"The neighborhood got rougher, rent got higher, payroll got higher."
That's Knitting Factory CEO Morgan Margolis, explaining to LA Magazine why he was closing the Federal Bar on New Year's Eve 2023 after nine years in the historic 1926 bank building at 5303 Lankershim. It read like an obituary for a piece of NoHo. The gastropub had been a fixture, its upstairs venue had launched the current Knitting Factory NoHo brand, and Margolis himself called it a "fantastic run" that started to wane through the pandemic.
If you only read that quote, you'd assume the building went dark. It didn't. Walk past 5303 Lankershim today and you'll find The Witch's Cottage, a full bar, cafe, upstairs event space, and private tavern that co-founders Celina Lee Surniak and Danielle Ozymandias built inside the same old bank walls, murals and all. They'd talked about opening a place like it together for over a decade. When the space came up for lease, one of them sent the other a two-word text: "you in?"
That's the pattern worth noticing if you live here. NoHo doesn't let its storied buildings sit empty for long, and it doesn't let the next tenant scrub the history either. The new owners tend to lean into it.
Two Blocks, Two Buildings, Same Instinct
The Witch's Cottage isn't the only example this year. A few blocks down Lankershim, a smashburger spot called The Alley Burger just opened at 5072 Lankershim, on a site that used to be The Alley recording studio. Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Etta James all recorded there. Instead of treating that history as trivia for a plaque, the new owners built it into the business. They're hosting regular live music nights, collaborating with local musicians, and framing the whole thing as a kid- and dog-friendly hangout that happens to sit on genuinely famous ground. The burgers are smashburgers with tallow fries, the shakes run on Straus Farm soft serve, and the beef is free-range and antibiotic-free. But the pitch isn't just the food. It's the address.
Put those two stories side by side and you get something more useful than a list of new restaurants. You get a read on how this specific neighborhood absorbs change. A bank doesn't become a bank-themed bar. A recording studio doesn't become a recording-studio-themed anything. They become something new that keeps the old story on the wall instead of painting over it.
Why That's Different From What Metro Is Building
It's worth separating this from the other kind of change happening in NoHo, because they run on completely different timelines and completely different logic.
District NoHo, the joint project between Metro and the city, is a ground-up redevelopment of the 15-acre surface lot next to the North Hollywood B and G Line station. When it's finished, it's expected to bring roughly 1,500 residential units, more than 300 of them affordable, along with 100,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space and 500,000 square feet of office space, all built out over multiple phases across 15 years. That's new construction on a site that's currently asphalt and parking. There's no old building to honor there. It's a different kind of growth entirely, the kind that shows up as cranes and construction fencing rather than a new sign over an old door.
The Witch's Cottage and The Alley Burger are the other track. They're not waiting on a 15-year buildout. They're proof that the existing built environment in NoHo, the one-story bungalows and small storefronts and converted banks that give Lankershim and Magnolia their texture, still has enough life in it that people want to reuse it rather than replace it. Both things are true about the neighborhood at once. One is slow and structural. The other is fast and personal, decided by two people who wanted to build a witchy cafe together and finally did.
What Else Changed While You Weren't Looking
The Business Improvement District that covers the Arts District has also been tracking its own version of upkeep. Its Clean Team and Safety Ambassadors published a report on what they handled from January through June of this year, the kind of unglamorous work, sidewalk maintenance and street-level safety checks, that doesn't get a grand opening but shapes how the district actually feels to walk through.
None of that erases the fact that a well-known spot closed in 2023 for real reasons. Rent went up. The pandemic hit nightlife hard everywhere, not just here. But if you were still picturing NoHo mid-decline based on that one closure, the last two years of tenant turnover tell a different story than the one Margolis was describing when he shut the door.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Month
If you're looking for a reason to walk down there this week instead of just reading about it, here's what's coming up:
- Valley Pride Street Festival, Sunday, September 20, at Cahuenga Boulevard and Burbank Boulevard. The block party returns to the same stretch of North Hollywood that's hosted it for years, with vendors and entertainment celebrating the Valley's LGBTQ community.
- Sarah Moshman Film Festival, Sunday, October 4, at Laemmle NoHo 7, if you want an excuse to catch a matinee at the theater that's anchored that stretch of Lankershim for years.
- The Witch's Cottage and The Alley Burger are both open now, so if you haven't been inside either building since the last tenant left, this is the week to go see what happened to the place.
The Thing to Actually Hold Onto
The easy version of this story is "new restaurant opens, here's the menu." The more useful version, if you actually live in this district and want to understand it rather than just visit it, is that the character of NoHo isn't held together by any one business staying open forever. It's held together by a habit. When something storied closes, the next owner tends to build on what was there instead of erasing it. That's not guaranteed to keep happening. But it's happened twice on the same street in the same year, which is enough of a pattern to notice next time a familiar storefront goes dark and you start writing its eulogy too early.
If you've been in the neighborhood long enough to remember what used to occupy a space that's now something else entirely, or if you're weighing what a property here is actually worth once you factor in what's happening at street level versus what's happening at the Metro station, I'm always glad to talk it through. You can reach out to Chad Pape any time. Let's Connect.
