LOTUS LAND : ARTIST-PHOTOGRAPHER DAUNA WHITEHEAD’S DOUBLE TAKE ON A LOS ANGELES LANDSCAPE

ECHO PARK ISN’T LOS ANGELES’ FIRST, NOR THE BIGGEST. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN just a small lake with a tiny island reached by a wood bridge, dotted with palm trees at its northern extremity and aswarm with ducks, all surrounded by a venerable neighborhood of old houses and apartments and Aimee Semple McPherson’s 1920s Angelus temple. Strolling through the park, keeping eyes well below the gray-stucco apartment monster on the west hill, visitors can believe they are in the Los Angeles of the ‘30s and ‘40s, of “Chinatown,” “Zoot Suit” and “True Confessions,” Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. A time when the air was cleaner, the music sweeter, the prospects richer.

Echo Park cost the city $5,637 when it opened in 1895; that was the amount paid to dredge the 15-acre pond, still the largest artificial lake in any city park. Originally landscaped with willows, eucalyptus and English-garden shrubs and flowers, the park inspired a Times writer to rhapsodize in 1904: “The view from the south end of the park looking across the lake with the boathouse and rustic bridge in the foreground and the Sierra Madre range in the background is a gem and would make a fine painting.”

But time, crime and budget limitations have since stripped the park of almost all low-growing vegetation. A water-aeration system was installed in 1984, along with a geyser fountain that shoots water 30 feet into the air, serving no obvious purpose except to drench people in paddle boats who venture too close. The playground, which includes tennis courts and a baseball diamond across the Hollywood Freeway from the park, is the oldest in the city. Like its Midwestern counterparts, the tiny swimming pool, tucked into the elbow of the freeway on-ramp, is open only in July and August. Lotuses--giant pink flowers crammed into the northwest corner of the lake--inspired the park’s annual Asian food-and-crafts Lotus Festival. Nobody is sure just how or when the lotuses were planted; local folklore has it that one of McPherson’s missionaries brought the seeds from China in the 1920s and tossed them into the pond.

A few decades ago, the area was a hotbed of radicals, and it has always been home to artists and writers drawn to the cheap rents and picturesque hills--and to the enduring, egalitarian park.

Artist-photographer Dauna Whitehead has taken hundreds of pictures of the park, superimposing images of starkly silhouetted palms with surreal, almost foggy vistas. Unlike the late Carlos Almaraz, who painted the park in bright, contemporary colors, Whitehead evokes Echo Park’s past, a distant landscape seen through a refractive mirror. “I love Echo Park,” she says. “I love the mix of people and classes and races and nationalities. I’m at ease here.”

I am, too. In an area known more for gang warfare than box-lunch socials, the park is neutral ground. Filipino grandparents feed the ducks; Salvadoran mothers push strollers. Young Mexican lovers hold hands and sit on the grass, kissing with restrained public passion. Vietnamese families picnic at the north end. An African-American man warms up before his workout while an Asian group moves through tai chi exercises. An occasional yuppie ventures down from the heights--Angeleno and Elysian--to jog, rent a paddle boat or feed the already plump ducks. Some people even try to fish in the lake, a serene, near-futile pastime.