Rustic Area in the ‘Middle of Everything’ : Echo Park: Homes with character are set in area that has trees and greenery and is best known as site of Dodger Stadium and Elysian and Echo parks.

Most mornings, Echo Park resident Carlos Mendez sips his coffee, serenaded by crowing roosters. Although just five minutes northwest of the Los Angeles Civic Center, the Echo Park District has managed to retain its rustic nature throughout its long history.

“If you are looking for a house that has character, if you like forests, if you like trees, this is the place,” Mendez said. “Up here on Lake Shore, further up, you will see a world where you will hardly believe that you are in L.A.”

Mendez, 36, moved to Echo Park in June, 1992, with his two dogs, Muffy and Charlie. A native of Mexico, Mendez, who works in a dry-cleaning shop, immigrated to Los Angeles 18 years ago.

He paid $210,000 for his two-story, two-bedroom farmhouse, which he traded up for from a house in South Central L.A. The farmhouse was built in the late 1800s on a 50-foot-by-200-foot lot that runs up the side of a hill. “I like Echo Park because you are in the middle of everything,” Mendez said. “It seems like I’m in the heart. I’m five minutes from downtown, five minutes from Glendale, 20 minutes from North Hollywood.”

Echo Park is bounded generally on the north by the Glendale Freeway, the south by the Hollywood Freeway, the east by the Pasadena Freeway and the west by Alvarado Street and Glendale Boulevard. The more than 34,000 residents are primarily blue-collar workers, largely Latino, with Asians and Pacific Islanders as the next largest groups.

Sunset Boulevard, which curves through the center of the community, is lined with small businesses, restaurants and shops. The area is best known as the home of Dodger Stadium, Elysian Park and Echo Park.

Echo Park was also home to the early movie industry. In 1912, Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio was located on the east side of Glendale Boulevard at Effie Street, and the community was often used as the background for Sennett’s Keystone Kops and other slapstick comedies.

Echo Park has long attracted movie people, writers and artists. Lisa Keller, a free-lance scenic painter and set dresser, and husband Rocky Grisez recently bought a duplex next to Elysian Park. “It has a really neat porch with an incredible view,” Keller said. “I can see basically from the Hollywood sign to Palos Verdes.” Keller, 32, rented in Echo Park for three years before buying the 1937, two-story building for $210,000 in April. “I like that it’s an ethnic neighborhood,” Keller said. “I like that there are are a lot of people from different countries, and the Latino aspect of it. I speak Spanish so I feel really at home here.”

Home prices in Echo Park range from $1 million for a secluded hilltop estate to $100,000 or less for a one-bedroom, fixer-upper cottage. The median price for a two-bedroom, one-bath house runs about $200,000. “The diversity of the real estate in this area is immense,” said Grant Lenox, owner of Century 21 Echo Park Realty. “I think the real estate really reflects the diversity in our community. I don’t think you can find such a melting pot in such a small geographic area any place else in the city.”

The city’s original residents were the Gabrielino Indians, whose village, known as Yang-Na, was located in Elysian Park near the present-day Police Academy. By 1830, the village was gone; the tribe extinct by 1920. The city council, in 1886, declared the area a public park. Today the 575-acre park is home to trails, picnic areas, groves of exotic trees and plants, and it is the passion of the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park.

Begun by Grace E. Simons in 1965 to defeat a move to build the city’s convention center in the park, the committee works to stop further encroachment into the park. However, the committee was formed too late to join the battle to save the residents of Chavez Ravine from the bulldozers and construction of Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962.

Yeu-Wei Yee, 48, owns a home just west of the ballpark, which he calls the “Hallmark of Echo Park.”

“I remember the 1988 World Series,” Yee said. “It was so great in the neighborhood--and we are the neighborhood of Dodger Stadium--everyone was jumping and screaming all over the place on their balconies and everything. It was a real nice kind of community sensation.”

Yee, a teacher at 10th Street Elementary School in the Pico-Union area, and his wife Martha, a film and television librarian at UCLA, bought their 1,800-square-foot hilltop home in 1978 for $65,000. Yee describes the home’s functional style as “1920s expedient. I think it was built not as a fashion statement.” He estimates the house and double-wide lot are worth about $200,000 today. Born and reared in Portland, Yee left the Pacific Northwest at the age of 22 in search of a more sophisticated environment, which he found in Echo Park.

“This is a middle- to lower-middle class area; therefore, it doesn’t have a lot of airs or attitude,” Yee said. “And because there are so many different kinds of people here, no one group of people has any tremendous ascendancy over the others.”

Yee also belongs to the Echo Park Improvement Assn. (EPIA) and organizes their bimonthly graffiti paint-outs. The group was formed in 1989 by residents alarmed with the growing trash and graffiti on their streets. The members meet monthly to organize tree plantings, clean-ups and fight against development and crime.

The EPIA has also helped revive the local Chamber of Commerce, and organized the Echo Park Security Assn., which hires a private armed-security company to patrol the streets for 10 hours each night. So far, more than 500 residents are participating, each paying $10 a month for the service.

Development of Echo Park began with Angeleno Heights in 1880, the beginning of a land boom that lasted two decades. Today, Angeleno Heights boasts the highest concentration of Victorian homes in Los Angeles. In 1885, enterprising investors began cable car service to open up the hills of Echo Park for subdivision. By 1896, the cable cars had given way to electric cars. Development of Echo Park continued slowly until the 1920s. Even today, the high cost of building on an incline helps keep the rustic nature of Echo Park intact.

In 1886, English landscape architect Joseph Henry Tomlinson was hired by the city to create a park in what was then a dammed-up spring. As the story goes, when Tomlinson called out to his assistant, his voice echoed off the surrounding hills, and the 26 acres became known as Echo Park. The park’s eight-acre lake is the largest artificial lake in the city’s park system.

Just north of the park sits Angelus Temple, built by the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1922 as the cornerstone of her Foursquare Gospel ministry. Sister Aimee would later explain she was led by the Lord to the site “facing the entrance of peaceful Echo Park.”

Led by more secular reasons, Susan Borden, and her husband John, a building contractor, moved from Newhall to Echo Park in 1978. “We’re not really suburban people,” Borden said. A community activist, Borden and her husband are raising their two daughters in the 650-square-foot house they built themselves. The lot was purchased for $25,000, with another $25,000 spent for building materials. The two-bedroom, one-bath house sits on a 50-foot-by-150-foot lot on a hill near Elysian Heights Elementary School and was appraised last year for $150,000. “This is a wonderful neighborhood if you want to see different faces,” Borden said. “One of the few neighborhoods that is truly diverse.”

It is this diversity that both defines and divides Echo Park. “I think that one of the problems in Echo Park is the diversity is so great here it’s really hard to include all of the groups in any one thing,” realtor Lenox said. “Everyone seems to unite over fighting crime, of course. That’s kind of a common denominator, a common issue among all of the groups.”

LAPD Senior Lead Officer Joe Writer, of Northeast Division, works closely with the EPIA. He credits the organization as a positive force in decreasing crime. “The people here are really focused in on what needs to be done,” Writer said. “And not just crime, but a variety of improvements, improving the quality of life for everyone in the neighborhood.”

At a Glance

Population 1993 estimate: 33,986

Median age: 29.2 years

Annual income Median household: 23,701

Household distribution Less than $30,000: 61.5% $30,000 - $60,000: 28.5% $60,000 - $100,000: 7.8% $100,000 - $150,000: 1.9% $150,000 +: 0.4%