Chinatown is one of those neighborhoods where the building came first and everything else got squeezed in around it. Walk down Broadway or Hill Street and you’ll see restaurants with apartments stacked above them, family shops that have been open since the 1940s with a storeroom in the back that hasn’t been sorted in just

Cypress Park sits in that stretch of Northeast LA where the hills roll down toward the river, and if you’ve lived here a while, you already know what that does to a garage. Half the homes along Cypress Avenue and Isabel Street were built in the 1920s and ’30s on lots that slope hard toward

Atwater Village is one of those pockets of Los Angeles that still feels like a small town somebody built a freeway around. It sits inside a bend of the LA River with Griffith Park on the far bank, the 134 running along the top edge, and San Fernando Road marking the eastern line toward Glendale.

Glassell Park climbs. Turn off Eagle Rock Boulevard and within a couple of blocks the flat commercial strip is behind you and you’re on streets like Andrita, Toland Way, or one of the narrow cuts above Verdugo Road where the pavement bends around the hillside and the houses sit stacked on retaining walls. It’s a

El Sereno is one of those Northeast LA neighborhoods most of the city drives past without ever really seeing. Huntington Drive runs through the middle of it with that wide grassy median left over from the old Pacific Electric streetcar line, and if you turn off it in almost any direction you’re on a narrow

Lincoln Heights has been here longer than most of Los Angeles. The tract was subdivided back in 1873, which makes it the city’s first real residential suburb, and you can still read that history right off the street grid: narrow lots on the hillside blocks off Griffin Avenue, Victorian cottages sitting a few doors down