Now, I haven’t actually lived in L.A. since 1999, but I go there as often as twice-a-month to visit my parents and my sibs. In the time I’ve been elsewhere, certainly a lot has happened. When I left for college, Echo Park and Silver Lake were still kind of sketchy areas (Echo Park is, after all, part of the demesne of the infamous Rampart Division that had its infamous special anti-gang unit) and I felt like a lot of Angelenos had no idea that Eagle Rock was in the state of California, much less part of L.A. But as R can attest, the hipster population in Echo Park and Silver Lake have certainly increased, and I continue to be astounded at how much Colorado Blvd. and Eagle Rock Blvd. have gentrified. I knew it was a beginning of a new era when a Starbucks finally opened on the corner of those aforementioned streets.

Having spent my early childhood in Echo Park and Silver Lake, and my later childhood and teen-age years in Eagle Rock, I never really thought much about the Westside until B got his driver’s license. In general, we hung out in that ill-defined region of L.A. County that isn’t San Fernando Valley, but isn’t really San Gabriel Valley either, but is in fact where the two valleys meet. (Until the 818/626 area code split made it less ambiguous, it was always unclear to me where Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena belonged geographically) Since there wasn’t really that much to do in Eagle Rock, or all of Northeast L.A., for that matter, if we decided to hang out in actual L.A., L.A., then we’d go down to the Fairfax District, back when Melrose Ave. was busy with gentrification. It was rare that we’d go out further west than that. We would occasionally make it out to Venice or Santa Monica, but only to hit the beaches.

It wasn’t until I was in college and my cousin M moved out to the actual district of West L.A. that I began to understand what the Westside was. Since I was going to school at Cal at the time, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Westwood. It certainly didn’t have any of the quirky, bizarre, and quasi-Marxist character of Berkeley (although I have to say that Berkeley has begun to resemble Westwood more and more, from the little I’ve seen of it since graduating.) I, like most Angelenos, completely loathe the 405, and am not overly fond of the Santa Monica Freeway, and would be quite happy with never driving out there during rush hour, which typically ends around 2 a.m., and starts up again around 4 a.m.

From then on, I’ve generally come to think of the Westside as anything west of the La Cienega (and obviously not counting the Valley, which is another animal entirely.)

Naturally, since there is a Westside, you’d think that there would be an Eastside. In my opinion, you would be wrong, but like I said, a lot has changed in the intervening decade, and apparently, being on “the Eastside” has become a trendy thing. When I grew up, there were only three regions that had geographic adjectives attached to it: West L.A., South Central L.A., and Northeast L.A., and I was only aware of the last one because that’s where I lived. East L.A. is not actually in the city of L.A. If any neighborhoods had the right to claim the title of “the Eastside”, then I guess it would be Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, and El Serreno, but even then, geographically speaking, only Boyle Heights is actually directly east of Downtown L.A. The other two neighborhoods are still technically northeast of Downtown L.A., which is the geographic area I’ve always associated them with. I’ve heard people—some affectionately, some disparagingly—call these neighborhoods “The Barrio”, and Highland Park, Glassell Park, and even Eagle Rock could be included in this description.

Indeed it’s only recently that I’ve started hearing the term “the Eastside” actually used. When I grew up, only Westsiders used the term “the Eastside”, which they used to refer to anything that wasn’t the Westside. Clearly, it’s elitist. The Westside is where the celebrities and the rich live. Everywhere else was where the hoi polloi lived. Parallel to the economic discrepancies is the difference in ethnic makeup. It’s really only on the Westside (and in the Valley, which actually has its own West and East dichotomy) that white people are the majority. Everywhere else, brown faces dominate by far. (These animated demographic map of L.A. illustrates this quite dramatically.)

But people who don’t live on the Westside hardly ever use the term “the Eastside”, except ironically, or perhaps for people who aren’t familiar with L.A. We tend to use the neighborhood’s name. Echo Park. Silver Lake. Hollywood. K-Town. The Fairfax District. Mid-Wilshire. Westlake. Pico-Union. Los Feliz. Atwater Village. Elysian Park. These are the places I knew growing up. My parents used to take me to MacArthur Park, or to the La Brea Tar Pits, or the carousel in Griffith Park. My mom did her banking in Downtown L.A. If we didn’t go to the Safeway in Echo Park, then we’d get groceries in K-Town. Sometime we’d eat Filipino food on Temple Street. I had my first piece of pizza at a place on the corner of Alvarado and Sunset that no longer exists. Across the street from there was where we’d get the car washed. My high school (which was a Catholic school) is in Pico-Union, where a priest who was my Latin teacher got mugged crossing the street. (Who the hell mugs a priest?) I remember after the L.A. riots, we’d pass by the burnt-out ruins of buildings every day.

But there is no monolithic Eastside. To me, the Westside is just a peripheral part of the city, despite the fact that that’s where the wealth and a lot of the power is, where the world-famous public university is, where the freaking international airport is. It may even be all the non-Angeleno who has never visited L.A. thinks of as L.A., when they’re aren’t demonizing the corrupting influence of Hollywood on American culture.

But it’s not like L.A. would be the only city in the U.S. to have a Westside but not an Eastside. Chicago has a Northside, a Southside, and a Westside, but no Eastside, and people would have no idea what you were talking about and think you were crazy if you tried to refer to the narrow strip of land abutting Lake Michigan where the streets are actually prefixed with “East” as “the Eastside.” L.A. is actually similar in this respect. The center of L.A. is technically the intersection of 1st Street and Main Street. Since Main Street north of 1st goes off in a northeasterly direction and then actually ends running east-west, even most of what people generally think of as Northeast L.A. is still actually technically on the western side of the city. Certainly Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Mt. Washington, and Glassell Park are all considered west of Main for address numbering purposes.

Clearly, the Westside is a cultural phenomenon. There is no official line of demarcation. I’m not the only one who favors using La Cienega, although there are some who even push the Westside further west by using the 405 as a border. There is some rationale to using La Cienega. Between La Cienega and Hoover, the streets are lined up on a grid following the cardinal directions. West of La Cienega, everything gets tilted somewhat. (And east of Hoover, north of MLK, everything is tilted by 45°, which is the part of the city that was built according to King Charles III’s decree when California was still a Spanish colony.) La Cienega is precisely where Santa Monica Boulevard stops running east-west, and actually starts running kind-of northeast-southwest, and it’s sort of where Sunset, Pico, Olympic, and Venice do the same thing. La Cienega is approximately where the developments of the city of L.A. going west pretty much ran into the developments on the coast going east back in the day.

Another possible way to demarcate the Westside from everything else is by area code. If you’re 213 or 323 you’re in the central part of the city. If you’re 310/424, you’re on the Westside (unless you’re actually in the Harbor District, I guess. And if you’re 818 then you’re in the Valley.)

What inspired all this was a FriendFeed post from edythe about the L.A. Times attempt at defining neighborhood boundaries. Prior to this, the L.A. City Council tried to do this by forming neighborhood councils, but apparently not that many people consider this definitive. I’m glad the L.A. Times didn’t endorse a Westside-centric view of the city.