Stories and items from other parts of the blog:
* Fire burns a Glassell Park garage. Eastside 911
* Got a garden but not a green thumb? Home & History
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Film crew turns the clock back on Angeleno Heights store
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LAPD Northeast Division’s newest crime fighting tools are Facebook, Twitter & YouTube
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Silver Lake tree is long on lemons
June 2009
The battle over the future of the Southwest Museum on Mt. Washington has been going on almost since the first day it was taken over in 2003 by the Autry National Center in Griffith Park. Many residents and organizations from Northeast Los Angeles have worried from the start that the 102-year-old Southwest Museum, which owns a treasure-trove of Native America artifacts, would lose its collection and its identity despite promises by the Autry to keep the Mt. Washington landmark open. This afternoon, before a city panel called the Board of Referred Powers, the Friends of the Southwest Museum will try to prevent the Autry from getting permission to expand its facility in Griffith Park as part of its effort to ensure that the Mt. Washington facility will remain an active museum.
* Update: The board postponed making a decision for three weeks to give the Autry Museum and Councilman Jose Huizar time to work on a binding agreement linking the expansion of the Autry in Griffith Park to the re-opening of the Southwest Museum on Mt. Washington.
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Echo Park vegans don’t like meat but love to party. Echo Elysian Forum
Three-peat: Eric Garcetti swearing-in ceremony at 6 pm at LA City College Theater. Council District 13
Campus cafe owner fights to stay at Cal State LA. Cool State LA
A new blog in the neighborhood. Echo Park Now
Open until midnight: Late night hours coming this summer to parks in Boyle Heights, Cypress Park, Echo Park-adjacent & Glassell Park. LA Now & City of LA
A Santa Monica-transplant closes shop in Atwater. AV Newbie
Montecito Heights before and after brush fires. Above the City
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Stories and items from other parts of the blog:
* A Silver Lake beekeeper serves up home grown honey in Atwater. Eastsider on the Go
* Crime on a cul de sac has a resident worried. Eastside 911
* A Chinatown Victorian makes a move (finally) to Highland Park. Home & History
* Hermon goes shopping for a market. Eastside Citizen
Photo by Amy Seidenwurm
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On Saturday morning, over steaming bowls of menudo served in Styrofoam bowls, the members of the Southern California Old Timers gathered within the brick walls of the Maravilla Handball Court in East Los Angeles. This group of mostly older, former prisoners and veteranos from barrios across Southern California had come here not only to attend their 20th Annual Menudo Breakfast. They were also here as part of an effort to preserve the handball court, built in the early 1920s, and to honor its history and the memory of Michi Nishiyama and her husband, Tommy Shigeru, the Japanese-American couple who ran the place and the adjacent grocery store for decades.
The court on Mednik Avenue served as an unofficial recreation center, gathering place, gambling hall and, at times, refuge not only for members of the Maravilla Handball Club but for nearby residents and members of the Lomita Mara and other gangs.
“The attraction was the game plus the people,” said Ronnie Villegas, 59, who grew up in the housing project across Mednik Avenue. “It was a safe place to come from the projects and from the police. It was a shelter. They [cops] would look in the door but wouldn’t come in.”
When word came down that Maravilla Handball Court might be sold, some former and current residents decided to try and save the wedge-shaped community landmark, said Amanda Perez, founder of the Maravilla Historical Society. “It was built by homies and the community brick by brick.”
Photos by Rick Morton, the Maravilla Historical Society & The Eastsider
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They are dead, having fallen victim to some mysterious ailment, and perhaps some city neglect, after blooming in Echo Park Lake for more than 70 years. But that news apparently never reached the editors of Sunset. In the July issue, the magazine recommends that readers take a day trip to Echo Park to enjoy the non existent blooms: “Echo Park Lake transforms into an aquatic garden through late September, with lotuses blooming on the water.” Well, they won’t this year and probably not for many years to come until the city replace the bed.
The magazine also recommends stopping by the Echo Park Film Center, which announced it will be closed in July. Well, we all make mistakes (like spelling hommies instead of homies the first time around). So, in order to avoid further confusion and disappointment among Sunset magazine readers, The Eastsider presents the list of …
Things You Won’t Be Able To Do in Echo Park in July
* Attend the Lotus Festival, which was axed by the city’s budget crunch.
* Find a sober patron at Barragan’s on a Wednesday.
* Sleep without a techno-dance beat pulsing through your head.
* Leave Pioneer Chicken with grease and Orange Bang stains on your shirt.
* Walk through Elysian Park without coming across evidence of ritual sacrifice, random art, a lowrider car show or 1,000 roaring motorcyles.
* Walk through Elysian Park without coming across evidence of ritual sacrifice, random art, a lowrider car show or 1,000 roaring motorcyles.
Feel free to add to the list.
Photo by Mocodragon via Flickr
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Five children and two adults injured in Lincoln Heights fire. LAFD
From Echo Park pig to Los Feliz pork roast. Eating LA
Hope is up and crime is down on Drew Street one year after a Glassell Park gang raid. LA Times
Don’t expect those pot clinics to close down anytime soon. LA Times
Are you sure you want real English food at the Fresh & Easy? Eating LA
What you can do with a Silver Lake porch. Apartment Therapy
The Dub Club Decade: Echo Park’s role in an L.A. reggae revival. Evil Monito
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s51o1LbHYiw&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
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If you ever wondered why the neighborhood is called Echo Park, then you should talk to Martin, who writes in about a dance party heard far and wide this weekend:
“Do you know the location of the booming vibrating dance music that has echoed around the neighbourhood for a second night? We first heard it Friday night (June 26) from home near the lake, south of Sunset. Then Saturday night I was attending an event off Lakeshore Drive in the hills. It was clearly heard starting at about 9 or 10pm. Returning home it was audible again like a distant rumble or booming, equally loud but clearly at some distance. Traffic, human voices and mocking birds are usually the only sounds at night here, this is something new and goes on very late.”
A sleepless Echo Park resident named Erika apparently found the source of all that noise and reports about it on the Echo Elysian Forum:
“Well i woke up at 3AM, uncorked my painful earplugs and it was still going
on…drove around the neighborhood looking for it for about an hour finally
located it at a place called “under the bridge” (close to 1168 S. Glendale Blvd.)”
on…drove around the neighborhood looking for it for about an hour finally
located it at a place called “under the bridge” (close to 1168 S. Glendale Blvd.)”
Photo by Hexodus via Flickr
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Perhaps the last thing you want to hear on a Saturday afternoon is that about 1,000 members of a motorcycle club are headed in your direction to picnic and party. But that’s the news LAPD Northeast Division Capt. Bill Murphy received today after the Rare Breed Motorcycle Club, which held a huge and rowdy gathering last year in San Pedro, decided to change the location of their annual picnic at the last minute. Instead of hanging out near the harbor, hundreds of Rare Breed bikers, primarily African-Americans who prefer Harley-Davidsons, were roaring into Elysian Park, setting up barbecues and tents near the Avenue of the Palms on Stadium Way and jamming nearby streets.
But the motorcycle club was not the only horde headed to Elysian Park today. Tens of thousands of Dodger fans and their cars were going to start arriving late in the afternoon at the stadium next to the Elysian Park for a 7:10 pm game. Oh, just to make things more interesting, there was also a wedding scheduled at the LAPD Police Academy, wedged between park, the stadium and all those bikers. While Murphy scrambled to call in police units, it was too late to block the bikers.
“They already owned the park before we had resources,” Murphy said at a command post set up in the Police Academy parking lot. “We got an unexpected one-thousand motorcyclists here.”
So, officers spent the afternoon blocking streets near the picnic, tying up neighborhood traffic. Murphy said officers at the blockades were informed to let in members of the Police Academy wedding party. Meanwhile, his officers were able to negotiate a deal with the bikers:
they would have to leave by 4:30 before the early wave of Dodger fans arrived. With officers, traffic cops and paramedics looking on, a long and noisy parade of Rare Breed bikers roared out of the park through a pre-arranged path on Stadium Way to the southbound 5 Freeway. There were no arrests and no attempt to forcibly evict the bike club, Murphy said. “There was no need to use force.”
By 5 pm, Stadium Way was jammed once again, this time with Dodger fans.
Today’s last minute and apparently illegal biker picnic is the most recent bike and car club gathering that has clogged the streets of Elysian Park and drawn criticism from nearby residents. Murphy said residents complained to him today about the biker picnic. But, he noted, the Rare Breed bikers were much better behaved than the baseball crowd.
“The Dodger fans are usually worse,” Murphy said. Today’s biker invasion “was nothing like Opening Day.”
Related stories:
* Another day of cops and cars in Elysian Park. Echo Park Only
* Three killed in Pico Rivera outside a biker club pizza party. LA Now
Top photo by Rick Morton
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