The neighborhood is built around two reservoirs, with modernist houses in the hills above them and public stairways connecting the streets.
What Silver Lake looks like
Silver Lake is built around two reservoirs, both still there and ringed today by a 2.2-mile path. William Mulholland built the Ivanhoe Reservoir in 1906 and the the next year. The neighborhood took its name from Herman Silver, the water commissioner who secured the land. It started out two decades earlier as a small development called Ivanhoe, named for the Walter Scott novel. Its streets still carry the names of the book's characters.
The city found bromate in the water in 2007 and drained both basins the next year. Ivanhoe got shade balls afterward to block the sunlight that produces it, and the Silver Lake basin was taken offline as a drinking water source for good. It held water until a 2015 draining for a new pipeline emptied it.
Architects including Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner and Raphael Soriano built houses in the hills around the reservoirs through the 1930s and 40s. Neutra's own house and studio, built beside the reservoir in 1932 for about $10,000, burned down in 1963 and was rebuilt the next year by his son Dion. Cal Poly Pomona owns it now and runs Saturday tours, the only Neutra house open to the public.
Public stairways climb the hills where the streets don't connect, including the , 133 of them between Vendome Street and Descanso Drive. The , a few blocks northeast, are named for Harry Hay, who founded the Mattachine Society there in 1950. The , a bar at the bottom of the hill on Sunset Boulevard, was raided by police in 1967, two years before Stonewall. It is now a protected landmark.
Films shot in Silver Lake
Laurel and Hardy shot two comedy shorts on a public stairway above Vendome Street, and Under the Silver Lake filmed an overnight scene along the reservoir decades later.
The Music Box, 1932
Laurel and Hardy haul a crated piano up all 133 steps in the short, which won the first Academy Award for a live action comedy short and was added to the National Film Registry in 1997. A plaque set into the third step names the film.
Hats Off!, 1927
The same plaque credits Laurel and Hardy's earlier short Hats Off! to this staircase too, calling out that both films were made by the Hal Roach Studio. The steps run from Vendome Street at the bottom of the hill to Descanso Drive at the top.
Under the Silver Lake, 2018
Director David Robert Mitchell got the idea for the film walking around the reservoir and looking up at the houses on the hill. The production shot an overnight scene along the bluffs on the reservoir's southwest side and on Silver Lake Drive. The reservoir had been drained again in 2015, this time to build a new pipeline, so its water was added digitally afterward.
What Silver Lake can double for
Silver Lake can stand in for a private school, Hillcrest Academy, in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, a movie producer's mansion in Scream 3, a mob boss's estate in Gangster Squad and a reclusive songwriter's mansion in Under the Silver Lake.
