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 to create
Reservoir No. 4, where Echo Park Lake is now located, came across the
echo.Chronicles of the controversial negotiations in the late 1880s and early 1890s that created the park only make reference to Reservoir No. 4, according to Los Angeles Times articles of the period. An August 1892 Los Angeles Times article makes reference to a “so-called Echo Park” when the city budgeted an initial $5,000 for its creation—well before the first workers according to legend showed up to hear the echo.The name “Echo Park” does not start appearing in the Los Angeles Times with any frequency until the late 1890s when it was applied to the park as well as the neighborhood.

The community was named after a park laid out by the
city to surround a water reservoir that was turned into a recreational lake,
with a boathouse and fishing opportunities.