Echo Park Lake: Neighborhood Ashtray?
LA hosted its annual Coastal Cleanup Day last weekend, and as CBS reports, it extended beyond the beaches into some of the local parks. On the eastside, volunteers turned out at Echo Park, where they picked up 5,017 cigarette butts – that’s 5 lbs. of used smokes laying around a park that isn’t that big. That’s flat-out depressing. I actually went running around the lake a few days ago and realized that it’s is much prettier from a distance. The lotus flowers no longer bloom – no one seems to know why – and the lake had a few dead and dying ducks stuck in some kind of really bad-smelling, toxic-looking spill on one end.To the credit of Parks & Rec, they had workers there pulling out the dead birds, but it didn’t exactly make for a relaxing run. It’s a shame because Echo Park is a great neighborhood, but I just think there are too few green spaces for too many people, and this little patch can’t handle the number of visitors it gets. It’s a big debate – the same one they are having over at Silver Lake Resevoir (here’s an old Curbed LA post on the issue) with endless plans and counter-plans and protests over the opening of the meadow. I do see both sides. Chances are, opening the meadow will lead to more traffic, trash and stress on the fragile environment there. But we do need more parks. So what’s the answer?
mp said:
Ha!!! Echo park a “great neighborhood” Pleeese… The answer is to build a wall around it so that none of us can further destroy it.
September 26, 2008 1:43 PM
Echo Park Birds Stuck in Muck | Redfin Los Angeles Sweet Digs said:
[...] Looks like I’m not the only one who has noticed how many birds are dying and sick in Echo Park Lake. Chicken Corner, an Echo Park blog, wrote this week about the problem, with lots of locals weighing in as well. The blog’s author, Jenny Burman, apparently spoke to a Parks & Rec worker who thinks it may be avian botulism. Yuk. It does sound like it could be, though—the sick birds seem stuck and unable to move in whatever the toxic-spill looking stuff is on the edges of the lake. [...]
October 10, 2008 12:22 PM
Darrell said:
I grew up fishing at Echo Park Lake. I live nearby now. I know the place well. I have to report that it’s as clean as it’s ever been.
Which is to say that it’s always been dark green, murky and will probably always have rafts of foam, feathers, dead carp, plastic, Styro and various bird carcasses that gather on the north ends. These nooks, towards Aimee’s church and the storm drain outfall, are where the wind and currents gather such detritus. You’ll notice the southern end, towards 101, is usually cleaner.
There have always been the occasional dead duck. Worse are the fly-blown carp. You smell them from yards away. But the place still harbors some amazing fish. The loss of the panfish — bluegills, sunnies, crappie — is a bad loss: they are the fish for kids. Few are left due I believe to the introduction of the Florida bass, a ravenous monster. You might see me there with the fly rod, stop and say hello.
Darrell K.
October 14, 2008 12:30 PM
Tabascokid2717 said:
Anybody know what the circumference of Echo Park Lake is? I’ve been running around it in the a.m. and was wondering just how far I’m running in the morning there….
August 27, 2009 3:14 PM