A Walker in L.A.: Welcome to Cypress Park

When you walk or bike enough in L.A. you start to see the city knit together in a different way. And that includes learning entirely new neighborhoods—or at least the proper name and definition of them. Heading southwest from Eagle Rock the other day on bike, I meandered to downtown and rolled into Cypress Park. It was a neighborhood name I vaguely recognized from the nearby Gold Line station but I couldn’t say until this point that I ever really understood where it was. Like so many parts of L.A., it was an abstract blur, a place that I glided over on the freeway. What I found once I was there is a place with skateboarders and street vendors and men smoking outside bars between games of pool—a small but very cool piece of the puzzle that is Los Angeles.