Silver Lake Homes for Sale

About the Neighborhood

The Neighborhood the Reservoir Made

Silver Lake covers roughly 2.75 square miles of east-central Los Angeles, bordered by Atwater Village and Elysian Valley to the northeast, Echo Park to the southeast, Westlake to the southwest, and East Hollywood and Los Feliz to the west and northwest. The area was originally called Ivanhoe, after the Walter Scott novel, and the modern neighbourhood exists because of water: the city built the Ivanhoe Reservoir in 1906 and the Silver Lake Reservoir in 1907, the latter named for water commissioner Herman Silver. ZIP codes are 90026 and 90039, and the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, certified in 2003, is the local body. Anyone searching Silver Lake homes for sale is really shopping a ring around that water.

The reservoir's status is the single most misunderstood thing about the neighbourhood, so it is worth stating precisely. Silver Lake was taken permanently off the drinking-water system in 2008 after bromate was detected the previous December, and the complex was superseded by the underground Headworks tanks; the basins were drained during bypass construction and refilled in 2017 using Los Angeles Aqueduct water. The complex is a city Historic-Cultural Monument, listed as No. 422 in 1989 according to the Silver Lake Reservoirs Conservancy. A paved perimeter path of about 2.2 miles circles the water, and the three-acre Silver Lake Meadow opened in April 2011.

It has not, however, reopened as a park in any single moment, and copy claiming otherwise oversimplifies. The complex remains fenced LADWP property with access widened in stages: LADWP opened a temporary spur through the eucalyptus grove along West Silver Lake Drive in 2019, and a permanent path there was completed in April 2022. The Los Angeles City Council approved a master plan on 24 August 2023 to convert roughly 116 of the complex's 127 acres into parkland, with a 2.5-mile promenade and a bike route along Silver Lake Boulevard; the shortest estimated build for the full plan is about five years and depends on funding. Separately, a recirculation and aeration project reported at around 26 million dollars required temporarily draining Ivanhoe, with refilling beginning in November 2024.

The architecture is why buyers come from outside the city. Richard Neutra's VDL Research House at 2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, built in 1932 and rebuilt as VDL II with his son Dion between 1964 and 1968 after a 1963 fire, joined the National Register in May 2009 and became a National Historic Landmark on 10 January 2017; Dione Neutra left it to Cal Poly Pomona's College of Environmental Design in 1990, and it opens for tours. Nine Neutra houses form the Neutra Colony on Neutra Place and Silver Lake Boulevard, built roughly 1948 to 1962. Schindler's How House on Silver Ridge Avenue, built for James Eads How and landscaped by Neutra, is Monument No. 895; its date is variously given as 1922, 1925 and 1926, so check the source.

The rest of the neighbourhood is texture. Gregory Ain's Avenel Cooperative Housing of 1947 stands on Avenel Street, and John Lautner's Silvertop, the Reiner-Burchill residence on Micheltorena Street, was largely completed in 1963 after about seven years of construction. Sunset Junction, named for the Pacific Electric lines that met there before service ended in the early 1950s, is the commercial spine and the site of the 1967 Black Cat protests. The Music Box Steps on Vendome Street carry the Laurel and Hardy short of 1932. Note that Silver Lake has no HPOZ, so hillside rules rather than preservation review govern most projects; verify school assignment by parcel.