Curbed Cup 1st round: (7) Boyle Heights vs. (10) Hollywood

The Curbed Cup, our annual award for the neighborhood of the year, is kicking off with 16 neighborhoods vying for the prestigious (fake) trophy. We’ll reveal each of the neighborhoods this week, and polls will be open for 24 hours so you can cast your vote as to which ones should advance. Let the eliminations commence!

Boyle Heights

Boyle Heights continued to get attention this year for the anti-gentrification battleseighborhood groups have fought against art galleries, which they see as a harbinger of higher rents and greater displacement for existing residents of the working-class neighborhood.

In February, activists campaigning for all art galleries to leave Boyle Heights succeeded in pushing out one much contested gallery.

Galleries or not, development still appears to be coming to Boyle Heights. Three Mariachi Plaza storefronts came up for sale this year, advertised as a “development opportunity.”

On the same block, Metro is mulling a reworked plan to develop two properties along Bailey Street. Community backlash to a previous proposal caught neighbors by surprised and was scuttled because of the backlash.

But Boyle Heights’s biggest project is planned at the 13-acre site of the Art Deco Sears complex on Olympic Boulevard. The latest renderings of the mixed-use complex show offices, live/work units, a food hall, and fancy rooftop amenities for residents.

Hollywood

Hollywood has an established reputation for being a neighborhood where a lot of developers have big plans, and this year we saw a continuation of that. Amoeba Records could disappear within two years, to be replaced by a 28-story residential tower. (The music mecca has said it will try to find a new home in Hollywood.)

Boutique hotels, larger, 21-story hotels, and so many new apartments have been proposed. At the same time, the delayed Millennium Hollywood project next to Capitol Records made a play to get built quickly, looking for exemption from the lengthy environmental review process.

Hollywood’s set to get yet another private club: the London-based H Club will open a new outpost inside what used to be the Redbury Hotel.

Hollywood’s not just about the new, though. Structures from Hollywood’s past had a pretty good year too. The 97-year-old John Anson Ford Amphitheatre reopened this year after a $72.2-million makeover, and the Hollywood Reporter building was named a city landmark.