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A Message From The Walk Leader

We will meet at 9:45am on Saturday July 18th, 2009 at the Echo Park Boat House. 751 Echo Park Ave., Los Angeles, CA, 90026

This is north of the 101 Freeway and south of Sunset Blvd on Echo Park Ave.  Street parking is available around the lake, especially on Echo Park Avenue alongside the lake or on Park Ave or Laguna Ave.

Your group will be lead by Martin Cox, a fine art and commercial photographer who lives in Echo Park, and co-leader, fine art photographer Sara Jane Boyers.

Beginning at the 1932 historic boat house (where paddle boats are still available to rent), the walk will begin a counter-clockwise tour around the lake, passing the Lady of the Lake statue  (1934, by artist Ada Mae Sharpless), and the wooden Chinese footbridge made famous in the movie “Chinatown,” while catching incredible views of downtown Los Angeles.  We will then walk south along the western edge of the lake.

We will return close to our staring point before starting the steeper second part of the walk. Leaving the lake, we will turn walk up Laguna Ave up 85 public stairs into Angelino Heights, Los Angeles’s first suburb, where we will weave around streets filled with notable Victorian houses. Walkin along Kensignton, Douglas, Carrol and back then descend the Crosby Place stairs once more, passing the colorful Cathedral Center of St. Paul’s.

The tour is about two hours (3 miles) however when we head back across the north end of Echo Park toward the boathouse, our start point, we plan to head up Lemoyne and left on Sunset for drinks and food at MASA, a notable Echo Park hangout, where we can share photos.

For more on Echo Park history: http://www.historicechopark.org
At the end of the 19th century, a horse-drawn trolley rambled up a dirt road that is now Echo Park Avenue, which lead into hills covered with  “luxuriant” fields of native grasses and “scores of varieties of beautiful wild flowers.” The small farms and ranches that dotted the hills and canyons of Echo Park, and its sister neighborhoods of Elysian Heights and Angelino Heights, eventually gave way to Victorian mansions, Craftsman bungalows, Spanish Colonial style homes and brick storefronts. By the Great Depression of the 1930s, there were few empty lots to build upon. Echo Park may have changed dramatically over the past century, but it has managed to retain the historic character and strong sense of identity that sets it apart in a modern and sprawling metropolis.