Silver Lake
The reservoir at the center of Silver Lake is 96 acres of still water sitting in the middle of a city that rarely slows down. Named for a water commissioner, Herman Silver, it was designed by William Mulholland and put into service in 1908 — and it still organizes the neighborhood around it, the way water tends to do. The 2.25-mile walking path that rings it only opened to the public in 2015, after decades behind a fence.
What grew up around that water is a neighborhood with a particular density of modernist architecture, painted staircases, and a civic history that turns out to be genuinely strange and significant — a place where Richard Neutra built a research house, Harry Hay quietly organized the first gay rights group in the country, and Beck spent his teenage years.
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Regulars tend to do the reservoir loop early, before the dog walkers stack up, then cut up toward Neutra Place to look at the colony of houses Neutra built for friends and colleagues on a renamed cul-de-sac. The Micheltorena Stairs — 205 steps, painted — are worth the climb not for the view but for the excuse to slow down in a part of the neighborhood most people drive past.
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Book directly at the providerHow Silver Lake came to be
The land was being developed as early as 1887 under the name Ivanhoe, after the Walter Scott novel, by a firm called Byram & Poindexter. The reservoir that would rename everything arrived in 1907, built by the Los Angeles Water Department and designed by William Mulholland; it went into service in May 1908. The upper basin kept the old name, Ivanhoe. Both were declared Historic-Cultural Monuments in 1989.
Through the 1920s and '30s, modernist architects including Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, and John Lautner began building in the hills here — work that would eventually make Silver Lake one of the most concentrated sites of mid-century residential architecture in the country. In 1950, Harry Hay held the first meetings of the Mattachine Society in his Silver Lake home; a staircase nearby has since been designated the Mattachine Steps. In 1949, Chinese-American architect Eugene Kinn Choy won approval to build here after going door to door to challenge the racial covenants that had initially blocked him.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Silver Lake sits inland enough that the coastal fog rarely reaches it. Summers are warm and dry — mid-80s most days — with cool evenings. Winter is mild, occasionally rainy from December through February, and the hills turn briefly green.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.