They're eating the tripe. They're eating the mango sticky rice.

Life at the borders.

I like to say I live in Los Feliz even though I’m a closer walk to East Hollywood. Los Feliz has enduring cache. Institutional gravitas with landmarks like the Griffith Park Observatory, mainstays like The Dresden Room and Fred62, and with enough room to change a little every so often like the newer modern Mexican spot Mírate. You can’t ever quite accuse Los Feliz of being hip or gentrifying. And according to the borders drawn by the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council, I really do live in Los Feliz. “Los Feliz Square” to be more precise and also completely arbitrary.

I like to be cool, though, and TimeOut just named East Hollywood the 26th “coolest neighborhood” in the world," just behind a neighborhood in Dublin and just in front of a neighborhood in Bangkok. I was surprised that a place I moved to not completely by choice in 2020, when there was a large homeless encampment around the corner (speaking of LA institutional gravitas), could be this cool.

In some sort of hipster gerrymandering, TimeOut lumps Virgil Village and Melrose Hill into East Hollywood to include nearby culinary standouts but insists “most Angelenos would recognize” these areas as part of East Hollywood too. I’m not sure most Angelenos could point to any of this on a map.

My East Hollywood experience is this: if I stroll down to Hollywood Boulevard and make a left I go toward Little Armenia. Most Angelenos would agree Big Armenia is Glendale but there are a few murals marking the genocide, a few Armenian bakeries, a few Armenian grocers, and a few thousand Armenians here. There’s a parade every year. I like the tiny markets: Nairi and Arbat. I pretend they are New York bodegas because I sometimes want to be living there instead of here. Nairi has an attached event space that I hear a big party from every so often. I imagine that these are Armenian family celebrations being catered by an Armenian Artie and Charmaine Buccos and that these businesses are fronts for some sort of Armenian mob activity. Not because the offerings are bad, but because they’re good and imagining the mob goes there makes them seem even better. Maybe hoping there is organized crime nearby is more wishing I lived in New York. Or in the past.

If I stroll down Hollywood Boulevard and make a right, I’m in Thai Town where there is an infinite amount of Thai restaurants to sample. I have not gotten close to trying them all because I got in the habit of ordering pineapple fried rice and mango sticky rice from Crispy Pork Gang almost every time I get Thai. A Thai craving is a rice-heavy meal and rice for dessert. Sometimes the Thai places say mango sticky rice is not available because the mangos aren’t in season. How can this be? What’s the point of all these chemicals and preservatives and an advanced supply chain if I can’t have mango sticky rice whenever I want?

Once upon a time in Thai town, I ordered something with tripe. I thought tripe was a vegetable and not stomach lining because doesn’t “tripe” sound like a turnip? Whenever I make a childish mistake like this, I blame it on growing up in a food desert: Bradford, Pennsylvania. I didn’t know what an avocado was until I got to California. Serious. We didn’t have a Mexican restaurant until I was in high school. When it opened, there were rumors (hopes) it was a front for a Mexican gang. You had to drive an hour just to get to a Pizza Hut-Taco Bell. Until then, I had only had Ortega products. I think they have avocados all the time there now. Bradford finally got the advanced supply chain.

I discovered a connection between Bradford and East Hollywood. Aline Barnsdall, whose defunct artist community with the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Hollyhock House became Barnsdall Art Park, was born in Bradford. In fact, Aline’s cousin was president of the company owned by my across-the-street best friend’s family, McCourt Label. It’s a small world and knowing that I live sort-of across the street from this hometown connection that shares a relationship with my across-the-street neighbor gives me hope that I am in the right place.

Living a stone throw’s away from where the Black Dahlia’s killer may have lived gives me the sense that I am in the wrong place sometimes. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, the John Snowden house was once occupied by Dr. George Hodel and Hodel’s son thinks his father killed the Black Dahlia and may be the Zodiac killer too. Others dispute this theory, but everyone agrees Hodel was a bad guy and the house is spooky.

The Black Dahlia did live at the nearby Guardian Arms Apartments (now the Oxford House Projects) for twelve days in 1946. It is creepy to think of her walking up my street to the Mayan temple-like house of her possible killer. Only a little time and space separates us. But we’re not that close, I mistakenly call her the Black Delilah a lot (Hey there, Dahlia, what’s it like in LA…you’d be making history like you do….). I don’t think I can blame that one on growing up in a food desert.

Though I live at the crossroads of Armenia and Thailand, most of my time in East Hollywood is secular. We put these names on things and then they change. Maybe one day City Hall will be forced to rename it East Hollywood-Armenia-Thai Town like New York did with Chinatown and Little Italy. The barber shop I go to (Hollywood Barber Shop) is ran by and frequented by Hispanics. The last time I was there they had a Halloween movie on — The Jester (2023) — and we all watched in near silence getting undercut fades. There’s the Filipino and Black-owned Obet and Del’s Coffee. There is the white-coded (it serves bread) Friends & Family, which has the best pastries. Before I got my desktop, I’d spend hours there working. I sat at a window with a clear view of the crowd-pleasing strip club Jumbo’s Clown Room. It amused me to be in a place called “Friends & Family” with this naughty view, but it’s not that ironic — everyone always talks about how friendly and like a family Jumbo’s actually is.

You could say a lot of East Hollywood is like that. The staff at Friends & Family catches up with me about Bravo reality shows and gives me free coffee refills even though they’re supposed to be $1. The clerks at Norwood Market and Quality Stop Liquors don’t ask any questions about why I buy two or three Vitamin Waters there almost every night. It’s because buying once in a bulk feels expensive and like an addiction and buying them only at one place might make the clerk at the other place feel sad. Are people nearby being nice to you all it takes to make a neighborhood?

The area is changing as part of the city’s Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) Incentive Program and Hollywood Boulevard Safety & Mobility Project. LA wants to make everything more presentable in time for the Olympics. It’s a lot like when I try to do a deep clean of my apartment the day before my parents visit. The result of all this is that there are new, identical multi-block apartment behemoths popping up with names like “The Elinor” and “The Louise.” My guess is there was a consumer insight that we all wish we could live like Eloise at the Plaza. These buildings import local chains like Mendocino Farms and California Chicken Cafe. I love these places too but I would never think they were a mob front. Unless supplier Mary’s Free-Range Chicken is shaking everyone down.

Hollywood Boulevard has recently gone from two lanes each-way to one-lane with the extra space being turned into lanes for buses, bikes, and right turns with confusing green paint, random white lines everywhere, and unfathomable plastic bollards, bollards everywhere. I want to be supportive of these better streets, but the progress of public transportation is lagging behind their beautification and reduction of cars, leading to more congestion where there used to be less.

A building near me on Normandie Ave. that was just called “Hollywood Tower Apartments” is trying to play catchup. It rebranded as “The Norman” and put up a new sign. For a while, they put up a bunch of blue balloons as if it were the grand opening of a new building. It kind of worked. Now, I don’t think of it as random building. I think of it as “The Norman.”

There are efforts to prevent change. One street was designated the “Winona Boulevard Mid-Century Modern Historic District.” The district is considered “significant” because it “encompasses a period of change and new construction in the area, as early-20th-century building stock was demolished to make way for denser residential development that embraced Modernism.” Apparently, the 20th century building stock it replaced was not significant and the Modernism era is just the right amount of dense and modern. I think the buildings on this tract are interesting to look at but I wonder if most passersby find them important. What sticks out most to me on that street is the building with giant blue, yellow and white flags which I’ve heard, without substantiation, means it is owned by Donald Sterling.

I feel like the silly rabbit. I make too much of these boundaries between people, space, time, and streets. For street cred purposes I live in East Hollywood. Los Feliz may still be cooler. It doesn’t seem to require as many special projects to improve. At the same time, Los Feliz is pretty much the same place as East Hollywood. After all, East Hollywood is also Little Armenia, Thai Town, Virgil Village and Melrose Hill. And it’s all the east side. And it’s all Los Angeles.