

History

During the 1930s, Walt Disney built his first large studio in Silver Lake at the corner of Griffith Park Boulevard and Hyperion Avenue, currently the site of Gelson’s Market. As consequence, the name “Hyperion” is used by Walt Disney Company, with company entities carrying the name, such as Hyperion Books and the Hyperion Theater at Disney California Adventure Park.

Several blocks away on Glendale Boulevard was the studio of early Western films’ star Tom Mix. The location is now occupied by the Mixville Shopping Center. It is rumored that Mix buried his steed “Tony, the Wonder Horse” on the property. The neighborhood is crisscrossed by numerous municipal staircases that provide pedestrian access up and down the neighborhood’s signature hills. Among these are the Descanso Stairs, Redcliffe Stairs and the Music Box Stairs. The famous flight of stairs in Laurel and Hardy‘s film The Music Box are located between lower Descanso Drive and Vendome Street, as it winds up and around the hill.

In the 1950s and 60s Silver Lake, like Echo Park, was home to a middle class Latino community. The community was formed by people who worked in the then-bustling manufacturing hub of downtown Los Angeles. In the 1970s, outsourcing brought to an end the group’s prosperity, as they saw their jobs shipped overseas to Taiwan and China along with manufacturing. The neighborhood lost its prominence amid urban decay.

Beginning in the 1970s, the neighborhood became the nexus of Los Angeles’ gay leather subculture, the equivalent of the SoMA neighborhood in San Francisco. Since the late 1990s, gentrification has changed the area by pushing out public sex and “gay cruising“, and by facilitating the opening of many independent upscale boutiques, coffee shops, fitness studios, and restaurants.

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