L.A.'s Eastside: Where do you draw the line?

“ First & Main is ground zero for the city's and county's unified house-numbering systems--the manner in which government determines the addresses of large numbers of homes and businesses. Therefore, everything East of Main Street is East Los Angeles. Everything is either east, west, north or south of 1st and Main. This dates back to 1945, when I was about 3 years old – depending on the month this went into effect.

Main is the oldest street in Los Angeles, and 1st & Main is about three blocks south of where our Pueblo, now city, was founded in 1781.

Having not grown up on the Eastside, I don't really have a handle on the Eastside's Eastern border, but I'd say it ends where the City of Los Angeles ends.

I grew up in the Silver Lake/Los Feliz/Echo Park areas.

Until I was 4 we lived on Avenel Street, not far from the Roger Young Village in the Los Feliz area. We then moved in with my Grandmother on Berkeley Avenue, between Glendale and Silverlake Blvds. Her house had been built in the ’20s by my Grandfather.

I played in the Garbetts Estate, now known as Hathaway Hill. I went to Mayberry Street School, Thomas Starr King Jr. Hight and Marshall High. My mother and uncle went to Clifford Elementary, walking through the Sennett Studio on the way. They went to Belmont High.

My Boy Scout Troop met in the basement of the Echo Park United Methodist Church on Alvarado off Sunset.

The area we lived in was called Edendale, between the Echo Park and Silver Lake areas. Some even dared to even call it East Hollywood. The boundaries are so fluid that the area can be called either Echo Park, Silver Lake or, because Edendale still shows on some current maps, Edendale.

It was not then, is not now, and never will be “East Los Angeles,” no matter how desperate current residents want to distinguish themselves from the “Fashionable” West Side of Los Angeles. If residents take off their Rose colored glasses, they will see all of Los Angels as the gritty, dirty, unkempt pot holed ill cared for city that Raymond Chandler put on the literary map.

The areas in question are still The Los Feliz, The Silver Lake and the Echo Park areas. If that isn’t good enough for the current residents, they can lump all those areas into “East Hollywood” or “Edendale.” It was good enough for “us” in the ’20s, ’30s, ‘40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, 80’s and ’90s, and it is still good enough today. ” — Loren Latker from Pacific Palisades, Feb. 18, 2014, 11:02 a.m.