This must be Echo Park

For as long as downtown L.A. has been a bustling center for American business and trade, Echo Park has been its nearest escape. A slow walk down the neighborhood’s winding boulevards and up its remarkably steep hillside streets — if you dare — is the best way to take in one of Southern California’s first suburbs.

The stately Victorian homes to which 19th century business leaders would retire after long days at their downtown offices are still intact, perched on the high ground above Sunset Boulevard along Carroll Avenue, with a few holdouts along its parallel streets.

So is Keystone Studios, the world’s first enclosed film stage and studio and the birthplace of slapstick comedy, though it has since been repurposed as a public storage facility (not the worst case of historic preservation in Los Angeles).

Even some of the first efforts to make Los Angeles a viable Anglo-American settlement can still be found on a stroll around Echo Park Lake, originally a reservoir for drinking water when it was completed in 1868. Paddle boats have gently treaded its surface since it expanded into a vaguely English-style park in 1892 — the same year that palm trees were imported from Mexico to obscure its proximity to the city center.

In addition to being one of the few neighborhoods in Los Angeles to welcome culturally diverse immigrants during the population boom at the turn of the 20th century, including those from Mexico, Cuba and the Philippines, Echo Park’s illusory distance from the rat race has attracted — and continues to attract — countercultural figures. Ricardo Flores Magón, while in exile from his native Mexico for social reform activism that would later spark the Mexican Revolution, laid low on the northern border in 1915 to live with his comrades on a 5-acre tract. This corner, nicknamed “Red Hill,” was later home to Carey McWilliams, author of Southern California Country: An Island on the Land and other landmark texts spreading leftist perspectives on regional development.

The architecture of Echo Park may still be about as low to the ground as it was a century ago (its tallest structure, the Citibank building, is a mere eight stories yet still towers over its neighbors), but displacement and urban renewal have certainly taken residence here as well.

What was once a part of “Edendale,” a cluster of neighborhoods that included Silver Lake and Los Feliz to the northwest, has gone to great lengths to contribute to the hipster image of the Eastside while still preserving some of the idyllic nature associated with its former name.

The trendy cafes, shops and bars lining the three main commercial streets — Sunset Boulevard, Glendale Boulevard and Echo Park Avenue — all vie for attention without being too obvious about it. Crowds, in turn, compete for seats at Canyon Coffee, Honey Hi and Laveta during the day, and hop between late-night spots, including Club Bahia and the Short Stop, well into the night.

That is not to say, however, that Echo Park is a monolith of hipsterdom. Surviving several waves of gentrification, multiculturalism remains active in small businesses, such as Kien Giang Bakery and Centro Botanico Nacional, an herb shop that has offered spiritual cleansings using traditional Latin American medicinal practices for nearly three decades. At this year’s Lotus Festival, hundreds of paper lanterns hovered above Echo Park Lake in honor of the local Filipino community.

Perhaps the neighborhood’s spirit is best expressed on the northwest corner of Sunset and Echo Park. Ricardo Mendoza’s Sculpting Another Destiny, a larger-than-life mural of Chicano figures symbolizing the community care that took place in this former maternity clinic building, now frames Cantiq, a “one-stop self-care shop” for gender- and size-inclusive lingerie. Yes, Echo Park is an escape — and it remains among one of L.A.’s most multifaceted.

Discover a lesser-known history of Echo Park at Tom of Finland Foundation

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Despite being a museum recognized by the City of Los Angeles as a Historic-Cultural Monument, TOM House does not make its presence known. Hidden behind tall hedges on the steeply sloped Laveta Terrace far from the boulevard, it’s open only two days a week for small tours by appointment only. Tom of Finland made a career of bypassing U.S. censorship codes to eventually become the most renowned artist of homoerotic imagery.

In the last decade of his life, the Finnish artist lived at this 1911 Craftsman home owned by Durk Dehner, who helped Tom showcase his work across California during the AIDS epidemic. (The two founded Tom of Finland Foundation, headquartered at TOM House, together in 1984.) As photos along the stairwell make clear, members of the local and national Queer community (including John Waters, Mike Kelly, and Bruce Vilanch) frequently could be spotted within the three-story home or its extensive hillside backyard shrouded in passion fruit trees and ad hoc furniture arrangements.

“Los Angeles is the Queerest city in the world,” the guide tells us at the beginning of our two-hour tour, before relating tales about any detail that grabs the attention of visitors. The character of the century-old home is deepened by artistic embellishments beyond the displayed framed drawings by the artist, including Renaissance-esque paintings of nude men on the ceiling and hasty Sharpie drawings on the cabinets by contemporary artists the Haas Brothers.

If you’re lucky, the improvised tour will be interrupted by a visit from Dehner, whose art-filled bedroom (shared with his partner, S.R. Sharp) is part of the tour. Other bedrooms are occupied by Artists-in-Residence, who typically stay at the home for three months at a time to carry on the risqué legacy of Tom of Finland.

SEE THE COMPLETE ARTICLE BY SHANE REINER-ROTH

Published: 4th December 2024

Categorised in: News