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City Places for City People

Small Town in the Big City

by Sherrie Chung

When I was 11, my mother decided to move from Echo Park to Silverlake. She felt that Echo Park was becoming "gang infested," and she wanted to live in Silverlake because she heard that it was a "well to do" neighborhood, far from the "gangs" in Echo Park. She feared my brother and I would be lobbied to join one--especially since I was going into Junior High. So off we went.

The Silverlake We Never Lived In

We ended up living in a two-bedroom duplex on the outskirts of Silverlake. She could never afford the houses or apartments that nestled in the hills, the ones that that overlooked the reservoir and made Silverlake so attractive. It had a beautiful park as well as the famous Dog Park. My mother would say that everything she needed was within walking distance--and it was, but I never saw her venture out of our home on Benton Way. She also claimed to like the atmosphere and the attitude of the community. She said that compared to the people in Echo Park, the people in Silverlake took pride in their community.

She was a charlatan. She never cared about the community, only the reputation it had.

To friends, she often described our neighborhood as the "slums of Silverlake." She was half-joking and half-serious. She knew that the name of our neighborhood was enough to impress her friends, who lived in areas such as Van Nuys or Santa Ana, even though our house was nothing to brag about.

Our House on the Hill

Our house sat what looked like a dirt hill. It was white with a green trim. The paint was peeling badly, but the owner Joe was too stingy to paint the place. We had a yard of sorts, but what sort you could never tell because of the overgrown weeds, since he was also too cheap to hire gardeners and too lazy to do it himself. The yard remained unkempt. He would cut the lawn only after neighbors sarcastically commented about the weeds: "Hey, Joe, nice garden ya got there." We lived in Silverlake, but our home was not as impressive as my mother had fantasized.

Moving meant attending a new school and making new friends. For the seventh grade, I attended Thomas Starr King Jr. High. At King, I was alone. None of my friends from elementary school was able to attend King. They either were out of the district or chose to attend Valley schools. And I wasn't good at keeping in touch. Moving meant moving on to me, and I did.

Seventh grade was a blur. The only class I can remember is sixth period, Advanced Art. Our teacher (whose name I have forgotten) was retiring that year, a short-timer. She rarely bothered to get up from her chair and teach. Mostly she sat behind her desk and stared at the wall or the chalkboard. She couldn't have cared less that we were not doing our assignments. What we would do instead--"we" being Vicky Hattemer, Kerwin Wong, Aries Albelais, myself of course, and few others, was play "Dirty Mad Libs." "Mad Libs" consists of a pad of one-page stories written with blanks for many of out the adjectives, verbs, and nouns. One player would read silently through the story aksing the others to contribute an appropriate word for each blank, resulting in great silliness when we read the results out loud. We, of course, used to fill in the blanks with profanities or obscenities! If we were not playing "Dirty Mad Libs," we played card games such as spoons, speed, or bullshit. Sixth period was great! …But when school was over and summer began, I had nothing to do. I stayed home watching television all day. My mother felt that "good girls" stayed home, helping thier mothers. She also felt that "good girls" needed to stay home or they would stop being good girls.

Needless to say, I couldn't wait for eighth grade to start. I wanted out of that house!

When eighth grade finally began, the friends I had made in seventh grade carried over. I had classes with Vicky, Michelle, and some others. They had all known each other from Ivanhoe Elementary, while I was still a newcomer. But they accepted me.

The middle of eighth grade was the best, because that's when I met my first boyfriend, David Alvarado. He was a senior at John Marshall High. He was handsome, older, and in a band. I spent every day with David. After school he would pick me up, and we would walk over to Silverlake Park to find a shady spot under a tree where I could do my homework. While I studied, David would walk over to the 7-Eleven and buy us snacks. When I was finished, we would sit there, holding one another, kissing and waiting for the sun to set. When it finally became dark, he would walk me home.

When that summer came around, David graduated High School and I started summer school. Every day, David would pick me up after classes.

The Hill over Effie Street

We would walk everywhere, making it a point to go on excursions throughout the Silverlake hills. Once we found an outdoor staircase hidden in the foliage of a steep slope. We climbed to a cozy spot and waited for the sun to set, watching as the horizon turned a rosy red. After dark, we would watch the distant lights twinkle in the night, and then he would walk me home.

We had another favorite spot, a hill on Effie Street. We watched the sunset from there the day I heard David say, "I love you." That day will forever be etched in my memory. That summer, my mom met her boyfriend too. He quickly moved in with us. Although it was a little difficult for me to accept, in the end it didn't really matter to me; I was in love.

When ninth grade began, David and I were still together. We had the same routine. We'd go on walks, watch the sunset, and then he'd walk me home. It stayed the same until the middle of ninth grade. Then my mother's boyfriend somehow convinced her she needed to move to San Gabriel. He said, "We need to be closer to our people." I didn't really understand what that meant. I pleaded with my mom to let me finish out the year with my friends and with David. She ignored my pleas. We abruptly left Silverlake for San Gabriel. David and I tried to maintain a long-distance relationship but it didn't work. After a while we broke up. It was sad, but it was the best for the both of us. He was older; he needed to experience the world. And so did I.

Camp Hattemer--the New Generation

This time I kept in touch with my school friends. Every weekend, I would stay at Victoria Hattemer's house. I loved it there. Her family was wonderful, and they welcomed me every weekend, no questions asked. I hated being in hot, flat, dry San Gabriel. I had made some new friends in high school, but they were not the same as the friends I had made at King. So I kept coming back to Silverlake. The Hattemers allowed me to stay with them throughout the three months of summer vacation too. I remember countless months passed in that comfortable brown house. It always reminded me of that Madness song, "Our House": Our house in the middle of the street, our house was so kind and very neat, our house in the middle of the street…. There were always kids coming and going. The neighbors named it Camp Hattemer. I think they were best known for having a basketball hoop above their brown garage. We would play HORSE or handball or use the garage door as the base for Bloody Murder.

I spent most of my adolescence running in and out of that house on Locksley Street. Maybe that's the reason I returned to Silverlake after graduating High School. I wanted to be closer to the people who had shaped my youth, to the city I had embraced not because it was this ideal "well-to-do" community that my mom had painted it to be but simply because I love it's people and they love me.

The View We Loved

I live there still. Daily I take a 7 or 8 mile walk. I start from my home on Edgecliffe, going east on Effie, and make my way down to Silverlake Boulevard, passing the 7-Eleven where David used to buy our snacks. As I walk further up on Silverlake, I pass the shade tree David and I liked to sit under, and a little farther on a certain house I love on Fanning Street. Soon comes Locksley street, the street the Hattemers live on, where I walk by the house Vicky's grandmother lived in. Now Vicky herself lives there, with her husband Mike and their daughter Maya. Two houses down, the famous Hattemer home is now painted blue, and the basketball hoop, no longer hovers above the now-white garage. The imprint of little hands that used to play Bloody Murder sleep under the white paint…I walk down Griffith Park, I tell myself I'm almost home.

As I come to the end, high up on Effie Street, I smile silently to myself as the sun sets. I recall a day I thought I heard David say, "I love you," when in fact he had said," I love views." How long ago it seems…. Once it's dark, I make my way home, I always do, to one of the thousand windows twinkling in the shadows under the hill.

Text and photos by Sherrie Chung