The Nonprofit That Runs Your Farmers Market Also Named a Street After a Piano

Tuesday afternoon on Griffith Park Boulevard, the block between Sunset and Edgecliffe closes to cars the way it does every Tuesday and every Saturday, and by 2 p.m. the produce tables are three deep with people who clearly did this same walk last week. Someone is buying mushrooms. Someone else is flipping through a crate of vinyl at the edge of the market where the vintage sellers set up. A dog waits, leashed to a post outside the market boundary, because dogs aren't allowed inside the stalls themselves. None of this is new information if you live within walking distance of Sunset Triangle Plaza. What might be new is who is actually running it, and what else that same group is responsible for a few blocks away.

The plaza and the farmers market get treated, correctly, as the social center of gravity for this part of Silver Lake. What doesn't usually get mentioned is that the volunteer nonprofit managing that plaza, the Silver Lake Improvement Association, is also the reason a piano joke from a 1932 film has its own officially named intersection two neighborhoods away in spirit but a ten minute walk in reality. One organization, one small board of neighbors, is quietly responsible for both the produce stand you visit weekly and a piece of Hollywood history the city didn't formally recognize until 2024.

The plaza has a landlord, and it isn't the city

Sunset Triangle Plaza opened in March 2012 as a demonstration project under the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's People St program, the same initiative that has turned other one-block stretches of underused street into car-free public space around the city. What made this one stick, when plenty of temporary plazas elsewhere quietly reverted to traffic lanes, is that the Silver Lake Improvement Association took on the permit to manage it: vendor partners, adjacent businesses, events, filming, and the maintenance that keeps a public plaza from becoming a liability. The city eventually made the arrangement permanent rather than temporary, and the plaza has been the SLIA's to run ever since.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A city-run space answers to a bureaucracy. A neighborhood association answers to the people standing in line for tamales on a Saturday morning. The Silver Lake Farmers' Market, the anchor tenant of that plaza, has run on the same footprint since it opened as a Saturday-only certified market on September 29, 2001. A Tuesday session was added in April 2010 after regular customers asked for a second day. Both sessions run at the same address, 1500 Griffith Park Boulevard at the corner of Sunset and Edgecliffe, and the schedule has held steady for over a decade:

• Saturday, 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., the fuller vendor lineup and the busier morning
• Tuesday, 1:30 to 7 p.m., a smaller and later session that works for anyone who can't do a weekend
• Sunday, roughly noon to 6:30 p.m., a rotating vintage clothing sale in the same plaza space

None of that required a city council vote or a capital budget line. It required one neighborhood association willing to hold a permit for over a decade and keep showing up.

Pine and Crane, the Taiwanese restaurant that fronts the plaza, has watched this rhythm from the same storefront since 2016. Service manager Natalie Coyne has described the triangle as community oriented, and said she can't imagine what the block would be like without it. Cru, a few doors down, gets the same kind of foot traffic on plaza days, people finishing a market loop who decide to sit down for lunch instead of carrying groceries straight home. This is what a functioning public plaza actually produces day to day. Not a destination anyone drives to from across town, but a habit that a handful of local businesses have learned to build their week around.

The piano that never made it up the stairs

Ten minutes on foot from the plaza, at Laurel and Hardy Park on Vendome Street, the same nonprofit runs something with almost nothing in common with a farmers market. Every October, the Silver Lake Improvement Association hosts Music Box Steps Day, a festival built around a set of concrete stairs that most people outside Los Angeles only know from a fourteen minute film.

The SLIA has sponsored the Music Box Steps Day in Laurel and Hardy Park for 30 years, bringing the joy of the beloved Academy Award winning film 'Music Box Steps' by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to generations of Angelenos.

That's the association's own description of the event, and the thirty year figure is not a typo. This is a tradition older than most of the restaurants on Sunset Boulevard, run by the same volunteer group that permits the plaza's produce stands. The steps in question are the ones Laurel and Hardy struggled to carry a piano up in the 1932 short The Music Box, the film that won the first Academy Award for Short Subject, Comedy. The staircase still exists, unchanged enough that visitors still climb it specifically to stand where the joke happened.

For most of the stairway's ninety-plus years as a landmark, its fame lived entirely in film history circles and the occasional tourist detour. That changed in 2024. The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to officially name the intersection of Vendome Street and Del Monte Drive, the base of the steps, as the 1932 site of The Music Box starring Laurel and Hardy. Vincent Brook, an SLIA board member and the festival's founder, called it recognition of one of the most beloved film sites in cinema history. Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez framed it as part of a broader point about the neighborhood's stair streets and their place in the city's cultural fabric.

The festival itself, held in Laurel and Hardy Park directly across from the steps, has grown into a genuine neighborhood event rather than a small commemorative gathering. Recent editions have featured Laurel and Hardy lookalikes, live music, a magic show, educational displays about the film's history, a raffle, and a screening of The Music Box itself on the same lawn where families are picnicking. It is, in the truest sense, a party thrown for a delivery that never succeeded. The comedy of the film is that Stan and Ollie never actually get the piano to the top. The neighborhood has been celebrating that failure annually for three decades.

Two landmarks, one small board of neighbors

What ties the plaza and the steps together isn't proximity. It's governance. The Silver Lake Improvement Association was founded in 1989 by a small circle of neighbors who set out to address crime, graffiti, and general neglect in specific trouble spots around the neighborhood. What started as cleanup crews and block watches turned, over nearly four decades, into the entity now responsible for both a functioning public market plaza and a piece of officially recognized film history. That's an unusual range for a volunteer nonprofit, and it says something about how this particular neighborhood tends to solve problems. Not through a single large civic institution, but through one persistent group willing to take on whatever needed tending, whether that was graffiti removal in 1989 or a permit application for a car-free plaza in 2012.

If you already live here, this is probably the useful takeaway. The rhythm you've built your week around, the Tuesday market run, the Saturday morning coffee and produce loop, the occasional Sunday flea browse, exists because one small nonprofit board renewed a permit and kept showing up. The same is true of the festival that will fill Laurel and Hardy Park this October. Neither one happened because a developer saw an opportunity or a city department allocated a budget line. Both happened because a handful of neighbors decided a piece of the block was worth protecting, and then kept protecting it for years after anyone would have blamed them for stopping.

That's not a small thing in a city where public space so often depends on whichever agency currently has the funding. Silver Lake's version of civic infrastructure runs through one address book, one board, one thirty year tradition, and one produce stand that opens twice a week like clockwork. Worth knowing next time you're standing in line for a tamale, or climbing those stairs just to see what all the fuss was about.

If this is the kind of detail that makes you love where you live even more, or makes you curious what else is quietly holding this neighborhood together, The LA Home Girl Team spends a lot of time paying attention to exactly this kind of thing. Reach out anytime, whether you're just trading Silver Lake trivia or thinking ahead to your next move.