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.

Figueroa and Avenue 28, Cypress Park