Tag Archives: Echo Park Lake

“The Forest Dark” L.A. Locations: Echo Park

I originally moved to Los Angeles in 1981, and the first neighborhood I lived in was Echo Park, just off Echo Park Avenue on Effie Street. Most of my initial impressions of what L.A. and Southern California were like emanated from my experiences there, as I had no other frame of reference.

So, when I wrote “The Forest Dark” 30 years later,  I was really happy to set some scenes there. Here’s a quick video of those locations. There’s more to come — many other neighborhoods and landmarks appear in “The Forest Dark,” and I hope to visit them all with my camera.

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Echo Park Lake Gives Up Its Secrets (?)

What else will surface at Echo Park Lake?

Echo Park lake

So they are draining and fixing up Echo Park Lake.

It’s good they are cleaning it up, it’s not so good it’s going to take so long, but I’m going to keep my fingers crossed and expect the results will be spectacular.

Echo Park and its lake figure quite prominently in my own L.A. history.

When I first moved to the city in 1981, Echo Park was given as the freeway exit to take to get me to my new apartment, rented sight unseen from Milwaukee. So, indeed, Echo Park Avenue was the first city street I ever drove on in L.A. if you don’t count the freeway.

At first, I used the circular path in the park as a running track. This didn’t last long, however, because so many of the local residents (at the time) brought their dogs, sans leash, who would chase me down without mercy. As much as I pleaded with the cholos friendly neighbors to observe the signs that said dogs should be on leashes, alas, I was ignored at best and threatened at worst.

Since then, long since I stopped jogging, there have been picnics, first date strolls, and a couple of press conferences for a job I had (the park has an excellent backdrop view of the downtown L.A. skyline behind the fountains).

Whenever I cross over the park’s little bridge above the giant lily pads I think of Jake Gittes and the duplicitous older woman in “Chinatown” (Ida Sessions), who lived in an apartment court nearby.

He finds her murdered with her bag of groceries strewn across the floor. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a couple of bodies dredged up in the sediment.

So, what are your memories, past/present, of Echo Park? I’d really like to hear all the dirt, separate from that being dredged from the lake bottom.

 

 

 

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