Echo Park is a neighborhood in Los Angeles northwest of downtown. According to the website “Historic Echo Park” the neighborhood has no
official boundaries or borders. Generally, it is east and southeast of Silver Lake, north of Westlake/MacArthur Park, west and northwest of Chinatown and southwest of Elysian Park. Echo Park itself consists of the neighborhoods of Echo Park (the area immediately surrounding the lake and extending approximately a mile north on Echo Park Avenue), Angelino Heights, Colton Hill, Edendale and Elysian Heights. Dodger Stadium lies at the eastern edge of Echo Park.
The origin of the name Echo Park is not totally clear.Legend has it that the name Echo Park came into use in the 1890s after workers building the newly established city park now called “Echo Park” discovered that their voices “echoed” off the bluffs and hillsides to the east and west. A variation of that legend says the name was coined more than 20 years earlier when workers constructing a dam (more…)
This is a self-guided tour. You will
need your own vehicle. You will be able to pick up your tickets, maps and
directions at the Home
Tour Headquarters beginning at 11 AM and head off from there. Docents at each
house will help guide and inform you.
There are 8 homes on the tour.
Allow at least 4 hours to see all of them. You can see all or some of the
homes in any order. You can start at any time during between 11 AM to 4 PM.
Addresses will be provided in your program
and map. These homes are spread over a distance of nearly two miles.
There is one cluster of three homes that are in close walking distance. The
rest can be reached by automobile.
Access for the disabled is not available.
Most of the homes have multiple steps and floors in addition to long and
narrow indoor and outdoor stairways, making it very difficult for people with
physical disabilities to gain access.
Carpool when possible. Three of
the homes are withing walking distance of each other, but you will still need
a car to travel between the Home Tour Headquarters and the homes. Street
parking can also be in limited supply.
Food and drink will be available at two
locations. Baked goods at beverages will be sold outdoors at two of
the properties noted in the program. But eating and drinking is not allowed in
any of the homes.
Photography inside the homes is prohibited.
The New York Times visits Angeleno Heights and finds Murray
Burns peering out his front window:
It was a sunny March morning, and a white rental sedan
was parked in front of Murray Burns’s Victorian home on Carrol Avenue in Los
Angeles. From the car’s front seat, two German women snapped photos of the
ornately ornamented 1887 house, a Los Angeles landmark famous both as a
pristinely restored example of this period architecture and also as the set
for the television show “Charmed.”
Mr. Burns, wearing a pink Nehru shirt and Birkenstocks,
watched the gawkers from his front lawn and sighed. “This is what we live
with, every day,” he said, and, shrugging, shuffled toward the car. The women
watched him approach with trepidation, prepared for a scolding. Instead, Mr.
Burns flapped a hand at them with equal parts impatience and benevolence:
“Would you like to come in?” he asked.
The Germans ooh-ed and aah-ed as they peered around Mr.
Burns’s museum-perfect house, which is just one of 12 restored Victorians that
Mr. Burns and his wife own — mostly as income-producing rental properties —
and constantly end up showing to strangers. “We may own these homes, but we
think they belong to the people of Los Angeles,” Mr. Burns explained, as the
tourists snapped photos on his staircase. “There’s an obligation to let people
like these experience it too.”
A Home to Its Owners, A Museum to Its Fans