Casa Bianca, courtesy of Britta Gustafson (dreamyshade), Flickr (You wouldn’t think a seemingly quiet, 4.25-square-mile district tucked against the foothills in the northeast corner of LA would inspire the most influential filmmaker of the 1990s, educate the 44th President of the United States or start the region’s infamous cupcake wars.
Then again, there’s far more to Eagle Rock than meets the eye.
The community of about 35,000 people, which was its own city for a dozen years before being annexed to Los Angeles in 1923, offers a slightly more serene, but no less fascinating combination of hillside walks, early-20th Century architecture and fun shops and restaurants that mark LA communities like Silver Lake and Los Feliz a few miles away.
Wedged between Glendale, South Pasadena and Pasadena, Eagle Rock has two primary commercial districts that form a “T” along Eagle Rock Blvd. (north-south) and Colorado Blvd. (east-west). While Eagle Rock Blvd. is the more low-key of the two, its quiet spirit of rebellion lurks at Auntie Em’s and Pat and Lorraine’s. Auntie Em’s’ Red Velvet cupcakes helped give birth to LA’s Cupcake Wars and even garnered a “Throwdown With Bobby Flay” visit (Bobby won). The restaurant/bakery, which is also known for its breakfasts and sandwiches, is owned by Terri Wahl, former guitarist for the all-female punk band Red Aunts in the 90s.
Speaking of the 90s, Pat and Lorraine’s on Eagle Rock Blvd. provided the caffeine for that decade’s (arguably) most influential film director. The opening lines of Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 epic “Reservoir Dogs” were spoken in the coffee shop, and Tarantino wrote the script for 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” at the restaurant. And for good reason – the breakfasts are huge, the prices are cheap, the service is friendly and the vibe is absolutely down home.
Further up the hill, Colorado Blvd. provides shoppers, foodhounds and families alike with plenty of choices. Near the corner of Eagle Rock and Colorado, Twerps is great for kids clothes, IMIX Bookstore for eclectic reading and Swork for the requisite caffeine fix. Two short blocks east on Colorado, Peekaboo Playland gives parents a safe and fun indoor playground for the kids to go crazy.Meanwhile, the good grub doesn’t stop at Eagle Rock Blvd. by any means. Working west to east, Spitz provides an innovative, uh, spin on the shish kebab, Dave’s Chillin-N-Grillin doles out big sandwiches and a punk-rock vibe, Casa Bianca will feed you the same outstanding pizza it’s been
serving up since 1955, and Larkin’s puts an oh-so-sophisticated spin on soul food. The coup de grace, however, may be The Oinkster, whose owner Andre Guerrero did time at LA’s legendary Langer’s Delicatessen to perfect his pastrami. The restaurant’s sandwiches were given much respect on the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.”Need to walk off that meal? For architecture buffs or for those just wanting to take a great stroll, Eagle Rock’s streets provide plenty of examples of outstanding and well-preserved Craftsman style buildings. Most notable is the Women’s Twentieth Century Club of Eagle Rock, which was built in 1914, sits at the corner of Colorado and Hermosa Ave. and is a historical landmark. That said, the neighborhoods both north and south of Colorado Blvd. provide plenty of stylish houses to check out as well as the necessary hills to burn off some calories.
Of course, no visit to Eagle Rock would be complete without a walk through the leafy, hillside campus of Occidental College. “Oxy,” which has about 2,000 students, has been in session since 1888, about eight years after USC was founded and about 40 years before UCLA’s campus was built. Myron Hunt, who designed LA’s Ambassador Hotel, master-planned the 120-acre campus in 1910 and was its primary building designer for the next three decades, giving the buildings the classic looks that made them a stand-in for the fictional “California University” in the original “Beverly Hills 90210” TV series.
The school is also known for its 1979 enrollment of a freshman from Hawaii named Barack Obama. The future president transferred to Columbia University two years later, but that doesn’t mean visitors wouldn’t want to make their stay in Eagle Rock a little more permanent.
Danny King is a freelance reporter whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Daily Variety. King, who has been a staff reporter for Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Business Journal, currently writes about subjects ranging from the travel industry to alternative-fueled vehicles. A native Angeleno, King lives with his family in either Los Feliz or Silver Lake – he’s still not sure which.
