IN THE DAYS SINCE the owner of Ye Rustic Inn announced that the longtime Los Feliz dive bar may be forced to close, the fight for its survival has become a neighborhood cause célèbre, with a community demonstration last week drawing TV cameras and coverage from around the state. The bar’s possible demise has stirred a familiar Los Angeles anxiety: that another beloved neighborhood institution will disappear, taking a piece of the city's character and community with it.
Photo by Andrea Domanick
“ The Rustic was the ultimate third space,” longtime neighbor Mike Shellenberger told LA Material at the Oct. 28 demonstration outside the bar, where he and two other regulars were handing out homemade flyers that read Save Ye Rustic! “Everything is disappearing now,” he added,“the joke is, it's gonna turn into a $20 salad place.”
The crisis at Ye Rustic has been framed in many circles as yet another casualty of the corporate homogenization sweeping across the city. But an L.A. Material review of city and state records and interviews with involved parties has found that the heart of the issue is more complicated than that prevailing narrative. It reveals how even community support and City Hall's assistance can only go so far in protecting a neighborhood institution from the precarity and uncertainties of commercial tenancy.
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