Welcoming Back ‘Lady of the Lake’

The concrete statue stood sentinel over the lake in Echo Park from the depths of the Depression through the ravaging rise of street gangs.

By the time the 14-foot woman was taken down in 1986, she was cracked and marred by graffiti, her fingers were broken and her upraised hands seemed more fitting to a stick-up than to her mythical vigil over one of the oldest communities in Los Angeles.

Now, the Lady of the Lake is back.

After a three-year campaign by preservationists, the city has taken her out of a maintenance yard, fixed her hands and coated her with an anti-graffiti sealant. The Art Deco statue, originally called La Reina de Los Angeles, will be officially unveiled today at 5 p.m.

“It reminds us of how the neighborhood used to be,” said Marsha Perloff, a co-founder of the Echo Park Historical Society.

To Perloff and many others, the statue is a sign of renewal, both a cause to look back and to celebrate new improvements in an area known for its clapboard flats and teetering hillside bungalows.

Crime is down, the streets are cleaner and more professionals are moving into the area to take advantage of low housing prices and a central location just north of the downtown skyscrapers, between Silver Lake and Chavez Ravine.

But although Echo Park is clearly changing, most say it is staying true to a live-and-let-live spirit that has been at its core since it began growing out of the arroyos and vineyards last century. Once called Red Gulch for its communist sympathies, the area has been a haven for artists, immigrants and blacklisted filmmakers.

It grew organically, without a plan, rambling up hills so steep that the city built stairways in some places instead of roads. It is a place with goats and chickens and weeds, a place of hectic boulevards and street vendors and old eucalyptuses.

Named after the park that sits at its center just off the Hollywood Freeway, Echo Park has a strong commercial core surrounded by mostly working-class neighborhoods.

Some complain that gentrification tied to the influx of affluent professionals into the Craftsman and Victorian homes is sharpening class lines in the predominantly Latino area. They say the newcomers often bunker up in the hills and shop outside the area.

“I’m seeing a strange division between haves and have-nots,” said Ida Potash, a real estate agent who has lived in the area since the 1950s. The new residents “take their business out of the community.”

Potash said the working-class area is now dotted with islands of wealth. On her street, most homes are in the $120,000 range, she said, but two homes have been revamped and cost upward of $400,000.

Conrado Terrazas, a resident and staff member for Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, said the class differences are more geographical. “As you go higher in the hills, it’s more white,” he said. “And it’s more Latino in the flats.”

But like most longtime residents, both Terrazas and Potash emphasize a deep loyalty to Echo Park, and say it is changing mostly for the better.

In the last six years, violent crime is down 40% in the Northeast L.A. area that includes Echo Park, said Los Angeles Police Department Capt. Kyle B. Jackson.

Gang crime dropped 23% in the last year, he said. Jackson did not have figures specifically for Echo Park but he said it is “doing quite well.”

“There is definitely still a problem with gangs,” said Susan Bordon of the Echo Park Improvement Assn. “But they’re not in charge anymore.”

Juan Alatorre, 28, said the area was a lot more dangerous when he moved there from Guadalajara eight years ago. Gang members would hang out in the park and it was a bad idea to walk around at night, he said.

Now he takes his young daughter and son on strolls in the park every day, to see the ducks and kick a ball around. In the evenings, he sometimes walks past the elegant Victorian homes atop Angelino Heights.

“There used to be a lot of problems years ago,” he said. “Crime and trash were bad. People would just leave grocery carts in the lake. But for the last two years it’s been really peaceful.”

With the peace has come an increase in neighborhood activism. The Echo Park Improvement Assn. was founded in the late 1980s to combat graffiti but it has taken on other endeavors. The group has planted hundreds of trees along Sunset Boulevard and elsewhere, helped establish a community garden, fights efforts to open new liquor outlets and organizes festivals.

The Echo Park Security Assn. began as a Neighborhood Watch-style offshoot in 1991 and the historical society was established in 1995.

Residents also joined together to complain about traffic flooding their streets on the way to Dodger Stadium; team management finally closed the Scott Avenue stadium entrance in 1996.

The art community, meanwhile, has been steadily growing. Three galleries recently opened along Echo Park Avenue, and an art festival, which is running this weekend, began four years ago.

Robin Blackman, 37, and her husband recently opened Foto Teka, a photography gallery. They said the area’s cheap rent and sense of community are a strong lure for artists who can’t afford pricier enclaves such as neighboring Silver Lake.

“We’re the underdog community,” Blackman said. “And I’ve never seen a community that’s this ethnically diverse.’

On Friday, Blackman was helping to prepare for the art festival that will culminate with the unveiling of the statue today.

Sculpted by Ada Mae Sharpless, the figure was commissioned in 1934 by the Works Progress Administration. Its Spanish name means “Queen of the Angels” and it features a relief of the city at its base.

But it gradually became known as the Lady of the Lake, standing grandly on a point at the head of the lake for 52 years. It was removed so that the Department of Public Works could put a pump house there in the 1980s, officials said, and since its return in May, the statue has stood on the east shore.

It cost $10,000 to move the 8,000-pound figure, and the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, which contracted the work, had not tallied the overall price for the restoration, officials said.

Although some residents felt the money would have been better spent on a recreation center for children, many feel the statue is a symbol of pride.

“So many people have come up and said, ‘I remember that statue from when I was a little girl,’ ” Perloff said.