‘Little Armenia’ Sign in Hollywood Feels Strange, But Right

A wise American once wrote, “You can’t go home again.”

If you’re from Los Angeles, you know that truer words were never spoken.

Call this city home, and eventually L.A. will repay your devotion with a swift kick, a cold slap, and a mocking wave goodbye.

I learned this lesson the hard way after many years away. I decided to revisit the corner of L.A. where I was born and raised.

When I was a kid, I called this place Hollywood. The glitzier meanings of the name barely registered in my young brain. The Hollywood I knew was a sooty playground of concrete and asphalt where all my friends lived.

Then I got older, and moved to Montebello and many other places in California and beyond. I started telling people I was born in East Hollywood. I liked the gritty feel “East” added to its name.

But on my recent return, I found my old homeplace had a new name.

“Little Armenia” read the bold white letters on blue rectangular signs, installed by city workers on Hollywood Boulevard. Unfortunately, I am not Armenian.

Returning to your childhood home and finding it officially named for another ethnic group is sort of like going to your birthday party and finding someone else’s name on the cake.

If the sign had read “Little Guatemala,” I’m sure I would have felt a burst of pride: I might have called my immigrant mother to say, “There’s a little part of L.A. named after us!”

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My parents came here from Guatemala to reinvent themselves. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans followed after them, changing the L.A. neighborhoods they lived in.

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Little Tokyo, we read in this paper Saturday, is filling with Koreans. There’s been a big Vietnamese and Cambodian presence in Chinatown for decades now. And my part of East Hollywood probably could just as easily be called Little Manila or Little San Salvador.

There’s no denying the Armenian imprint on my old stomping grounds.

Armenian business owners have populated the neighborhood with signs written in the loops and arcs of their alphabet. My inability to speak Armenian led to a short conversation with a local merchant that ended with him apologizing for his poor English.

{snip} A lot of Guatemalans still live there. And another corner of our old stomping grounds has another official city of Los Angeles neighborhood designation: Thai Town.

It was the Thais who beat us all to the punch, back in 1999.

The Thais even got Caltrans to put “Thai Town” signs on the Hollywood Freeway.

It goes without saying that the official designation of Thai Town irked an Armenian sensibility or two. So in 2000, the City Council renamed part of East Hollywood to honor “the traditional birthplace of the Armenian community of Los Angeles.”

The official boundaries of Thai Town and Little Armenia overlap, which is odd–but also entirely appropriate, given the patchwork of ethnicities that call the place home.

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