Echo Park in Los Angeles, July 2008

Echo Park is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California.

At the end of the 19th century, when the hills were still covered with native plants and grasses, a horse-drawn streetcar line served the dirt road that is now Echo Park Ave. The community of Echo Park was founded by Thomas Kelly, a carriage maker turned real estate developer. In the late 1880s Kelly teamed up with a group of local investors, selling off pieces of what they called "the Montana Tract." Legend says that the lake got its name after workers building the reservoir remarked that their voices echoed off the canyon walls.

Echo Park was named Edendale before the construction of the park itself. The original name survives through the U.S. Post Office Edendale branch and the Edendale branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

The Los Angeles film industry was centered in Echo Park before the studios moved to Hollywood, just before World War I. Mack Sennett's studio was in Echo Park until the end of the silent era, and a large number of silent comedies were shot in the neighborhood, as were several Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Our Gang, Ben Turpin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Charley Chase, Chester Conklin, and Three Stooges shorts. Tom Mix also built his studio just over the hill in the Silverlake area, and many Westerns were shot in hills of Echo Park, East Silverlake and the Elysian Hills. Some of the earliest screen performers, including Gloria Swanson and Tom Mix, bought homes in the Angelino Heights and surrounding neighborhoods before moving to Hollywood and other areas.

The area has continued to be used as a location for films such as Chinatown, Echo Park, Kentucky Fried Movie, Mi Vida Loca, Tending Echo Park, Quinceanera and Columbus Day. The 1960s television series Gilligan's Island was shot in the area as well as scenes in Michael Jackson's 1983 music video Thriller, as were parts of the original 1953 film version, The War of the Worlds. The Manor, a house in the television series Charmed, is also located here. The area is popular with modern filmmakers for the pre-World War II look of some districts.

Before World War I, Echo Park was a middle-class neighborhood, nicknamed "Red Hill" for a concentration of political radicals living there. (Itinerant folksinger Woody Guthrie lived on Preston Avenue at Ewing St. in the 1930s.) Since its earliest days, the neighborhood has been known to attract the creative, underground, independent, and iconoclastic elements of society. Postwar "white flight" to the suburbs resulted in the area becoming largely Latino, although there have been latinos living there since the founding of the city in the late 1700s. Many working-class Chinese immigrants also settled in Echo Park due to its proximity to Chinatown, and the area overlaps the Little Manila district of Los Angeles, home to thousands of Filipinos; a small enclave of African-Americans has existed there, east of Alvarado St. and west of Bonnie Brae Street, since the 1920s. Renowned 70s beauty queen, actress and model, Veronica Porsche, third wife of boxer Muhammed Ali, came from this neighborhood. Since the early 2000s, artists, actors, musicians and gay couples of all races have flocked the neighborhood for its relatively affordable housing and alternative feel, maikng it one of the most diversified communties in the United States.

Text from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_Park,_Los_Angeles,_California