Siam Sunset has a story.

The restaurant at 5265 Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood has some of the best Thai food in Los Angeles. Its no-frills menu features Thai comfort dishes that are extraordinary in their simplicity. Thai breakfast foods, like jok and pa thong ko served with sweetened condensed milk, and Thai versions of Chinese-style BBQ are among their most popular items, though one would be hard-pressed to find more delicious crispy pork belly krapow, leek-stuffed fried rice cakes, or goi jub noodle soup anywhere else in the city. The late Pulitzer-Prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold raved about the food in a 2010 review for the LA Weekly, in which he crowned Siam Sunset the “Thaiest Thai in Thai Town.”¹

But Siam Sunset could also be described as the most immigrant of immigrant places, not because of what’s on the plate but because of where the restaurant is and how it looks. It’s part of a motel. Gold was sure to mention this seemingly unexpected, peculiar sight in his review, writing that Siam Sunset “commands perhaps the least promising location in Hollywood, a tiny, L-shaped diner attached to an America’s Best Value Inn.”²

Ruscha’s panoramas reveal when and how Siam Sunset came to occupy this space. When he took his first image of the location in 1973, the “tiny, L-shaped diner” was a Mr. Ed’s Coffee Shop. It was connected to the Bahia Motel, a two-story roadside motel with a U-shaped layout that, moving clockwise, started with a check-in office left of the entrance driveway, followed by guest rooms wrapping around a small parking lot, and ended at Mr. Ed’s. The coffee shop was a flat single-story structure with large storefront windows, a Googie-style sign, and—at the time of Ruscha’s photo—a poster advertising $1.29 breakfast.

By 1985, Mr. Ed’s was replaced by Bo Bo China, a Mandarin-style restaurant. Still attached to the Bahia Motel, the facade had gained English-language signage along with decorative Chinese characters on the windows and the Googie sign, and pagoda-shaped wooden double-doors. By Ruscha’s 1995 image, Siam Sunset had already arrived. A new bilingual “Siam Sunset'' sign with “Thai Chinese Food” at the bottom adorned the storefront, and the pagoda-shaped doors had been replaced by French doors with a banner-like sign in Thai directly above them. But the property’s exterior was bare-boned, and the entire motel appeared to have fallen into disrepair, perhaps even out of business, with the walls graffitied. By 2007, the motel had been renovated into the corporate-owned America’s Best Value Inn, complete with new stucco, roofs, paint, gateway entrance, and signs, including one that replaced the Googie sign. Siam Sunset, sporting a subtle facelift—painted-over graffiti and brown roof trim to match the renovation—played a role in the survival of the building and the revitalization of the neighborhood and a community.³

This part of Siam Sunset’s story is also worth telling. It opens onto a larger story, captured in Ruscha’s photographs of East Hollywood, about the history of Thai Los Angeles, immigrant placemaking, and urban transformation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It testifies to the way ordinary immigrants—rather than just civic leaders, political organizations, or corporate developers—have made an extraordinary impact on metropolitan landscapes even as they may not have worked formally or intentionally to do so.⁴ Immigrants made place through smaller actions, decisions, and expressions at the everyday street level, comprising a “redevelopment vernacular.”⁵ As Siam Sunset illustrates, immigrant placemaking is a nuanced, subtle, and gradual story of change and space-claiming characterized by the rehabilitation, modification, and reuse of property. Such efforts created places to ease the adjustment and transition for newly arrived Thais and allowed Thai American identity to flourish. They also represented a process of urban revitalization that is often unseen, underappreciated, or ignored.

Thai Town and Hollywood Boulevard

While Siam Sunset is in Thai Town, it is one block south of Hollywood Boulevard, the stretch considered to be the heart of Thai Town. In 1999, the City of Los Angeles designated this section of East Hollywood as Thai Town to highlight the historic and cultural significance of Thais to Southern California. With the naming of the world’s first—and only—official Thai town, the city added to its ensemble of formally recognized neighborhoods established to preserve and celebrate ethnic heritage.⁶ Nicknamed by Thais as “Thailand’s 77th Province,” it helped define and amplify Los Angeles’s identity, or its sense of self, as a twenty-first century multicultural global city.

Historically, the kind of Thai immigrant placemaking that happened on Hollywood Boulevard was consistent with what is seen in Ruscha’s photographs of Siam Sunset. His images of Hollywood Boulevard in 1973 establish not only the presence of Thai businesses in the broader East Hollywood area but, more importantly, that this community exerted its influence on the built environment through smaller yet meaningful ethnic expression and symbolic ornamentation. Ruscha’s snapshot of Tepparod Thai-Chinese restaurant at 5151 Hollywood Boulevard, one of the first popular Thai restaurants and nightspots in Los Angeles, shows it sitting at the end of a tight strip-mall, next to Jumbo’s Clown Room cocktail lounge. Tepparod’s fairly nondescript light-colored storefront is accented, however, with bilingual signage and a Thai-style gable roof design above the entrance doors.⁷

In the 1990s, Thai American community leaders began envisioning Hollywood Boulevard as the centerpiece of an urban development project and engine of economic development and integration that could be parlayed into greater visibility. The nonprofit Thai Community Development Center (Thai CDC) and its director, Thai American activist Chanchanit “Chancee” Martorell, spearheaded the mid-1990s push for a Thai Town. From that moment, Thai CDC and the City of Los Angeles became enmeshed in larger processes and politics of urban redevelopment and heritage commodification in the United States. In 2008, the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation designated Thai Town as a “Preserve America” community. This recognition supported the city’s efforts to promote neighborhood pride and Thai culture while also centering, and indeed prioritizing, the use of ethnicity and cultural tourism as a strategy to economically develop and “revitalize” East Hollywood and Los Angeles as a whole.⁸

Thai CDC worked to “clean up” Hollywood Boulevard, largely at the behest of Thai business leaders concerned with the deteriorated physical and social conditions of the area—a place filled with “pimps, hookers, and drug dealers,” in the words of Thai chef Jet Tila—and who hoped it would “be fixed up, and look better.”⁹ Thai CDC completed beautification projects that promoted distinct, highly visible Thai cultural expression and aesthetics in the built landscape, strictly along the six-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard between Western and Normandie Avenues. Local leaders imported two Thai Apsonsi (protective mythical creature) statues from Thailand, placing one at each Thai Town gateway entrance. Plans also included construction of a Thai Town marketplace and food court, a Thai cultural community center, and a Thai American museum.¹⁰

Culinary Capital

At the time of the designation, Thai food had become more visible and well-recognized than Thai people. Thai Town capitalized on this popularity, emphasizing culinary tourism as a redevelopment strategy and culturally defining East Hollywood as a uniquely Thai space. It worked. In 2007, the late celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain featured Thai Town in the Los Angeles episode of his hit travel/food television show, No Reservations. His experience there led Bourdain to conclude that “the Thais have forged a place in this town that ha[s] made a colossal imprint on its makeup and on its daily diet.” He also reflected: “I feel like I’ve been to Thailand and back . . . fast, cheap, and though barely a mile from the Sunset Strip, they may as well be thousands of miles away in a country not my own, but somehow more welcoming and familiar than the Hollywood freak show a few blocks over.”¹¹

East Hollywood was indeed home to the genesis of Thai food culture in Los Angeles—and a Thai American community. As “Culinary Ambassador of Thai Cuisine” Jet Tila once proclaimed, Thai Town exists “because Thai food came first.”¹² The opening of the Bangkok Market in 1971 on Melrose Avenue was a main driver, along with other grocery stores and a plethora of restaurants that followed. Some, like Jitlada and Thai International Market, found a spot on Sunset (in their case, at 5233 Sunset Boulevard), as did Siam Sunset (5265 Sunset Boulevard) and Chieng Mai Cafe (5189 Sunset Boulevard) later on. Jitlada and Siam Sunset have been especially impactful, as both have not only endured but have also earned critical acclaim and fame.¹³ By the late 1970s, restaurants made up at least one-third of all Thai businesses in Los Angeles County; most were in East Hollywood.¹⁴

Waves of Immigration

This had a magnetic effect in the 1970s and 1980s as large waves of Thais arrived in the United States, and relocated across Southern California, as a result of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. A majority of Thai immigrants moved to East Hollywood, both from other parts of the region and directly from Thailand, and enhanced the area decades before nonprofit organizations and government agencies enacted official community revitalization projects. A predominantly White neighborhood in 1970, East Hollywood blossomed into a multiracial and multiethnic space with a concentration and array of Thai businesses beyond restaurants alone, including travel agencies, newspaper presses, auto shops, beauty parlors, and video rental stores.

Ruscha documented the impact Thai migration had on East Hollywood’s built environment. Architecturally speaking, that impact was muted and subtle. Ruscha’s photos of Sunset Boulevard reveal hardly any noticeable “Thai” or “Asian” structural design elements on buildings or complexes. Thai entrepreneurs inherited “design assimilated” commercial properties that adhered to hegemonic White or European American landscape aesthetics despite their presence.¹⁵ 4 Stars Video (5211 Sunset Boulevard), a small Thai VHS rental store that carried popular entertainment from Thailand—like movies, drama series, music videos, and karaoke—was captured in 1995 as a brick facade with sheet metal roofing in an L-shaped strip mall on the northwest corner of Sunset and N. Kingsley. Its owners took over a space previously occupied by “Ski & Pack Rental and Sales'' in 1985, but made no discernable aesthetic changes to the building’s physical structure. In the adjacent plaza to the west, Jitlada also established itself in a “dreary” L-shaped corner mini mall with the same brick facade and sheet metal roofing.¹⁶ In 1990, food critic Colman Andrews pointed out the contrast between the restaurant and its architectural setting in the New York Times: “Jitlada is the name of the Thai royal palace in Bangkok, but there is nothing palatial about the restaurant: it’s a simple, two-room place in a mini-shopping mall on the funky end of Sunset Boulevard.”¹⁷

Ethnic Expressions

While Thai presence might not have been visible in architectural design and building structures, Ruscha’s photographs show Thais expressing their ethnic identities quite powerfully on storefronts via slight aesthetic modifications, clear and prominent Thai language on signage, and posters and advertisements on windows. As the longest standing Thai establishment in Thai Town, if not the entire city, Jitlada made several alterations from the time of Ruscha’s first photo in 1973 to his last in 2007. The restaurant expanded its footprint by taking over the Thai International Market next door, added a green awning listing their phone number and menu specialties on the trim, and adorned the front with potted plants and shrubbery. Most notably, they also modified the restaurant with Thai motifs. Ruscha’s first image shows a bilingual sign in Thai and English. After Jitlada took over the market they also took over its sign; in 1985, Ruscha found the restaurant with two large oval storefront signs, one in Thai and the other in English. Jitlada had also added a large, bright address sign with “5233” housed inside a Thai-style gable roof design, boldly displayed on the sheet metal between the two Jitlada signs.

4 Stars Video also exhibited strong Thai ethnic expression, with a dual-language sign that read “4 Stars” in English and “Video” in Thai, as well as a window poster of—seemingly—a Thai celebrity. Another Thai video rental store, Video Thai, which appears in Ruscha’s 1985 panorama on the second floor of the newer Sunset Center Plaza (5123 Sunset Boulevard), dons a Thai-only sign with half a dozen posters on its windows. These assertions, permanent and fleeting, left a profound imprint on the built landscape of East Hollywood. They are all the more meaningful considering Ruscha documented them during a moment of intensifying, racialized battles over Asian-language commercial signage and English-only movements in California.¹⁸ The photos show us a space where Thais openly pursued linguistic expression that, while just as controversial and subject to regulation with the passage of English-only legislation, received less attention and scrutiny than in nearby suburbs.

Community and Identity, Shaped Relationally

It’s tempting (and profitable) to want to imagine Thai Town, and ethnic neighborhoods in general, as contained places occupied solely by members of one ethnic group and infused with their particular lifeways and cultural practices. But such an approach elides the multiracial and multiethnic nature of the neighborhoods themselves, obscuring a more dynamic understanding of the process of immigrant placemaking and revitalization. When Thais began moving there, East Hollywood was home to poor and working-class Asian, Latino, and Armenian migrants living almost entirely in rental housing. When it became “Thai Town,” Thais made up only 2.2% of East Hollywood’s 81,848 residents; Latinos made up 44%, and Whites 34%.¹⁹ An ever-changing place, Thai Town also overlaps with “Little Armenia.” The view of Thai Town from Hollywood Boulevard makes this difficult to discern, but Ruscha’s panoramas lay it bare. In 1995, for instance, Chieng Mai Cafe shared a plaza with Hong Kong Bakery and Sahag’s Basturma, a popular Armenian sandwich shop.²⁰

Similarly, Jitlada has had at least three neighbors, including a Chilean restaurant, Los Andes, and an Armenian restaurant, Garni, that took its place. Such transformations are also evident in Ruscha’s photographs of single shops over decades, as with Siam Sunset or 4 Stars Video, which by 2007 had become an Armenian wholesale store named, simply, “Armenia.” In East Hollywood, on the ground, everyday Thai American community and identity was shaped relationally; that is, in relation to other diasporic and immigrant populations as opposed to just a dominant White “host” society.

Reinterpreting Siam Sunset’s “Thaiest Thai in Thai Town” as a distinction for Thai American placemaking rather than just cuisine is also a generative way to shift thinking about the impact of immigration on metropolitan landscapes outside of ethnic enclaves and “official” ethnic neighborhoods like this one. Despite their location in a heralded center, the way Thais changed the built landscape of East Hollywood along Sunset is typical of post-1965 immigrant placemaking and urban transformation in the U.S. Ironically, Ruscha’s flat Sunset facades allow us to get behind the carefully crafted image of formally designated ethnic neighborhoods like Thai Town. His photographic narrative raises significant questions about what is lost in the City of Los Angeles and Thai CDC’s landmark-oriented version of urban redevelopment as cultural preservation, and where all of the area’s residents—the neighborhood’s everyday redevelopers—fit into this process. As such, Ruscha’s photographs expose a complicated relationship between ethnic heritage preservation and urban revitalization, allowing us to consider what a more expansive and accurate narrative of immigrant placemaking might look like in Los Angeles and beyond.

Notes