"There is a lot of evidence that one's employment influences one's health," Simon explains. "When you're unemployed, that can create stress."
And when you're out of work, you don't have easy access to health care.
Padua, longtime executive director of the Free Clinic on Sunset, has seen the truth of that, working since 1978 with low-income and unemployed residents who stream in for free checkups and emergency treatment. Her clients are mostly Latinos whose top two problems are diabetes and hypertension.
PHOTO BY AMANDA LOPEZ
Alex De Ocampo: When he was a kid in Silver Lake, a home-invasion robber held a gun to his head.
PHOTO BY AMANDA LOPEZ
Amy Clarke serves on the neighborhood council, gardens at the school and takes a bus to Craft Night.
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Padua says neighborhood kids are obese and have diabetes because they eat poorly and don't have the money to buy fresh chicken, fish or salads at such Silver Lake establishments as Forage, Cliff's Edge and Flore Vegan Cuisine. "Their favorite restaurant," she says, "is McDonald's."
Until recently, Rachel Bryant, an upbeat, 26-year-old USC grad who studied film and who works as a cocktail waitress at a downtown nightclub, was part of the so-called "Utopian wing" in Silver Lake.
Bryant met Herman-Wurmfeld at the Micheltorena Street Elementary School community garden, where he volunteers Wednesdays to teach schoolkids about growing herbs and vegetables. Herman-Wurmfeld convinced Bryant to join the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council last fall. An Atlanta native and a Latina, she moved to Silver Lake in 2010 and lives near the Echo Park border, which she affectionately calls "the Badlands."
One recent afternoon, Bryant dines on fries and a medium-rare cheeseburger at Lamill, a coffee shop on Silver Lake Boulevard, where people are hunched over their MacBooks. At one point, three female zombies with gray faces and frizzy hair drag by — their arms outstretched and a single cameraman recording their distorted moves. A few people give them a quick, nonchalant glance.
Bryant's taking a break from her other work as a filmmaker and "clandestine" artist — she was a co-founder of the Silver Lake Picture Show, which offers free, outdoor screenings at Polka Dot Plaza. Her arm is tattooed with the words "Things Take Time," which is part of why she quit the Neighborhood Council. "There were endless circular debates on what to do," Bryant says, and it was "not my cup of tea." She says of the older, liberal crowd of Silver Lakers made up of Neuman, Ringuette and many others: "It was hard to get people to move into action."
She's adopted her own long-shot cause: to close the Rampart Boulevard exit of the 101 freeway, near her home. "People come careening off that ramp," Bryant says, noting that schoolchildren often dash across Rampart. "It's insanely dangerous."
Bryant sees a "big divide" between people who live north of Sunset and those south of it — with Sunset Junction, where Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards meet, acting as a base camp for the younger crowd. She's worried that "the people who made [Silver Lake] great" — the rebels and artists — "are going to get priced out."
At the "values and goals" meeting, the mostly baby boomer crowd wanted things from City Hall: sheep, parking spaces, more parks, more street cleaning, enforcement of the city's ban on gas-powered leaf blowers, help for gay seniors. Younger folks such as Bryant, Nicholas Robbins and Matthew Mooney are talking a whole different game.
"The youth in the neighborhood are not connecting with the older generation," says Robbins, another co-founder of the Silver Lake Picture Show and a playwright and managing director of the Rogue Artists Ensemble theater company. "People my age are very anti-government right now."
But Robbins did approach the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council for funds for the Silver Lake Picture Show. He argues that Silver Lake's artistic community has long contributed to the neighborhood's vibe but says certain Neighborhood Council board members — whom he describes as "the old guard" — were "not thrilled" about his pitch, intensely questioning him. "They made me feel like I was doing something wrong," he says. They eventually gave Robbins a few hundred dollars. But, he says, "The folks on [the council], I don't know who they are serving or what they're thinking."
Mooney, who moved to Silver Lake eight years ago from New York and earned a degree in urban planning from Cal State Northridge, interned for the Neighborhood Council and stayed involved with it. He created a "comprehensive mobility" subcommittee because he felt Neighborhood Council members weren't planning enough pedestrian- and bicyclist-friendly ways to tackle Silver Lake's parking and traffic congestion. "It's a one-man show," he says, "but I had to do it."
Mooney doesn't own a car, and certainly doesn't want a city parking garage crammed somewhere near Sunset Boulevard, an idea floated by some. He says that would attract even more people into Silver Lake to shop or dine, which would in turn create worse traffic. "A big, ugly parking garage would be the death of the neighborhood," he says.
The ideas and critiques put forth by Bryant, Robbins and Mooney thrill Herman-Wurmfeld — creating what he calls Silver Lake's "grand conversation." He says he's convinced that "there are so many little communities that are ready to come to the conversation," and that in this conversation, the young must be heard.
This kind of talk makes Paul Neuman suspicious. Councilman Paul Koretz's spokesman, a verbose, intelligent guy with a deep knowledge about how things work at L.A. City Hall, says, "You need to do your homework. You need to do your due diligence before things can happen."
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