Abandoned project doesn't fit in with Eagle Rock's progress

To those who live in the hills above Eagle Rock -- iconoclasts and eccentrics, many of them artists and "day sleepers" and people who drop Samuel Beckett lines casually into conversation -- the grassy lot at the end of the main drag was never much of a mystery.

Road workers created it 75 years ago when they lopped off part of a hill. Left behind was an awkward triangle of land wedged between Colorado Boulevard and a cliff, which routinely cast off rocks so porous they crumbled in your hand. The lot was empty, everybody figured, for a reason -- it didn't seem hospitable to construction.

So it came as something of a surprise when, five years ago, developers started making noise about not only building there, but building something ambitious: 17 "live-work" lofts, almost 40,000 square feet worth. It came as less of a surprise when, earlier this year, it started to fall down.

Today, a half-built, block-long still life of concrete and rebar has supplanted the grass and ivy. Cinder-block walls are tagged with graffiti. Trash -- a crumpled milk jug, a condom wrapper -- is caught in the weeds. All of it is framed by 40 towering pillars.

The developer says the project is effectively dead. It's unclear whether anyone -- the developer, the lender, the city -- has the wherewithal or the inclination to do anything about it. Neighbors fear the site could stay this way for years; seeking some sort of progress, they are planning to sprinkle the site with morning glory seeds.

Scattered across Southern California, there are signs of a real estate market gone bad -- empty downtown condos where developers are giving away resort vacations to make sales; hills in Corona that have been denuded in anticipation of houses that won't be built any time soon.

But if you set out to find a singular temple to this sort of thing -- to the excesses of the boom, to the perils of the crash -- residents argue that you could do worse than to settle here.

"This thing," said Terry Parker, who lives up the hill, "was a fiasco from the start."

On Saturday, as many as 20,000 people are expected to attend the 10th annual (and still free) Eagle Rock Music Festival. It will probably be the festival's biggest crowd yet; 74 acts will perform on 16 stages, most lining Colorado.

The festival has become a celebration of local, independent music, not just from Southern California, but from northeast L.A. specifically. An eclectic lineup -- salsa, hip-hop, a marching band -- is also designed to mirror the area's diversity.

Another undercurrent of the festival is a celebration of Eagle Rock itself, which has undergone a renaissance in recent years.

Eagle Rock stumbled into a terrible decline in the 1970s. In the '90s, it began to ascend, fueled by millions of dollars in public and private investments -- and a wave of artists and bohemians priced out of the beach and unimpressed with the hip scenes of Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Echo Park.

Along with counterculture types who'd never left, they sought to create a different sort of community on what might be called an urban seam -- not quite city, not quite suburb; edgier and funkier than nearby Glendale and Pasadena, but more forgiving and artsy than the metropolitan center to the south.

By and large, they succeeded. Colorado Boulevard is the most obvious testament -- coffee shops and muffler shops and an old-fashioned hardware store interspersed with galleries, artisans and eateries with Malbec tastings and vegan tempeh balls.

"There is a special flavor here. There is no attitude. You see the same people. You become a regular," said Renee Dominique, director of operations at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, which is a producer of the music festival. "It has a village feel."