Echo Park’s History Reveals a Bohemian Soul and a Latin Heart

Echo Park — nestled within Los Angeles’s hilly eastside corridor along the 101-freeway — is a vibrant neighborhood that has cultivated community since its beginnings. Down Sunset Boulevard, stop in at high-end vintage boutiques. Grab a bite to eat on Glendale Boulevard or Echo Park Ave. Take a blanket to Elysian Park or Echo Park Lake, where there’s ample greenspace and pretty views to lay out on an afternoon off.

For as long as Echo Park has had residents, the neighborhood has been a cultural crossroads. With all its grit and plentiful foliage, Echo Park is steeped in a history of Victorian-style gentility, queer bohemia, Mexican dreams, and hipster-ization. In the overlapping of these eras, the identity of Echo Park has grown more nuanced, more colorful, and more distinctive as an aesthetic haven for those who call it home.

Echo Park Lake 

It started with a lake. In 1866, Echo Park Lake was established as a drinking water reservoir.

On the other side of the Rockies, the United States was recovering from the Civil War. Meanwhile, the American West was just starting to grapple with its American identity. And this was long before Los Angeles had freeways, movies, or even a sizeable metro area.

In 1866, there were less than 5,000 people living in the city of Los Angeles. It was practically a village! But it was in that year the first street lights appeared, the first bank was opened, and the first rail line arrived. So, Echo Park Lake was part of the city’s first wave of industrial development. And as Los Angeles would grow, Echo Park would sit at the heart of this urban expansion.

Angelino Heights

At the end of the 19th-century, Angelino Heights was developed as one of the first suburbs of Downtown Los Angeles (second only to Bunker Hill, which has since been demolished).

Still standing and preserved in the center of today’s Echo Park neighborhood, Angelino Heights features Victorian-style homes.

“The idea was to create an upper-crust neighborhood where the elite might live above the hoi polloi while spending huge sums (think $7,000) to build dream homes in this picturesque setting,” says LA Magazine’s Glen Creason.

In 1891, four property owners relinquished 33 acres of land surrounding Echo Park Lake to the city, and the area was turned into a public park.

Edendale

Edendale was a Los Angeles district established in 1892 and makes up what is today Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. During the first half of the 20th-century, Edendale was the bohemian epicenter of the silent film industry, the early gay rights movement, and a refuge for political outcasts.

“L.A. was then one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States — but in Edendale, you could live amid native black walnut trees, possums and scrub jays,” says Hector Tobar of the Los Angeles Times.

Edendale was given its character by the poets, photographers, and artists who moved into its hills and valleys in the 1910s and 1920s. The area was made iconic by the birth of the film industry.

Early film companies tagged Edendale as their headquarters. This included Selig-Polyscope Studio, Bison Studio, Universal Studio Edendale 1912, and Keystone Studios. It was here where Charlie Chaplin also got his start.

“It was rustic and it was spacious and it was a place where your soul could expand,” says writer and historian Daniel Hurewitz, quoted by the LA Times, “and it was filled with people who had similar desires.”

Unlike New York’s artistic society, densely saturated and naturally overcrowded, the Edendale scene offered its urban-minded residents an anti-urban serenity.

The LA Times goes on to quote Hurewitz:

“ ‘There’s really a different relationship between the public sphere and private lives in L.A.,’ said Hurewitz. ‘You experience privacy more intensely in L.A.’ The privacy that allowed gay life to flourish behind closed doors eventually gave it the courage to seek a public voice, he said.”

In most artistic enclaves — especially in the years of flappers and cabarets — gay life was alive and happening. Edendale was that for the West Coast’s queer community, many of whom were intrinsic to the birth of filmmaking.

Mid-century, Edendale dissolved into greater Los Angeles. After World War II, swaths of white folks moved further west or to the San Fernando Valley. The Latino community showed up. The neighborhood changed yet again. But Edendale’s legacy would carry on, as would the intersection of arts and queer identity.

El Nayarit

The story of El Nayarit perfectly encapsulates the history of Echo Park during the second half of the 20th-century. El Nayarit was a restaurant founded by Mexican immigrant Doña Natalia Barraza, who came to the United States at the onset of the Mexican Revolution. She may not have been able to read or write English, but she knew how to run a business and she left a historic impact on the community.

She first opened El Nayarit in Boyle Heights and, in 1951, opened a larger location at 1822 Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.

The LA Times reports:

“[T]he Nayarit helped define Echo Park,” says Natalia Molina, Barraza’s granddaughter, “It provided work opportunities for well over 100 people, served delicious, authentic Mexican food, and fostered a diverse community of Latinx immigrants and others who met and mixed in the restaurant’s dining room.”

Doña Barraza not only gave the neighborhood a delicious restaurant, she established a safe and celebratory place for the community to gather.

Molina goes on to say: “Its wide-ranging customers helped chip away at racism in the city. And it was a force multiplier when it came to creating opportunities for immigrants to seize for themselves and their communities.”

If you lived in Echo Park during this time, you frequented El Nayarit, plain and simple.

When Doña Barraza died, her daughter ran El Nayarit until selling it to Cuban owners in 1971, who kept the name.

There is less written about Echo Park in the 1980s and 1990s. The neighborhood was infamous for its gang activity and gun violence. Michael Jackson shot his music video, Thriller, in Angelino Heights in 1983. And El Nayarit, with its new owners, kept serving locals and visitors. Until 2001, that is, when concert promoter Mitchell Frank bought the building and turned El Nayarit into a nightclub called The Echo.

Hipsters

Opening The Echo opened the neighborhood to its next chapter.

At the turn of the 21st-century, many American cities saw a reversal of “white flight”. In neighborhoods that had predominantly become homes to people of color, young (and often white) hipsters started moving in. This was true of Echo Park, too.

According to the research done by UC Santa Barbara’s Kimberly M. Soriano, Echo Park was 11% white in 2000. By 2010, the neighborhood was 46.7% white (which includes Latin people who identify as white).

This extreme racial shift changed Echo Park, yet again.

Today, the neighborhood is home to over 30,000 people and features a blended ethnic composition. Its streets feature murals, bars, cafés, boutiques, and parks. Residents are relatively creative and make bold fashion choices. Echo Park Lake became a homeless encampment, which has since been removed by the city.

So what is Echo Park?

Echo Park has a bohemian soul and a Latin heart. It’s a cultural crossroads and a fun place to go out. When we explore its history, we uncover a nuanced tale of American gentility, queer bohemia, and migrant power, the continued re-invention of urban identity, and a whole lot of classic Los Angeles foliage.