My street in Atwater goes genuinely silent around nine at night. No traffic, no helicopter, just somebody walking a dog down toward Sunnynook. After all these years here that still surprises me.
So what is the quietest street you have ever lived on, and what was the thing that eventually ruined it? Alley, bar, flight path, the neighbor with the leaf blower.
The little streets behind Burton Chase Park in Marina del Rey are the quietest I have lived on, and that is exactly why I defend this place when people call it boring. No through traffic, no bar crowd, the loudest thing most nights is a halyard slapping against a mast.
What ruins it is a summer weekend when the park books an event and every parking spot within four blocks is gone by noon.
My block in Inglewood over by Edward Vincent Jr Park is quiet almost all week, people are outside but nobody is making noise for the sake of it. Then there is a game or a show at SoFi and the whole thing flips, side street traffic and somebody parked across my driveway. It is maybe a dozen nights a year, so I just plan around it.
Koreatown, of all places. My side street off Wilshire is dead quiet because it is older buildings full of people who have lived there twenty years, and I work from home all day hearing nothing but my own keyboard. The quiet ends at the corner though, where the karaoke crowd takes over around eleven.
The quietest I ever had was a small cul de sac up in the Los Feliz hills. No cut through traffic at all, which is really the whole secret, quiet has less to do with the neighborhood than with whether the street actually goes anywhere.
On my side of it, since I rent places out, the thing people underestimate is the alley. A building can sit on a lovely street and still have trash pickup at five in the morning ten feet from the bedroom window. Walk the back of the building before you sign, not only the front.
The half year I spent in Culver City with roommates was the quietest I have ever been in LA and I did not appreciate it at all at the time!! Little street with no bars and no through traffic, you could hear the sprinklers come on at six in the morning.
Now I am in DTLA and the noise honestly stopped bothering me, you trade it for walking to everything. But the sirens are constant and if your window faces a main street you are done. If anyone is apartment hunting down here, go stand in the unit at ten at night before you sign anything, the daytime tour tells you nothing sooo do the night one too.
In WeHo the quiet pockets are the residential blocks north of Fountain, roughly between Kings Road and Harper.
You feel like you are half a mile from Santa Monica Boulevard when you are actually two blocks off it.
Probably Amherst Ave in Sawtelle. It wasn’t super quiet, but better than a lot of other places.
Lived on a tiny dead-end off Rowena in Silver Lake for some years. After 8pm it was just coyotes and the occasional distant 5. You could hear someone drop a glass two houses over.
Back side of Echo Park, one of those skinny streets that climbs toward the reservoir. Weeknights it would go dead quiet except for raccoons or cats fighting in the alley.
A little loop in Rancho Park behind the golf course. Felt like the Valley.
Spaulding Square, those little 1920s streets west of Highland. No bars, pretty much no traffic, just porch lights. Was a special vibe, but I prefer my place in Santa Monica nowadays.