When One Word Restaurants Named After Nouns Arrive: Beware
Lex Steppling on seeing Nirvana at 10, being pinballed at the Palladium, and the tell-tale signs of gentrification
Lex Steppling, like many of our guests, cannot be put in a box. He defies first impressions, stereotypes, and expectations. In the best way.
A Native Angeleno who has lived throughout LA, including stints in Venice, Pasadena, and Chesterfield Square, Lex is currently six children here in LA. And still, somehow he had time to sit down with me.
Since we had never met in real life, he and I spoke for an hour and a half off the mic and then for another 75 minutes or so as the tapes were rolling. What you will hear is his recollections of going to shows like Nirvana at the Forum at 10 years old, when he realized Echo Park was gentrifying, and why he thinks it’s harder to raise kids in LA today than in the past.
For the full conversation click the play button below. For a few chunks of the chat, keep scrolling for some edited moments.
Tony Pierce. Let’s talk about Nirvana because that’s what we were tweeting about when we decided to do this podcast episode. You were 10 years-old when you saw them at the Forum?
Lex Steppling: I was 10 or 11. My friend’s older brother had the hookup and so we went. I don’t remember who took us there or how we got there.
Your parents are okay with their 10 year-old going to Inglewood?
Everybody went to the Forum back then. Everybody went to the Forum for everything. Do you mean because I was so little?
Yes. I ask because I saw AC/DC’s Back in Black tour when I was 14 and my mom dropped me off at the arena, alone. She says she doesn’t remember doing it and I was like, “well who else would have done it?”
Unlike you who lived relatively close in Chesterfield Square, we lived a ways from the venue.
But she would say, “do you know how young 14 is?” And so I’m asking you, do you know how young 10 is?
Well my first concert was a year before that. It was Primus at the Hollywood Palladium.
“Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver”?
It was before that. It was “My Name is Mud.” That album.
Frizzle Fry.
I had a couple older cousins from the Bay Area. They really liked Primus. So they got me into them. And I really liked them.
I was looking through the LA Weekly one day and I saw it in the back page ads where they would have event listings.
And so they had the ad for Primus at the Hollywood Palladium, so I cut out the ad.
You were 10 years-old at the Palladium? Maybe nine?
I was like, “I’m gonna go.” So I had an older cousin here in LA and she’s like, “I’ll take you.” She was probably 18 or something.
And a friend of mine, the same friend whose brother hooked us up with the Nirvana tickets later, now that I think of it, and she said she would take me too.
Everybody used to always say how rough the Palladium was. But it’s kind of a magical place.
It IS a magical place.
It’s like a high school gym.
It is exactly like a high school gym!
It’s got a flat floor, like a parquet-type floor. There’s the upper level where the executives are at, but most of the people are just on the flat floor.
It has the same acoustics of a high school gym, but in a good way.
What I’m saying is a 10 year-old would have a hard time because you’re shorter than everybody. It must have been hard to see.
Oh, yeah. No, I got pinballed the whole night. But I had so much fun. And what’s funny is that Butthole Surfers played there and then they opened for Nirvana a year later.
And you know, in the ’90s, concert culture was a much different thing than it is now.
There was a certain special exciting thing. Pre-Internet you didn’t have access to much stuff. So to get to hear things, see things, or even get the tshirt was a big deal.
So I have four teenage kids. I have two little kids.
Four of my kids are teenagers. So my wife and I, we get them cool band shirts. You got to be cultured.
Over time you watched Echo Park go from not-desirable to highly-desirable.
I did and I guess this is why you’d like this shit.
This is super specific for me. I saw two things happen. I was barely beginning to get an understanding of what gentrification looked like.
So Echo Park… I lived there as a small child and I lived there again in my early teens.
The intersection of Glendale Boulevard and Scott.
Where the McDonald’s is?
The McDonald’s is, I believe, off of Montana. But maybe. It’s where Scott intersects with Glendale where it comes down the hill.
There used to be a little Mexican restaurant there, but now it’s like a cannabis place.
[sarcastically] I don’t know anything about that world.
Okay. So there used to not be a stop light there. It was a really dangerous intersection. And it was a terrible place to make a left turn.
And then one day, there was a light.
And around that same time, Masa of Echo Park opened.
OK hold on. You know where I’m from. Are you about to talk trash my pizza place?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I got defensive all of a sudden.
Well, that’s good to know. But I’ll explain in a second why it’s good to know. So when I saw that shit pop up, a Chicago pizza place — and it didn’t say it was from Chicago.
[Laughing] It says it’s a bakery.
It says Masa of Echo Park. That doesn’t sound Chicago to me. But when we started seeing places named after nouns, we knew shit was like —
Masa was the red flag?
One of the the four horsemen of gentrification.
No, it’s restaurants named after a single noun. If the place is called Oat, or Spoon —
I mean you’re right, Masa doesn’t belong there.
I’m just saying it’s funny now because that place is seen as like a stalwart of the community. But back then I saw it and I immediately held a grudge. I was like, I’m never setting foot in that place.
Because these two things happen. Now you get a fucking stoplight. And now there’s the bakery. And I know what this means.
What does it mean?
It meant it was being gentrified.
White folks are coming in.
There have always been white people in Echo Park. Echo Park always had diversity that it doesn’t get credit for, just like Silver Lake.
Silver Lake and Echo Park were both really special places. They were very diverse.
Were?
They were. Past tense.
They were special points of energy. They were politically activated. They were very like, everybody was welcome. They were very queer communities. They were very class-diverse communities. They were very political communities.
And I don’t mean political in the inside game bullshit. I mean, like people with radical politics lived there, thrived there.
There were artists of every generation and it was very special and very LA.
There was a time, especially in LA, where being an artist was not a synonym for being privileged.
Arts didn’t come from the gentry. I’m talking theater, I’m talking music: all came from the hood.
So Masa opened up, and that aesthetic, but also “Masa of Echo Park.” That sounded away to me.
I did finally go there recently. I finally let it go. My wife was like, “their food’s good.”
She’s from the neighborhood too. She’s like, “let it go.”
And I was like, fine. So I went in, I ate there. I don’t even remember what we had, but it was good. It was really good.
But the waiter, he was talking and I said, “I have to tell you. This is a big deal for me. You guys opened in what ‘97 or something? I vowed to never set foot in this place because you’re on some gentrifier bullshit.”
And he was like, “oh no, we’re really down for the community. The Blue Bottle coffee just tried to open up and we told him to go fuck themselves. We’re all about the neighborhood.”
And it hit me. I was like to most people, this is like the OG Echo Park spot.
So the light on Scott, Masa of Echo Park, and then a lot of places held out for a long time.
But you also had places where the gentrification happened really fast, radically fast.
Highland Park. Never seen anything flip that fast.
This was just the tip of the iceberg. Hear the whole conversation by clicking the play button below.
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How great was Lex? When you stoke us, you’re saying — “Tony, all this pizza talk has me thinking, you deserve a nice pie from Masa. Abbondanza!”
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