Lifestyle ‘All the neighbors know who she is’: How one woman built a flower farm across eight yardsĭuring the pandemic, Rachel Nafis worked as an ER nurse. (Even now, you can start a healthy debate among longtime locals just by saying the most prolific apartment mogul’s name: Ray Huffman.) Look-alike apartment buildings multiplied where bungalows once stood. In the 1960s, suburbanization and the completion of Interstate 8 in Mission Valley began draining the area of money and homeowners. Its many Craftsman homes and Spanish Revival bungalows made it one of the most densely populated areas in the city, with streetcars running up and down 30th Street and University Avenue, the neighborhood’s thirst fed by a water tower that’s still a local landmark. Which Hartley did.īefore long, North Park had grown to include about 30,000 residents in about three square miles, just south of Mission Valley, just east of Hillcrest (and just north of Balboa Park, of course). But if you’re in Southern California, you can still develop a residential neighborhood. If life won’t give you lemons, you can’t make lemonade. But soon he realized there wasn’t enough water to irrigate it. It was 1893 when neighborhood pioneer James Monroe Hartley decided to start a lemon orchard on 40 acres north of the city’s biggest park.

But as someone who first encountered this neighborhood decades ago and renewed the acquaintance in recent weeks, I know there’s a backstory - by turns inspiring and horrific - just beneath its well-decorated surface. Many of North Park’s most visible assets, including the mural, the LaFayette’s new incarnation, the listening bar and seafood restaurant Mabel’s Gone Fishing, have only shown up in the last two years. The neighborhood “has really blossomed,” he told me. Or his evil twin.Īs I approached the crazed face, I found longtime North Park local Jay Lind already on the sidewalk, grabbing photos with his phone. Here, you’ll find breweries and gastropubs, a seafood joint that recently won praise from the Michelin people, a listening bar with a stash of buyable classic vinyl in the backroom, and a 90-foot-long mural outside Verbatim Books that features a typewriter protruding from the roof and a crazed face in a doorway between oversize horror books. Stay up to date on the best things to do, see and eat in L.A.

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