A Long Walk Through Echo Park

Some would say reinvention is the best antidote for a bad reputation. Ask any Angeleno.

But longtime resident Ron Emler might rescript that axiom--just a shade.

For the last 15 years or so, Emler’s prescription has called for reinvestment or better, break-a-sweat commitment. A late-to-the-game community activist, Emler, with the help of other concerned neighbors, has ministered to the sagging image of Echo Park and tried to help the neighborhood reconnect with itself.

Along the way, Emler, 60, has performed a bit of personal reinvention: from high school career counselor to real estate broker and now, stunningly, even to him, bestselling author.

The fruit of his efforts, “Ghosts of Echo Park” (Echo Park Press, 2000), co-written with a neighbor, Susan Borden, is a self-published, scrapbook-esque pictorial history of the often-maligned and determinedly undefinable neighborhood.

In his more than 30 years in Echo Park, Emler has not simply watched it go from placid to nightmare, then from struggling to “transitional”--and now somehow, to his guarded surprise, edging toward hip. He, many residents agree, has had a strong hand in shaping its trajectory.

Yet it was one thing when the book was eagerly snapped up by curious locals at Magic Gas, the neighborhood filling station. But exceeding all expectations, the book is now in its second edition (1,000 in the first edition, 3,000 in the second, already half sold) and has become a surprise bestseller at several local bookstores (charting six times on The Times’ bestseller list).

No one is more bewildered by the success than Emler himself, who started piecing it together as a quiet side effort.

“I’d been traveling through southern Oregon, in ‘97, and saw this book about Jones Valley with these sketches of a one-room schoolhouse with this folksy kind of commentary. You know, something like your Aunt Eleanor would do,” cracks Emler. “And I thought, why don’t we write a book about Echo Park?”

Chatty and anecdotal, “Ghosts” has the feel of a Sunday afternoon driving tour. With nearly 50 years as residents between them, Emler and Borden know all the shortcuts and gossip and back story. So much of Echo Park’s heritage, the authors discovered, had fallen away, or been eclipsed by the stubborn taint of high-crime rates and urban blight.

Like the railroad ties peeking through a busy thoroughfare or a Craftsman’s oak wainscoting uncovered beneath decades of paint, the idea was to dig out what was lost or forgotten, and restore it to its former glory--if only in imagination. From contributions to Hollywood’s film vault--Edendale Studios (1908-14)--to the wooden hillside staircases that seem to wend nowhere, the book explores how quintessential Echo Park came to be.

“We never thought about making money,” says Borden. “We really just wanted people to understand the history. The Victorian homes in Angelino Heights--the cable cars that used to run or the steam locomotive down Sunset. We wanted to talk to the people who have lived here since the roads were dirt.”

Roughly bordered by Elysian Park at the east, Glendale Boulevard at the west and Riverside Drive and Temple Street at the north and south, respectively, even the neighborhood’s fluid boundaries continue to be up for debate. Echo Park has always been more vivid, 3-D collage than melting-pot cliche--a free-speaking mishmash of architecture, language and custom that doesn’t always easily coalesce.

“Ron really wants to erase that negative image,” says Edna Kam, a 40-year resident and fellow Echo Park activist. “That’s why the book came about.”

Indeed. It’s a neighborhood that most Angelenos know simply as a blur, a backdrop of cantinas and clinics, dress shops and taco stands sped by en route to Dodger Stadium on balmy summer evenings.

Emler knows it’s so much more. It’s blooming lotus blossoms floating in Echo Park Lake come July. It’s such Cuban fare as medianoche and a scalding cafe con leche at El Carmelo on Sunset. Firecrackers snap the air during the weeks leading up to the Lunar New Year. Black-clad mariachis nightly stroll the main business corridor along Sunset Boulevard. And goats, rabbits and chickens take up residence alongside the artists and immigrants--from China, Mexico, El Salvador, Romania, Korea, Russia--who for decades have made homes here.

He wasn’t always so community inclined, Emler is quick to point out on this uncharacteristically chilly morning. A fire crackling in the hearth, he sits with Borden, 54, in the sunlit living room of his gray stucco home at the U of a cul-de-sac tucked off Echo Park Avenue. His picture window frames a series of impossibly steep hills, with bright white, blue and silver-gray houses peeking in and out of foliage.

Emler recalls that when he first moved in, in 1968, he was primarily in the market to minimize his commute. “I had been living in Venice and had a job in La Can~ada. And I just stumbled on the house. It had hardwood floors, was $75 a month. Of course I took it!”

Early on, Emler says, he didn’t really pay much notice to what was going on outside his doors. “I was either at work or out partying,” he admits with a gust of a laugh, settling into a Morticia Addams wicker chair. Until the late ‘80s, when the neighborhood, along with much of Los Angeles, began to change, due to “crack cocaine and gangs.” Emler’s concern only escalated when four people were shot and killed just steps from his home.

“I was afraid,” he recalls, “and I actually started to look for some place else to live.” Before he got too far, he first asked police about options. “We talked about Neighborhood Watch and I thought, well we certainly have plenty of business in my neighborhood. Let’s get started.”

One afternoon, Emler set up a table in the street and stacked it with anti-crime literature. “There were five guys rolling joints watching. I just started by saying we want to live in a clean, safe, graffiti-free neighborhood. We’re not asking for much.” Out of the small crowd that began to assemble on the asphalt, first one neighbor stepped forward. And then another. “At first it was hard to get the Police Department to come out for misdemeanors--loud music, drinking in public. But it starts with the little things. We had to get them to come and enforce those quality-of-life laws.”

But officers began to respond to infractions big and small. Month by month, the tension began to lift. There were fewer gunshots at night. Fewer youth congregating in the streets and alleys. The community canvassed and came up with funds to hire a private security service to patrol the streets. Castoffs and litter were removed from the sidewalks. Graffiti painted over, disappeared. “And though the reality has changed,” says Emler, his brow wrinkling. “the perception has not.”

That’s true, says Darin Williams, general manager of Select Patrol, the company that has provided security service since 1994. Though Echo Park now boasts one of the lowest reported crime rates in northeast Los Angeles, that factoid is mostly unknown outside of neighborhood boosters’ meetings. But that may be changing.

“More and more people,” says Borden, who stepped in about midway to help Emler assemble and edit the book, “are coming out of the woodwork and admitting that they are from Echo Park. That just didn’t used to happen.”

Likewise, property values are rising--houses that sold for $120,000 a decade ago now are edging up to $400,000. A long list of young professionals--from downtown attorneys to Westside film industry types--are snapping up parcels full of fruit trees, succulents and expansive city views. But maybe the most telling harbinger is a new (albeit mini) Starbucks that has opened just at the area’s border, where flavor-of-last-month Silver Lake crosses into Echo Park.

Emler hardly thinks Echo Park will go the way of Silver Lake. And most certainly that is not his goal. His most proud achievement has been to create a strong, vocal coalition of neighbors that crosses lines of race, ethnicity and economics.

What often gets downplayed in all of this talk of reinvention, says Emler, is the spirit of cooperation. “It’s [the] neighbors who can afford $15 a month . . . to pay for a security service . . . who help those walking down the street at 8 p.m. with a bag of groceries and a purse on their arm who are the prey of criminals.”

The book’s success, says Tim Morell, buyer at Los Feliz’s Skylight Books nearby, does speak to something particular. “Generally, with books like that we . . . get five in and see what they do. With this we’ve gone through four cases--about 120 of them. That’s just the the current edition. It’s madness!” Morell says, but suggests something significant about a community’s careful evolution. “People who move to Echo Park are often people who are really interested in the historical aspect of it . . . of the city. It seems to be the right book for the neighborhood. They are all activists, preserving a neighborhood--not just turning it over to the developers.”

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“Ghosts of Echo Park” is available through some area bookstores and on the Web at https://www.echopark.net.