Monday, October 29, 2007 – Echo Park

East on Sunset, on the way to Union Station, you pass through Echo Park, the original center of the film industry in Los Angeles, before the studios moved to Hollywood just before World War I – Mack Sennett's studio was located here until the end of the silent era, and a good number of silent comedies were shot in the neighborhood, and later the shorts – Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Our Gang, Ben Turpin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Charley Chase, Chester Conklin, and Three Stooges.  Tom Mix built his studio here, just over the hill in Silverlake actually, and lots of westerns were shot in hills here. Echo Park has been used as a movie location – Chinatown, Kentucky Fried Movie, Mi Vida Loca, and so on, including parts of the original 1953 film version of The War of the Worlds.  It has "the look."  And Echo Park also gave us a good mystery novel and a pretty good movie of the same name.  Oh yeah, Echo Park was also home to Art Ingals, who in 1956 built the first Go-Kart in a storefront on the 1900 block of Echo Park Boulevard.  Now Echo Park is primarily Latino, except for the working-class Chinese, as Los Angeles' Chinatown is nearby.

The area is full of murals that now make Echo Park another world.

Full-Color Destiny – "Sculpting another Destiny" – mural by Ricardo Mendoza – 1571 Sunset Boulevard at Echo Park Boulevard

 

Angelic Music – "The Angels of Music (Los Angelitos de la Musica)" – Annie Sperling-Cesano and others – Descanso Street and Sunset Boulevard

 

Echo Images – From Echo Park to Silverlake

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik