Sunset Junction is an informal name for a portion of the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, California. It was home to the Sunset Junction Street Fair from 1980 through 2010. It is located in the southwestern part of the district along Sunset Boulevard.
The name refers to the street junction of Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, two of the largest streets in Los Angeles, both of which travel from Sunset Junction to the Pacific Ocean. For most of their distance, the streets run parallel, but join here where they intersect Sanborn Avenue and where Santa Monica Blvd ends.
Originally the junction was formed by the branching of two interurban railway lines and was known as Sanborn or Hollywood Junction. In 1895, the Pasadena and Pacific Railway Company built an interurban rail line from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica, whose route ran along Sunset Boulevard as far as Sanborn Avenue, where it turned west along the present alignment of Santa Monica Boulevard. In 1905, the Los Angeles Pacific Railway, successor to the Pasadena and Pacific, built a new branch northwest along Sunset Boulevard from Sanborn Avenue as a shortcut to its existing line on Hollywood Boulevard, forming the junction that is still reflected in the existing street configuration. The Los Angeles Pacific Company was one of the eight rail companies merged in 1911 to form the Pacific Electric Railway. Rail service ceased on the two lines in 1954 and 1953, respectively. [1]
Sunset Junction is the site of one of the first actions in the nation against police activity in gay bars, the Black Cat Tavern protest, which began on February 11, 1967, almost two and a half years before the more famous protest at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village. The event is named for the Black Cat Tavern, formerly at 3909 Sunset Blvd between Sanborn and Hyperion Avenues, a location that had been a gay bar periodically since the 1940s. [2] Organized in response to a police raid on the Black Cat on New Year’s Eve 1966, in which several people were hurt, the protest was planned to coincide with similar actions at African-American, Latino and “hippie” establishments around the city, which were also regularly patrolled. Of these, the protest at the Black Cat was most successful, with over 200 people marching without any violent confrontation. The Black Cat protest continued for several days but did not attract the media attention that the protests at the Stonewall Inn later did. [3]
For many years Silver Lake housed a small, quiet gay and lesbian population, but in the 1970s a combination of affordable housing, a bohemian ambiance and promotion by gay real estate agents caused the gay and lesbian population to swell to more than 20% of the neighborhood total. [3]
In 1979, an early literary gay and lesbian bookstores, A Different Light, was founded at 4014 Santa Monica Boulevard. The store functioned as a focal point for the community and was the site of readings by noted authors, including Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Larry Kramer. [3] Subsequently, additional branches were opened in West Hollywood (1990), San Francisco, and Greenwich Village in Manhattan. The original store closed in 1992, as have the branches in Greenwich Village, West Hollywood, and San Francisco. [4]
Tensions in the 1970s between the growing gay and lesbian population and working-class Latino families in the Silver Lake neighborhood led the integrated lesbian and gay Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance to organize the first Sunset Junction Street Fair in 1980. [3]
The Pacific Electric Railway Company, nicknamed the Red Cars, was a privately owned mass transit system in Southern California consisting of electrically powered streetcars, interurban cars, and buses and was the largest electric railway system in the world in the 1920s. Organized around the city centers of Los Angeles and San Bernardino, it connected cities in Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Bernardino County and Riverside County.
Moses Hazeltine Sherman was an American land developer who built the Phoenix Street Railway in Phoenix, Arizona and streetcar systems that would become the core of the Los Angeles Railway and part of the Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles, California, and owned and developed property in areas such as West Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood, California. He also served on the Los Angeles Water Board. He was also known as M. H. Sherman and General M. H. Sherman.
Laurel Canyon is a mountainous neighborhood/canyon located in the Hollywood Hills region of the Santa Monica Mountains, in the Hollywood Hills West district of Los Angeles, California.
Wilshire Boulevard is one of the principal east-west arterial roads in the Los Angeles area of Southern California, extending 15.83 miles (25.48 km) from Ocean Avenue in the city of Santa Monica east to Grand Avenue in the Financial District of downtown Los Angeles. It is also one of the major city streets through the city of Beverly Hills. Wilshire Boulevard runs roughly parallel with Santa Monica Boulevard from Santa Monica to the west boundary of Beverly Hills. From the east boundary it runs a block south of Sixth Street to its terminus.
Mid-City is a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, California.
Santa Monica Boulevard is a major west-east thoroughfare in Los Angeles County. It runs from Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica near the Pacific Ocean to Sunset Boulevard at Sunset Junction in Los Angeles. It passes through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. A portion of it is designated as California State Route 2.
San Vicente Boulevard is a major northwest-southeast thoroughfare located in the western portion of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles, CA.
Pico Boulevard is a major Los Angeles street that runs from the Pacific Ocean at Appian Way in Santa Monica to Central Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, California, USA. It is named after Pío Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California.
Western Avenue is a major four-lane street in the city of Los Angeles and through the center portion of Los Angeles County, California. It is one of the longest north–south streets in Los Angeles city and county, apart from Sepulveda Boulevard. It is about 29 miles (47 km) long.
Vermont Avenue is one of the longest running north/south streets in City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County, California. With a length of 23.3 miles (37.5 km), is the third longest of the north/south thoroughfares in the region. For most of its length between its southern end in San Pedro and south of Downtown Los Angeles, it runs parallel to the west of the Harbor Freeway (I-110).
The western border of Santa Monica, California is the 3-mile (4.8 km) stretch of Santa Monica Bay. On its other sides, the city is bordered by various districts of Los Angeles: the northwestern border is Pacific Palisades, the eastern border is Brentwood north of Wilshire Boulevard and West Los Angeles south of Wilshire, the northeastern border is generally San Vicente Boulevard up to the Riviera Country Club, the southwestern border is Venice Beach and the southern border is with West Los Angeles and Mar Vista.
The Santa Monica Air Line was an interurban railroad operated by the Pacific Electric between Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles. It operated between 1909 and 1953.
Norma Triangle is a residential neighborhood in West Hollywood, California. It encompasses the area bound by Doheny Drive and Beverly Hills on the west, Sunset Boulevard and Holloway Drive on the north, and Santa Monica Boulevard on the south. The small district has the shape of a right triangle.
J was a line operated by the Los Angeles Railway from 1911 to 1945, by Los Angeles Transit Lines from 1945 to 1958, and by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority from 1958 to 1963
7 was a line operated by the Los Angeles Railway from 1932 to 1955. It ran from Spring and 2nd Streets to Athens and 116th Street, by way of Spring Street, Main Street, Broadway Place, Broadway, and Athens Way. During its Los Angeles Transit Lines days, around 1950–55, Line 7 was rerouted off S. Broadway to Central Ave., at least as far north as 7th St. across Olympic Bl. to possibly Vernon Avenue, covering trackage that was abandoned rail by line U, when that line was converted to trolleybus August 3, 1947.
The Venice Short Line was a Pacific Electric interurban railway line in Los Angeles which traveled from downtown Los Angeles to Venice, Ocean Park, and Santa Monica via Venice Boulevard.
A Different Light was a chain of four LGBT bookstores in the United States, active from 1979 to 2011.
Los Angeles Pacific Railroad (1899−1906) (LAP) was an electric railway and steam locomotive public transit and cargo shipping railway system in Los Angeles County, California. At its peak it had 180 miles (290 km) of track from Pasadena, through Downtown Los Angeles, the Westside, and Santa Monica, then to the South Bay towns along Santa Monica Bay.
The Watts Line was a local line of the Pacific Electric Railway that operated between the Pacific Electric Building in Downtown Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States and the Watts Station at 103rd Street in Watts, Los Angeles. It was the primary local service for the Southern District, which also included the Long Beach, San Pedro, Santa Ana and Whittier interurban lines. The route operated along the Southern Division's Four Tracks route, with the Watts Line using the outer tracks and the Long Beach line and other limited stop lines using the inner tracks. It operated between 1904 and Nov. 2, 1959. During the 1910s, its service was combined with the South Pasadena Line of the Northern District. From 1938 to 1950, the line was combined with the Sierra Vista Line, which was the main local line in the Northern District.
The Western and Franklin Avenue Line was a Pacific Electric interurban line which traveled from Los Angeles to Hollywood from 11th & Hill Streets via Hill, Sunset, Santa Monica Boulevard, Western Avenue, Franklin Avenue, Argyle Avenue, Yucca Street, and Vine Street to end at Hollywood and Vine Boulevards. It operated from 1908 to 1940.
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