My Favorite Corner of LA: Micheltorena and Sunset

Los Angeles has better hills than San Francisco

Source: Author

I’m a huge fan of The Bold Italic’s San Francisco street corner series. One of the latest — My Favorite Corner of SF: Carl and Cole — resonates hard because I lived just a few blocks away, at Cole and Hayes when I lived in The City. I always envied my Cole Valley neighbors.

Thanks daisy barringer for the fantastic work.

Anyhow, I live in Los Angeles now. And I love it. So I’m going to humbly steal the street corner idea and adapt it to Los Angeles.

I’ll present the Los Angeles series in one of two ways:

• A practical guide using a street corner as a starting point for exploring this great city.
• Using a Los Angeles street corner as the setting to chronicle a meaningful story or formative period from my personal life. I took this approach in installment one of what I guess will become a series:

My Favorite Corner of LA: Melrose and Gardner

Los Angeles impacts me, meaningfully, in both ways.

In this article, we look at Micheltorena and Sunset in Los Angeles’s Silverlake neighborhood — the ideal starting point for a solid urban hike.

Source: Author / Micheltorena and Sunset, Silverlake

I fell in love with Los Angeles one of several times at this corner.

There truly isn’t a better starting point for a hike in urban America. It’s also where I shed most of my San Francisco bias.

My San Francisco friends love to chide Los Angeles. It’s flat. There are no hills!

Bull shit!!

If you walk straight ahead in that picture — you’ll be going north on Micheltorena — you climb a 20.3% grade to the top. You wind up in a beautiful residential neighborhood. Like so much of Los Angeles, you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere, except you’re only…