Last week, a developer filed paperwork with the city of Los Angeles to demolish the Tenants of the Trees bar at 2810 Hyperion Avenue in Silver Lake and replace it with a couple dozen apartments. Urbanize reports that H for Hyperion, LLC plans to build a five-story structure filled with one-bedroom units on top of 2,200 square feet of retail on the ground floor.
The Trader Joe’s-adjacent location and modernist geometric design by Bjarke Ingels Group will certainly attract the affluent young people who are known to populate architectural renderings. The architecture firm was founded in Copenhagen and is known for its awe-inspiring museums, music halls and performing arts centers around the world, and this is certainly a more attractive addition to the streetscape than the shabby wood plank exterior Tenants of the Trees installed a decade ago.
Before that, the building had a streamlined nautical look, with porthole windows and a rooftop neon sign. It housed a gay bar called MJ’s, the latest in a series of cocktail lounges catering to the plummeting gay population of the neighborhood. This is the same part of town where the Mattachine Society started in the 1950s and where the patrons of the Black Cat bar protested attacks by the LAPD years before Stonewall. “Nearly every other storefront was a gay or lesbian bar, a leather store, a bookstore, or a community Aids organization.,” The Guardian reported in 2023. “Today, despite the rainbow flags flying along Sunset Boulevard, Silver Lake is being “de-gayed and de-Latinized.” Writer Eric Brightwell created a map to more than 50 queer historic and cultural sites in Silver Lake, the majority of which are long gone.
The modest building on Hyperion Avenue went up in 1949 as three shops, including a dry cleaners and a donut store. By 1969, the storefronts were combined into one space, wood paneling and carpeting were installed and it became a short-lived restaurant called Nomad’s Table. Soon, it was a bar called Woody’s, likely named for owner P.N. Woodward. The ONE Archives at USC cites nearly a dozen gay guides that mention the club during the 1970s and 80s.
Through the decades, the club hosted special events, carnivals in the parking lots and fundraisers for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. A lesbian night called “Utero” popped up in the 90s, along with promoter nights called Solid Gold, Club 69 and Papa Boner. “Any of us who lived in the era of the Blue Parrot and Studio One knew that all the bars away from West Hollywood were where you went if you wanted to hook up,” remembers David Del Valle of Hollywood. “Woody’s was very friendly with no pretentions, a real working class place.”
Another gay bar called MJ’s took over in 2002 and then the big remodel came when Tenants of the Trees opened in 2015, catering to a different audience. The city isn’t requiring any sort of environmental report or historic assessment. “The project would utilize the enhanced administrative review entitlement pathway,” Urbanize reports. “Which does not require a separate environmental clearance or a public hearing.”
Soon, the lot and its decades of history will be cleared and forgotten when these luxury units are completed – and we can only assume the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s will be even busier.
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