Finding Home on Hoover St

The streets that shape us

Every day, I begin my morning with a walk. I’d like you to believe that I am the kind of person who wakes up each morning and walks before engaging with email, social media, or work, but I’m really just the kind of person who walks every morning because I have a dog who has a lot of energy. My dog has been with me for over eight years now, so for nearly eight years, our morning ritual has included a long walk down Hoover Street, which is one of the main thoroughfares that runs through our neighborhood. I’m not sure which of us knows more about this part of Hoover, me or the dog. Maybe we know it in different ways. I know where all of my favorite flowers are and which time of year they bloom. She knows where other dogs pee most frequently. I know the names of a lot of the people who live on that street. She knows where the squirrels like to hide.

During the early days of COVID, our walks were the one thing I looked forward to, a punctuation in the otherwise unending spool of hours in which I tried to keep myself calm, safe, and engaged with the world from the solitude of my home. Everything I already knew about Hoover because of our walks became heightened, because we were taking more time, not in a rush to get to or from anywhere. We said hi to the other dogs for longer. I lingered at my favorite rosebush sometimes for five whole minutes, just smelling and re-smelling and re-smelling the roses. It was spring, after all, when shelter-in-place orders first went into effect in this part of the world.

But my daily dog walks are not where I first developed intimacy with this street, which runs north/south from Loz Feliz through East Hollywood, gets cut off at Temple Ave, then begins anew in Rampart where it continues its run through Pico Union and University Park until it dead ends again at USC, my workplace since 2012. In many of these neighborhoods, including the one I live in, Hoover serves as the unofficial border between one neighborhood and the next. It’s a divider and a connector at once, separating neighborhoods from one another at the same time that it runs through neighborhood after neighborhood, joining whole disparate parts of the city together until it finally ends just near the intersection of the 110 and the 405 in southeast Gardena. It is not the longest street in LA. That title goes to Sepulveda Blvd (25.4 miles), with Hoover not even close behind in 20th place at 14.1 miles. And while it may not be the longest street in the city, or even the easiest-to-navigate street because it stops and restarts many times in its 14.1 miles, it is the street I know best.

I started riding my bike to work in 2013 when a colleague of mine who lived right next to Hoover found us a bike route that kept us as far away from car traffic as was possible while still getting us to campus in a timely manner. Hoover, unlike its immediate neighbor thoroughfares Vermont and Virgil Avenues, is not as heavily trafficked, and when it is full of cars, at least in my part of the neighborhood, those cars are slowly moving in a single file line as they snake their way from Santa Monica Blvd to Temple Ave. Traffic does get pretty brutal on Hoover between Wilshire and USC’s main campus, but there is also a bike lane for half of that stretch.

I biked to work on Hoover Street for at least six years and only stopped after I’d been bumped by cars one too many times and decided I didn’t want to die on my way to work. But between my daily dog walks and my six years of commuting by bike, I can safely say that I know almost every inch of the five miles of Hoover that runs between my home and my place of work. I can tell you how many hills there are on my way to campus and which hills are the safest and most fun to cruise down, hands above my head like on a roller coaster, as I make my way home.  I’ve walked and rode Hoover in the daylight and in the dark, in the sun and in the rain. If the city ever wanted a thorough account of which parts of Hoover flood the most during a storm, I could point them to every poorly constructed intersection, every clogged storm drain, every curb that succumbs to the small lakes that form on this street that was not built for weather.

There are so many small not-so-secret secrets on Hoover that I love. For years there was a place on the corner of Hoover and Washington called Lucy’s. The building was bright yellow and every time I rode by it, it smelled like cotton candy. There’s a CVS there now, and I think Lucy’s was relocated a couple blocks west, but the smell doesn’t carry to Hoover anymore. There’s a house outside of which there are often piñatas in their early existence, just colorless papier-mâché forms lined up to dry on the sidewalk. There’s a clothing store with a ton of headless mannequins dressed in a variety of sexy clothes, everyone ready for the club but not a single club in sight. There’s a gorgeous old church and also a tall building made entirely of glass windows that reflect the entirety of the sky’s mood. There’s an auto shop with a little metal statue-guy made of spare car parts. And most important to me, there’s my mom’s old apartment, one block off Hoover, just south of Wilshire, it’s red brick building and yellow awning that was, until recent new building construction on Hoover, visible every single day that I biked past it on my way to and from work.

My mom moved to LA in the early 1980’s to go to law school at Southwestern, which is a law school located on Wilshire just up the street from her old place. I’m not sure how long I managed to live in this city without realizing that her apartment building, where she paid $500 a month for a studio apartment, was a regular part of my daily commute. I only learned this fact when she visited me in LA at some point and insisted I drive her down my bike route so that she could know just how (un)safe it was. As we passed by the building in my car, she told me about walking around Lafayette Park, about hopping in a friend’s car as they drove all the way down Wilshire to get to the ocean. Suddenly, this street that connected me from my home to my job also connected me from my present to my mom’s past.

I have always thought of streets like a circulatory system (maybe because I don’t really know much about the circulatory system, but love to collapse complexity into metaphor when it suits me). When we live somewhere, like really live somewhere for a while, we tend to develop a relationship to certain roads. When I was a teenager, that road was C-470, the highway that traced a circle around the far edges of Denver and brought me from my home in the mountains to my friends farther east, to my school south of Denver, to the mall, to the movie theater, to my cousin’s house. Before Hoover, C-470 was probably the road I knew best, and like Hoover, I used the redundancy of my circulation through that road to mark time and feeling.

Hoover Street holds a lot for me. The way the light hits a certain palm tree during winter sunsets reminds me of the last time I fell in love many years ago at this point. Waiting in my car at the stoplight at Hoover and Melrose reminds me of the lyrics to a folk song I spent a month listening to on repeat back in 2018. The flower vendors that post up on their little corners every Valentine’s Day have made me smile in exactly the same way for nearly 10 years, their predictability just one of many blessings I’ve experienced on Hoover. If I were ever to not live in this neighborhood, or when my dog leaves this earth, our little stretch of Hoover will become sacred ground for me, a scrapbook of all the phases of my adulthood that I have shifted through since I moved here.

There is so much more I could say about streets, about traffic, about the layout of cities, about the ways we have turned our environments into concrete and asphalt much to the dismay of almost every living thing. But in spite of all that, I have a deep love for this little 14.1 mile road, so much of which I haven’t even experienced. Sometimes, when I’m walking the dog early in the morning, smelling peoples’ breakfasts as the smells waft out through their windows, hearing music play as people begin their day, I think about the whole stretch of Hoover, from Los Feliz to Gardena, and all the lives that pass through it. How similar those lives are to mine, and how different. How the built environment where you’re from and where you live shapes you and is shaped by you. I think about my 23-year-old mom, running alone down Hoover when she wasn’t in class, me so far ahead in her future, Los Angeles still an unimaginable dream in my not-yet-to-exist little heart. If this isn’t home, I don’t know what home is.