Is ‘Hood Hipness a Cause for Happiness or Just a Hassle?

In her calls from London, my significant other’s sister kept telling us our neighborhood was hip. At first I just rolled my eyes, but about the third mention I began to wonder.

After all, here was trend-maven Jenni declaring from 6,000 miles away that our ‘hood was the place to be.

Sure enough, a little research has revealed that we live in the hippest swath of Los Angeles. If only I’d known when we bought the house, it would have made it so much easier to write that down payment check.

The December issue of Vogue dubbed Los Feliz “the hot ‘hood on the Left Coast”--not to mention “the SoHo of L.A.”

Then there’s the four-page spread in the April issue of W, replete with two dozen photographs.

”. . . in a surge of post-glam realism,” the writer tells us, “living on the edge has become the trend in hip circles of Los Angeles.”

Absolutely. I especially identified with the post-glam.

Naming stars, such as Madonna, Nicolas Cage and Brad Pitt, who’ve--gasp!--chosen to live east of La Cienega Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills and Los Feliz, the article spun my corner of L.A. into a whole new light.

“Everywhere I look when I go out,” one Los Feliz fashion designer told the magazine, “it’s just totally cool hipsters, stylists and fashion people.”

Obviously this woman does not do her grocery shopping at the Lucky on Hillhurst Avenue.

A local restaurant owner is quoted on the east Hollywood scene: “A lot of people are comparing it to Paris in the ‘20s and ‘30s.”

Sure they are. And I’ll bet they were all born about 1976.

*

All this hype--triggered by Madonna’s move to Los Feliz last year and the opening of a few blocks of outre shops on Vermont Avenue--got me thinking about whether it was good or bad to be officially hip.

So I did a little calling around.

“It scares me to death,” confessed Bruce Carroll, a retired network news producer who has lived in the area for nearly three decades. “The last thing I want to be is trendy. Trendy is traffic.”

“I abhor crowds, and that’s why this is a nice place. You can do your business and be gone.”

Carroll grew up in Beverly Hills. He remembers when there were hardware stores where Gucci now reigns. “I know how this can ruin a neighborhood,” he sighed. Granted, “Hillhurst isn’t going to become Rodeo Drive,” Carroll continued. “But given enough publicity that it’s hot and trendy, it will attract a certain element.”

A short stretch of Vermont has already gone Melrose. Down the street from the surgical supply and lock and key stores, boutiques with names such as Sinister and X-Girl and colors like lime green have sprouted.

“I don’t see it really taking off like that--which I think is good,” Don Waldrop of nearby Franklin Hills said hopefully. “We’d just as soon as not have the Westside riffraff hanging out around here.”

Just kidding . . . sort of.

Hollywood Hills resident Marcia Smith laughs at the fact that her hills have been declared the capital of hip.

“Little do they know,” said Smith, who’s in the middle of a neighborhood battle over creation of a mini-plaza.

“When I look at many of my neighbors, I don’t consider them very hip,” she added pointedly, dismissing them as “conventional.”

Which is not to say she’s not a ‘hood chauvinist.

“It’s one of the few real neighborhoods in Los Angeles,” she proclaimed.

*

In a city that veers from the grimly shabby to the artificially pristine, the eastern foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains are neither.

The streets, often so narrow they are effectively one lane, wind with the hills instead of slicing through them. Mostly built from the 1920s through the ‘50s, the houses are a pastiche of styles and sizes, ranging from grand old walled compounds to the small and ordinary.

Home to early Hollywood--”I can look down at Laughlin Park, where Charlie Chaplin and Cecil B. De Mille had houses,” noted Carroll--it has always attracted writers, artists and people from the entertainment industry.

Yet it is too heterogeneous to be pretentious, and that is one of its charms.

To the extent hipness is surface posturing, it offends the sensibility of the place. The sudden attention, in some ways seductive, is threatening.

Still, it would be silly--and probably nerdy--to take it too seriously.

As Los Feliz real estate agent Karen Weiss mused: “What is hip?

“The fact that movie people live where you live, is that hip? I think the best thing is, we’re getting better restaurants, cleaner streets and a new library to boot.”

I’m still a tad confused about one thing. Next time Jenni visits, do we tell her this is Paris in the 1920s? Or SoHo?

‘I abhor crowds. That’s why this is a nice place. You can do your business and be gone.’