turtles all the way down | The Valley Village View

or, AN ECHO PARK LAKE TURN-AROUND: A cautious View to historic preservation.

Through long years of misgovernance the Lake was allowed to turn into a muddy, trash-strewn, corpse-filled swamp full of noxious weeds. Not coincidentally, the neighborhood of Echo Park, with its famous Angelus Temple and thousands of picture-perfect Victorians and Craftsman bungalows with breathtaking hill Views of Downtown, deteriorated into a burned-out Vandalized gang-infested slum.

The big triangle-shaped lot at the north rim of the reservoir — still a single farmstead in 1894! — was filled by Aimee Semple MacPherson’s Angelus Temple and Parsonage in 1922.

In the late ‘Nineties and early Aughts, the neighborhood began stabilizing into one of L.A.’s vibrant mixed-race, artists-gays-and-immigrant-young-family welcoming enclaves. It was still crime-ravaged, though; full gentrification was undermined by the festering sore of the Lake at its core.

In 2011 the City of Los Angeles did the right thing, or half of the right thing, by spending what it cost ($45 million) to restore the watershed, the fish, the wildlife, the plants. The benches and walks were enhanced, and the Lake was replanted as a botanical garden of water plants — lotuses, lilies, rushes, wild gingers, reeds. All of course, graciously lorded over by some of L.A.’s oldest and most Narcissistic palms.

In 2013, then-Mayor Elect Eric Garcetti, who had represented the area on the City Council, snipped the ribbon. Here it is, after 7 years, all grown-in together, complete with fountain and Swan Boats, and all in eye-popping bloom, and teeming with fowl and fish and all Noah’s creatures except mosquitoes. Hallelujah. Click to enlarge the pics, the light was DAZZLING yesterday.

LA has returned Echo Park to being one of the most gorgeous, accessible, safe, cool and pleasant urban oases in the world. The neighborhood has already well-repaid its “debt” for the City cost of the renovation, in rising values. If anything, Echo Park has gentrified too much — but what a View!

The Coot family were out for a feed; Mom made sure junior got plenty of greens; while Old Grey Heron stood master of all he View’d.

The palmettos were out promenading in their boas; their flowing plumes, a perfect inverse of the Fountain jets.

YET, PATIENT READER, TURN AROUND:

For every shot in this album, if the camera had been turned around, this would be the View of Echo Park Lake.

I think the Angelus Temple helps out — I saw a crew of young people knocking on the tent doors and distributing boxed lunches to anyone who needed one. All of the homesites were well-thought-out, sensitive of the plants and the pathways. One had a bookcase full of literature and academic volumes. One had a kitchen folding table with a vase of flowers. There was no crime, no smell, no drunkenness, no disturbance of the wildlife in any way; their dogs wagged, they didn’t bark. This, in itself brought a tear to my eye. These were not crazy drug addicts. Theses were well-brought-up Americans, many of them people my age, suddenly dispossessed of their homes and left with no place, but what they could carve out by dint their own damn courtesy and neighborliness and ingenuity. It is a credit to the City that they haven’t run them off. But when I said in the first paragraph, that the City did half the right thing, this is what I meant. It is a CRIME that American cities ignore the social costs of displacement, homelessness, and the lives and livelihoods uprooted by investments in the urban core. This unnecessary tragedy was what Patrick Geddes labored his whole career to get us to understand about cities, redevelopment, rising rents, and social justice. And Henry George, before him. So this issue sticks in the View’s ocular like a beam. We learn nothing.

I sincerely believe the Park right now is a safer place for young women joggers, lost little infants, stray dogs, or sun-distracted tourists, with good neighbors like those I saw yesterday, caring about the place.

There are maybe 300 or so camps, spread all along the one-mile perimeter. They deserve notice. And their numbers are about to skyrocket like one of our old Baja fan palms. Congress adjourned this weekend leaving a further coronavirus relief package undecided. As Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Obamas’ pastor, put it, “God Damn America.”

Echo Park has two very good spirits presiding over it. First, giving daily benediction, the “Queen of the Angels” 1933, by WPA artist Ada May Sharpless. Second, the spirit of Aimee Semple MacPherson, who served so many thousands of meals during the Depression, that the City made her move her soup kitchen out of the park, over to Temple Street. These legacies give the place an air of grace and mercy to this day.

The lessons of that Depression Era Echo Park are well worth reflecting upon.

Green is so soothing.

This gorgeous spring-fed canyon in the oak woodlands of Griffith Park was formerly the site of the Tongva village of Maungna; it was among the first, if not the first, rancheria to be “reduced” to the Mission at San Gabriel in 1777. That left the land free to grant to Cpl. Feliz and his family (“Los Feliz”) in 1795. This spring was probably a very valuable part of the rancho grant — for though the LA River flowed right past the ranch, that was the Pueblo’s water. Water tumbling down from Santa Monica Mountain springs would have been invaluable.

Between 1910 and 1920 Griffith Park Superintendent Frank Shearer gave the city this Olmstead-inspired half-mile meander along the creek, stunningly landscaped with native and exotic wonders. Decades of neglect have been reversed in the past two years. They’ve cleaned out the muck and leaf litter and crashed tree limbs of a century, which had made the place pretty wild. It has probably never looked this good, with everything all grown in and all the water flowing and clear.