Taking the Stairs in Los Angeles

Lea Appleton
Jul 3
2 min read

Updated: Oct 27

The Silver Lake stairs are known for their brightly painted steps!

Blue stairs going up to a red house, with brown leaves and green ivy along the edges.

Step back in time as you explore the staircases that were created when streetcars took people to and from work. The stairs in Silver Lake were built to help commuters navigate the hilly neighborhood in this area northeast of the Los Angeles city center as they made their way to catch the streetcars to downtown.

Many of the stairs are open to the public and are regularly maintained by neighbors, keeping their brightly colored designs photo-ready for your walk in the neighborhood.

There are a number of walking maps available, but one of the best ones I found was created by Socal Stair Climbers. There's lots of steps involved (obviously!) so be sure to bring water and snacks and wear comfortable shoes.

How to get there

Located between the 101 Freeway on the southwest side and Interstate 5 on the northeast, Silver Lake is accessible from many directions. Take Alvarado Street from either freeway (the 2 Freeway ends and flows into Alvarado St.) and then turn northwest on Sunset Blvd and northeast on Silver Lake Blvd. From there, park and walk!

Itinerary

We started our exploration along Silver Lake Blvd. at the Mattachine Steps named in honor of Harry Hay who founded the gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society in 1950. While not as fancifully decorated as some of the others in the area, the long staircase provides good views of the area below. From there we walked south along Silver Lake Blvd. past a brightly painted wall to our east and turned onto N. Easterly Terrace for our next set of stairs. You'll see on the map in the link that there are a variety of ways to navigate this lower portion of the staircase tour, so take your pick on which ones you want to see--we went to the ones on Easterly Terrace that are not even noted on the map! Following this we circled back up towards the western side of the reservoir to the Lower Swan, Middle Swan and Upper Swan steps. At each street we also took a look around at the variety of architecture of the homes in the neighborhood. Lots to look at!

We continued up W. Silver Lake Drive because we wanted to walk all the way around the reservoir. After going up and down the Kenilworth Stairs, found just west on Tesla Ave, we doubled back across the top of the lake and made our way back down the east side. One of the fun things to see along this side of the lake was some houses that were also brightly painted as you can see here with a mural of well-known women such as Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Oprah, Greta Thunberg, Lupita Nyong'o, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.