Ask Silver Lake — Sunset Junction, What’s Your Function?

NOTE: a version of this piece was written for the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council’s “Ask Silver Lake” column.

‘Ask Silver Lake’ is dedicated to exploring the history and insights of our community. If you have questions or ideas you’d like us to consider, please drop a comment or send them to outreach@silverlakenc.org.‘

Like most large neighborhoods, Silver Lake is home to several smaller micro-regions — essentially neighborhoods within neighborhoods. Some — like Edendale, Ivanhoe, and Primrose Hill — are old tract names that for whatever reason stuck around long after they were subdivided. There are also communities like Hathaway Estates (a guard protected collection of Mock Tudor homes) and Mixville (the site resident cowboy film star Tom Mix’s old ranch). Some newer designations, like Silver Lake Heights, have gained a degree of traction whilst others, such as Silver Lake Village, have been less successful. Surely the most widely recognized of these neighborhoods within the neighborhood, though, is Sunset Junction — a name that refers to the intersection of Sanborn Avenue and Sunset Boulevard and the surrounding area. Multiple readers have requested more information.

Sunset Junction’s identity really began to come together in the early 1960s. Silver Lake was already Los Angeles’s gayborhood — but the opening of gay bars at the junction radically increased the community’s visibility. New Faces opened at Sanborn and Sunset in 1962. Within fifteen years, it was joined by Curly’s, the Detour, Don’s Male Box, Gay’m, the Place, the Queen’s Attic, and, most famously, the Black Cat — all of which operated within a block of the intersection.

The biggest boost to Sunset Junction’s profile came in 1980 with the launch of the annual Sunset Junction Street Fair. From that year until 2010, multiple blocks of Sunset Boulevard would be closed to cars in order to accommodate crowds of up to 300,000 revelers. The street fairs live performances were legendary and featured both local acts and international stars like Buzzcocks, Chaka Khan, the Cramps, Isaac Hayes, Love, and Sleater-Kinney. The fun ended in 2011 when the Board of Public Works denied a permit to the street fair’s organizers.

Detail of Map of the Los Angeles Pacific Company Electric lines around Los Angeles, 1910 by Charles C. Pierce

Sunset Junction began decades earlier as a junction of two rail transit lines called Sanborn Junction. The first train arrived at the junction in 1896 when the Pasadena & Pacific Railway began offering service connecting the downtowns of Los Angeles and Santa Monica along what’s now Santa Monica Boulevard. It became a junction in 1905, when the Los Angeles Railway added another rail line that continued up Sunset to Hollywood. Although identified as Sanborn Junction on most rail maps, it was recognized by a variety of colloquial names including Santa Monica & Sunset Junction, Sunset (Sanborn) Junction, Hollywood Junction, and ultimately, Sunset Junction.

By the time the last train passed through the junction in 1954, people had begun to settle on Sunset Junction as a name for the area. Although it may look older, the now iconic sign there that reads “Welcome to Silverlake Sunset ✮ Junction” was only painted around 1999. The sign itself, though, is a relic of an earlier age, when it loomed over the junction from above Perry’s Steakhouse. Somewhat inextricably, It originally also included text that said “since 1928.” What significance, if any, that particular year held was apparently lost to time and at some point the date was painted over.

A row of charming, streetcar-era, Tudor Revival-style commercial buildings in the intersection were best known, in modern times, for hosting the pioneering gay bookstore, A Different Light. Efforts were underway to acquire designation for them as Historic-Cultural Monuments in 2011 when developer, Frost/Chaddock, demolished them after assuring both City and Neighborhood councils that they had no intention of doing so. Today it’s still a vacant lot.

The triangular lot formed by Manzanita Street and the former rail lines — now Santa Monica and Sunset boulevards — was for decades nothing but a surface parking lot. In 1988, a Jiffy Lube was built there. In 2011, it was announced that a small section of the triangle would be unpaved and transformed into Sunset Junction Plaza. A contest was held and a winner awarded the contract. It was to have been completed by 2012. Work on the project began in 2015 and, when pavement was removed, the old rail lines were exposed. Some Birds-of-paradise and a few bushes were planted and a Metro bike share station was installed but the plug was pulled on Sunset Junction Plaza in 2016.

In recent years, there have been calls to revive both Sunset Junction Plaza and the Sunset Junction Street Fair but neither have come to fruition. If you have ideas for what you’d like to see in Sunset Junction — consider bringing them to the appropriate Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Committees.

Support Eric Brightwell on Patreon