My love letter to Echo Park

Flickr photo via Orrin

Inspired by a recent LAist post and the Foodlatio post, “One Man’s Love Letter to L.A.: If You Don’t Like It Here, ‘Get The Fuck Out’” I think we need to write a love letter to Echo Park to remind everyone (especially with the Echo Park Lake rehab project) why we love this ‘hood. We’ve had a couple of friends and roommates ditch out on LA after only a couple of months in Echo Park, and we think they missed out on a great thing. Here is our love letter, and feel free to share yours in the comments below.

We love walking up those steep hills even if you’re lazy, because you needed a pricey 6-pack from The House of Spirits

We love the sunsets and the great weather 330 days of the year

We love looking at the golden domed Ukranian church

We love Elysian Park, and that even with the Lake closure, we have PLENTY of amazing open park space to use

We love the grassroots activism, part of Echo Park history and its present

We love the walking: You can walk to a grocery store, a great bar, a great restaurant, easily

We love the true sense of community: Meet the right people, and you’ll understand why they’ve lived here for 30, 40 or 50 years!

We love making change: we can actually contribute to our community in a positive way – idealistic, yes, but with the right research and the right people, it happens!

We love our mascot, Maria/Mario the Goose

We love the stairways, that in good weather you can get a free workout

We love the smell of jasmine at dusk, the BBQs on holidays, the chaotic sulfur smells on the 4th of July

We love Echo Park! It’s expensive to live here, there are too many hipsters, it gets way too hot in September, Glendale Blvd. is a mess, and it doesn’t always smell so great. And, like the original love letter to LA says, “Most tourists hate this town too but LA is like a fungus, it grows on you. There is no immediate visual pull like San Francisco, or history like Paris, or skyline like New York…. While we may not have many marquee attractions, what we do have is a bunch tiny pieces to the mosaic that makes up this great city.” I’d like to think Echo Park is a big chunk of that mosaic, where anyone could learn to love LA.

2 Responses to “My love letter to Echo Park”

1. Orrin says:

   September 14, 2011 at 10:35 pm

   Hey, that’s the perfect use of my photo …taken at the Magic Gas/Chango intersection!

   -Orrin
2. foodlatio says:

   September 15, 2011 at 5:37 pm

   I love the civic pride, we need more of this around here. Well done Angeleno.

   For the original foodlatio LA Love Letter:
   http://foodlatio.com/post/9960190970/los-angeles-i-love-you

   Cheers,
   Chris Backley