On a recent Monday night, all the seats inside Max's Lounge are taken. Classic rock blares from the jukebox. Charlotte Martin, 24, Julia Mayo, 21, and Ryan Weddle, 28 — a singer, waitress and sound editor, respectively — are gathered in the dimly-lit Tinseltown lounge to talk love, life and careers.
Across the street at Canter's Kibbitz Room, Edward Martin, 43, a musician and antiques dealer, enjoys a tuna fish sandwich in a corner booth. Groups of friends huddle quietly as a jazz quartet plays to the smoky bar. Nearby at the Nova Express CafÈ, a sharply dressed waiter barely has time to talk over the thumping electronic music as he hurries gourmet coffee and tea to aspiring members of the Hollywood elite.
It's another night after hours in Los Angeles' traditionally Jewish Fairfax district.
The neighborhood scene looks different by daylight. A few blocks down from these night-crawler establishments sits Dave's Cut-Rite Deli, owned by a man named Steven Friedman whom everyone calls Dave. Inside the 50-year-old kosher supermarket, Lola and Adam Krispow, Holocaust survivors now in their 70s, carefully consider a purchase of barbecued cod. Adam wants to buy three pieces of the bright red pre-cooked fish, but Lola weighs in for two. "In case it is bad," she says in a Yiddish accent still heavy after nearly three decades in America, "why would we want three?"
From the 1950s to 1970s, the Fairfax district was the epicenter of Jewish life in Los Angeles. In the years after World War II, looking for new housing and fleeing an influx of Mexican immigrants, middle class Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors, moved west from Boyle Heights to Fairfax. In 1935, Fairfax had four synagogues; by 1945 there were 12, according to the president of the Jewish Historical Society of Southern California, Stephen Sass.
The neighborhood's Jewish vivacity lasted into the 1970s, with its residents supporting Jewish delis and butchers, grocery stores
and fish markets, schools and a ritual bath. But in a familiar pattern, the next generation of Jews grew up, went off to college and traded in ownership of a mom-and-pop shop in favor of a white-collar career.
Today, the generation of European immigrants is dying out, and while Los Angeles is still home to a vibrant Jewish community, the center of Jewish life has shifted southeast to nearby Pico-Robertson. Fairfax's old guard has given way to less deeply ethnic immigrants from Russia and Israel, Orthodox Jews who do not patronize the more secular Jewish establishments and would-be Hollywood moguls seeking their own version of the American dream. This last wave of newcomers has turned Fairfax into a tale of two neighborhoods, one whose daytime denizens head off to bed just as its nocturnal dwellers step out.
The Krispows, who live in nearby Westwood, make two monthly pilgrimages to Fairfax Boulevard, but they don't often encounter the likes of those who frequent Max's. "There are maybe some young people, but I don't see them," Mr. Krispow said. Up a few blocks at Atara's, a Jewish gifts and bookstore, the wig-wearing Orthodox woman working the cash register echoes these observations. "I don't see Hollywood types here," she said. "I really don't. A lot of the younger set, they work during the days. We leave at 6 to 6:30," Mr. Friedman said. "I have a sense of the story you're looking for. It's not on Fairfax."
The Nova Express opens each day at 5 p.m. According to co-owner Cary Long, the name, which seems appropriate enough for a business on a street famous for selling lox, is actually an homage to William S. Burroughs's eponymous experimental novel.
Mr. Long opened Nova on Fairfax because the rent is much cheaper than in surrounding, more desirable areas. Today, the commercial rent on Fairfax runs at about $1.50 a square foot, whereas a comparable place on Melrose Avenue, another youth magnet, is $10 a square foot. "The land owners have nostalgia for the way Fairfax was 20 to 30 years ago, so they are resistant to what we are trying to do." Mr. Long said. "They hate Melrose. I love Melrose."
Some new business owners say they were drawn to the Fairfax exactly because it seems to be two neighborhoods at once. When Aliza Murietta and her husband Peter left their jobs at Chicago's legendary Second City Theater and moved out to Los Angeles, they wanted one thing the city famously lacks: A neighborhood in which people actually get out of their cars and walk. They found that Fairfax fit the bill, and were charmed by its old Jewish ambiance. "I love how eclectic it is, I wouldn't want it to be one or the other," Mrs. Murietta said. They now rent an apartment from Julie Newmar, a Jewish actress famous for her role as "Catwoman" in the 1960s "Batman" television series. In 1995 they opened bang (with a lower case b) Improv Studio, an improvisational training center and theater. In addition to the unknown comics the Muriettas are committed to promoting, bang has played host to well-known funny people such as Margaret Cho, Andy Dick, Dan Castellaneta, Sarah Silverman and Joey Slotnick.
Harry Blitzstein, who grew up in the neighborhood, remembers the days when new immigrants, their arms tattooed from the war, would walk down the street dressed in their finest. Today, Mr. Blitzstein, now 62 and a painter, runs the Blitzstein Museum of Art on the street, an only-open-in-the-evenings gallery that sells contemporary impressionist-style paintings and caters to the area's newer residents. "The daytime crowd are buying breads and cabbages. Even though I put up a sign that says 'museum,' people walk right by," Mr. Blitzstein said.
The iconic Canter's Restaurant, which runs the Kibbitz Room, is one place at which the young mingle with the old and business goes on as usual. The kosher-style deli, opened in 1948, has always been a destination for non-neighborhood folk. A very abbreviated list of the stars who have come to dine in the deli include Bob Hope, Orson Welles and Nicholas Cage, who met his wife, Patricia Arquette, amid the restaurant's vinyl booths.
Open 24 hours a day, Canter's makes the regular list of Hollywoodistas looking to hit one last spot after a movie shoot or a long night out. Marilyn Monroe frequented the joint so often, ordering grilled Swiss cheese on rye with tomatoes, that Canter's named the sandwich in her honor, only to have her estate demand $1,500 a year for the moniker, said Marc Canter, 35, a third-generation deli maven.
Mr. Canter said that the Fairfax district "has lost a little bit of the daytime, but the nighttime has taken on a whole other spin, reminding me what it used to be like in the daytime in terms of foot traffic."
Fairfax, it turns out, has always had a hip streak. According to Mr. Sass, in the 1960s, at the height of the counterculture movement, the street featured a head shop. Harry Zaretsky's Kosher Fish Store (now a used-clothing stored called "Out of the Closet" that benefits those suffering from AIDS) made an appearance in the 1968 Peter Seller's film "I Love You Alice B. Toklas," the story of an uptight L.A. lawyer who joins the hippie movement.
Along with Mr. Sass, Mr. Long is a member of the Fairfax Local Area Neighborhood Initiative. Three years ago, the organization received a federal grant for mildly depressed neighborhoods, which has allowed it to make cosmetic improvements on the streets like adding more trash cans and improving street lighting. There is also a movement to have Fairfax designated a historic district. "Some of us want to preserve the character of the neighborhood and some that's not their business," Mr. Sass said. "That's not a bad thing, that's just change."
— Aliza Phillips