E confides that on arriving in L.A., "all the clichés came true before my eyes, all the plastic people. And I thought the West Side was all there was. I didn't know about Echo Park and Silver Lake and the great underground art scene. I don't think of Los Angeles the same way I used to. I really like it now."
From Material Dreams, Southern California through the 1920s.
By Kevin Starr
Near the Disney studios, a few hills away in the still pastoral Silver Lake district, the neighborhood where Richie lived was the closest thing Los Angeles had at the time to an artists' quarter. Developed as the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists' Tract (perhaps the most exotic subdivision of them all!), this montage wedge at the northern edge of the Echo Park District, called the Hill by its residents, had survived as a semi-rural pocket of modest hillside homes a brief distance from the center of the city. The night-time diorama of light from central Los Angeles proved one of the major attractions of living in this urban woodland where small wildlife--raccoons, possums, birds--abounded in the thicket and chaparral. It is not surprising that the Hill became the bohemian quarter of the 1920s and 1930s, a pastoral alternative to Bunker Hill in the downtown.
Echo
Park, distinguished by the scheme of English landscape gardening developed
throughout its thirty-three acres is a delightfully restful retreat, largely
frequented by those who choose its pleasant paths for an opportunity to repeat
to willing ears, the sweetest story ever told.
Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory
By Norman Klein
Only a quarter mile north of the park, the emerging film industry was headquartered in Edendale, along Glendale Boulevard. Moviemaking there began in 1909 with the Bison Studios (one-reeler westerns), followed by Mack Sennett in 1912. In what was called “northern” Edendale, cowboy star Tom Mix built a studio ranch in the late teens, or rather it was built for him by Bison/Selig; 12 acres including a complete frontier town, a saloon, corrals, a desert and Indian village. Locals remember seeing Chaplin, Pickford, Swanson and Fairbanks in the Park.
Los Angeles, California
The City Beautiful 1907
By Charles Mulford Robinson
The other territory which I have in mind as a desirable addition to Echo Park is the hillside to the east. And that on the west is hardly less important. These frame the picture which the park makes. It is impossible to get away from them, as long as they remain in private hands, the beauty and charm of the park is in jeopardy. The tops of those hills are the park’s natural boundaries; their slopes can make it or mar it; they may be made beautiful with planting, or they may—if not acquired—be covered with glaring billboards, or otherwise so used to ruin the park picture. Simply to safeguard the present investment, those hills should be acquired.
By James Ellroy
I sparred with my old pal Pete Lukins and rolled sets at the speed bag until the sweat blinded me and my arms turned to rubber. I skipped rope and ran through the Elysian Park hills with two pound weights strapped to my ankles, jabbing at tree limbs and bushes, outracing the trashcan dogs that prowled there.
By Mike Davis
At one Neighborhood Watch meeting I attended in Echo Park, an elderly white women asked a young policeman how to identify hardcore gang members. His answer was stupefyingly succinct: "Gangbangers wear expensive athletic shoes and clean, starched tee-shirts." The women nodded in appreciation of this "expert" advice, while others in the audience squirmed in their seats at the thought of the youth in the neighborhood who would eventually be stopped and searched simply because they were well groomed.
The houses were situated in two locals: Echo Park and Silverlake, and across town in Watts. Silverlake-Echo was several miles due east of Mount Lee, a hilly area with lots of twisting streets, greenery and seclusion, the kind of terrain a necrophiliac might find soothing.
Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory
By Norman Klein
Nor was it (Echo Park) considered relevant by the boosters, certainly not in the preferred way – and not because there weren’t enough churches. There were perhaps too many. The Saint Athanasius Episcopal Church had been founded in 1864; that was suitable. But nearby were what some called “last chance” religions, with soup lines in the thirties stretching three blocks to Sunset Boulevard; and a Ukrainian church not far from a synagogue. In other words, when a gentleman in 1930 used the term “bohemian”, he also meant – in picturesque euphemism – a place where too many of the wrong religion and wrong race cohabit. Echo Park looked more like the Lower East Side than Greenwich Village. It attracted groups who found themselves isolated ethnically or culturally from a profoundly Midwest ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identified city.
By Kevin Starr
The great god Pan, piping his hedonistic tune, was alive and well on the coast. If this was true, then Los Angeles had more than its share of religious eccentricity... Aimee Semple MacPherson was carrying on in this tradition of folk evangelism at the Four Square Gospel Church in Echo Park, although her scandalous disappearance (a faked kidnapping, a sojourn in Carmel with her lover) in 1926 somewhat stalled her momentum.
By Adah Bakalinsky and Larry Gordon
Although the Echo Park and Elysian Heights area is just north of the downtown skyscrapers, very little has changed from the look of 50 years ago. To be sure, Echo Park's population has changed; it is now home to many working-class Latino and Asian families, many of them recent immigrants, mixed in with old Anglo residents, aging hippies and a new influx of professionals looking for decent housing close to downtown. There are some slums, and problems with graffiti and gangs.
Still, this hillside community is a comfortable place with a real sense of history, a mixture of inner-city and country-lane living. Its many houses from the Thirties, Twenties and even, in some cases, the 1880’s are cherished for their character and their spacious yards. Its shopping district on Sunset Blvd. is a lively, ethnic potpourri and its hilltops offer stunning views. Dodger Stadium is an easy walk away, and the neighborhood is blessed with two famous parks: Echo Park itself, with its lake and geyser fountain; and Elysian Park, whose 600 acres make it the second largest park in L.A., after Griffith Park.
By KevinStarr
The next morning (after arriving in Los Angeles via Route 66) Man Ray’s pal phoned a girl whom he knew in New York and arranged a date for himself and Ray that evening. Ray was delighted with his escort Juliet Browner, a Martha Graham dancer with fawn-like features and slanted eyes.
The next day, Juliet and Ray met for lunch, followed by a long talk in a rowboat in Echo Park Lake. Ray literally invited her back to his hotel to see his etchings, in this case his portfolio of drawings, watercolors, and Rayographs (direct contact photographs) that he smuggled out of Europe.
LOS ANGELES
A Guide to the City and Its Environs
Compiled
by Workers of the Writers' Program of the
Work
Projects Administration in Southern California
1941
S. from City Hall on Spring St. to 2nd St.; R from Spring on 2nd St.; R from 2nd on Glendale Blvd.
ECHO PARK, bounded by Glendale Blvd., Temple St., and Echo Park and Park Aves., a 31-acre municipal park in the heart of a populous residential district, is pleasantly landscaped with many varieties of fine ornamental and shade trees. It has an eight-acre lake (boating). On an island in the north end, reached by an arched bridge, is one of the park's three picnic grounds (tables, gas stoves; free). Egyptian papyrus and water lilies growing in shallows at this end can afford shelter during the nesting season to numerous waterfowl--swans, ducks, coots, grebes, and geese. In summer a lush growth of lotus springs from the water in the lake's northwest arm, the large pink-and-white flowers attracting many painters and photographers. In the 1870's the lake provided water for adjacent farms, and water power for a woolen mill that stood at Sixth and Pearl (now Figueroa) Streets.
A
Pictorial History
Ron
Emler & Susan Bordon
1998
Angona
House 1889
Collective memory and legend
believe the Angona house at 1435 McDuff is the oldest house north of Sunset
Blvd. in Echo Park. A descendant of the original Angona family, now in her
nineties, still lives in the family home. Louise Angona, born in 1906, is a
daughter of Cono Antonio Angona, one of the eight original Echo Park residents
listed in the earliest City Directories. The family made wine on the site from
1900-1910 with grapes imported from the San Fernando Valley.