Park usage slowed during the pandemic, of course, and the overall condition of the park degraded in kind, but it was truly jarring to see it suddenly thrust into a weird sort of kettled purgatory.Īnd there was another casualty of Echo Park’s steel wire era-the vendors who sold food and drinks in the park were given an unceremonious boot too.
As such, it attracted a diverse crowd, from big family birthday parties at the picnic tables to young couples on pedal boat dates and trendy transplants fresh out of Brooklyn or Culver City. That’s not to say it was paradise before the closure, but the energy was good, and in a time with decreasing options for Third Places, it was the rare community hub where you were not expected to spend any money, a truly public space, unlike the malls that so often fill that purpose. It felt claustrophobic and dystopian like you were living in a walled city, and there was the unshakeable feeling that you were under surveillance. Not that any of this was strictly impossible with the fence up, but there was something undeniably oppressive about trying to kick back in an area surrounded by chain link with controlled access points. The effect on the atmosphere is immediately apparent-even on a weekday afternoon, people lounge all over the gently sloping grass, goslings and ducklings stray from the shore up to the sidewalk to snack on breadcrumbs and spilled takis, and joggers turn laps around the path. Now, more than two years later, the fence is down, and Echo Park Lake is fully open again, just in time for prime picnic and park hangout season.
The park was totally closed for two months, then reopened with a chain link fence and only a few entrances and exits. And then there was the controversial closure in 2021, in which former City Council member Mitch O’Farrell and the LAPD forcibly evicted some 200 unhoused residents who created a community in the park. In the 21st century, there was a major two-year renovation from 2011 to 2013, in which the lake was drained and redesigned to favor water cleanliness, and the surrounding park was re-landscaped to match the neighborhood’s increasingly trendy image.
There has been a fence around Echo Park Lake a scant few times since its conversion from a man-made reservoir into a public park in the 1890s.
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