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    Echo Park boathouse gets bronzed

    The formerly beige Echo Park Lake Boathouse is now sporting a new bronze – or is it Harvest Gold? – paint color and copper collar under the lighthouse as part of  an extensive renovation of the 80-year old building. Is this the original color? It’s hard to say. Project manager Ohaji K. Abdalla with the [...]

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    Arroyo View Estates: A slice of ’60s suburbia above historic Highland Park

    Drive north on Avenue 66, passing by the tiny wood bungalows and grand Craftsman-style homes of Garvanza and Highland Park, and then take Easy Street and Fortune Way into a world of 1960-style suburbia.  Here, on a Highland Park hillside that butts up against the Pasadena city limit, a tract of about 200, mid-century ranch [...]

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    Old Russian church finds a new home in middle of a Boyle Heights apartment complex

    The leasing office of the Lorena Heights Apartments was busy today with applicants eager to live in one of the 112 units of the newly constructed affordable housing complex, which held a grand opening on Wednesday.  But what is now a crowded leasing office and recreation center was once filled with the faithful attending services [...]

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    Hermon trailer park residents say farewell to one of their own

    A  group of residents and guests gathered around the picnic tables at the center of the Monterey Trailer Park in Hermon  last Saturday to remember Paul Brown, who had lived for nearly 30 years in the trailer park under a forest of pine, oak and elm trees off Monterey Road.  Hermon activist Wendi Riser in [...]

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    “The Cut” digs into the geology and history of Echo Park & Silver Lake

    It was a year ago that Rory Mitchell wrote a story for The Eastsider exploring the history of the crumbling sandstone cliffs that line Sunset Boulevard on the border of Echo Park and Silver Lake.  Mitchell has now followed up the story with the video montage above titled “The Cut” – the name given to [...]

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    Echo Park Bohemians: The early years

    Bookseller Jake Zeitlin settled in the Elysian Heights section of Echo Park during the late 1920s and became part of a community of progressive writers and artists who found seclusion and a cheap place to live in the hills.  Zeitlin, who lived in Echo Park for about a dozen years and died in 1987, recounted [...]

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    Eastside Property: The grand urban plan behind an East L.A. neighborhood

    This Spanish-Colonial style home that recently went up for sale was built in 1926  in the far eastern tip of unincorporated East Los Angeles as part of  a subdivision called Montebello Park. The  former ranch was transformed into a new suburb with the help of  the urban planning firm of  Wilbur David Cook,  the master [...]

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    The leaning lighthouse of Echo Park is back on a solid footing

    Workers are in the final stretch of repairing and renovating the Echo Park Lake Boathouse, the 80-year-old, Spanish Colonial building on the eastern shore of the lake.  The job, which is separate from the approximately $65 million lake clean up now underway, included the installation of all  new plumbing and electrical systems, including a new [...]

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    Eastside Property: 122-year-old Atwater home recalls Riverdale days

    Most of the Spanish Colonial-style homes and storybook cottages that line the streets of Atwater Village were built in the 1920s and 1930. Those homes are relative newbies compared to this newly listed three-bedroom home in the 4000 block of  Baywood Street. The farmhouse-like structure was built in 1890, according to the listing and city [...]

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    Will Echo Park’s Lady of the Lake do an about face?

    View Echo Park Lady of the Lake’s original location in a larger map When Echo Park Lake’s costly clean up is completed next year, one of the park’s icons – the Art Deco-style Lady of the Lake statue – will be restored and returned to her original location at the tip of a peninsula on [...]

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    Highland Park exhibit revives memories of Chicano art scene

    Richard & Lisa Duardo | Photo by Martha Benedict Several of the artists who were involved in a pioneering Chicano art movement in Highland Park during the 1970s  attended Saturday night’s opening reception of  Resurrected Histories: Voices from the Chicano Arts Collectives of Highland Park. With their hair now streaked with gray, the artists, friends [...]

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    A sign of the past shines over Highland Park

    Highland Park residents on Tuesday night celebrated the restoration of another historic sign above Figueroa Street.  The neon and opal glass Manning’s Coffee Store sign was relighted as part of a program to restore some of the vintage signage, including the green and white Highland Theatre sign, which was restored last year.  Nicole Possert with [...]

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    Heritage Square declared historic landmark

    The City Council earlier this month declared Heritage Square, the open-air Montecito Heights museum dotted with fanciful Victorian-era homes and buildings, a city historic cultural monument.  While many of the buildings visible from the 110 Freeway are landmarks in their own right, the City Council’s action designates the entire museum grounds, a narrow strip of [...]

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    First Street Bridge reopens – finally

    City officials will gather on the First Street Bridge – one of the Los Angeles River spans linking Boyle Heights to downtown Los Angeles – on Tuesday morning to celebrate the reopening of the structure following a widening project  that took longer and cost more than expected.  Portions of the 82-year-old bridge have been closed [...]

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    Fire damages historic East L.A. handball court site

    A small fire broke out on Thursday afternoon on the site of a nearly 90-year-old East Los Angeles handball court that has been nominated as a state historic monument. The fire at Maravilla Handball Court – the oldest surviving handball court in East L.A. – caused relatively minor damage to a vacant store connected to [...]

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    Neighborhood Fixture: New paint and pride for an old Echo Park church

    The dusty and dingy white exterior of the nearly century-old Echo Park church at the corner of Morton and Parmer avenues was recently repainted a bold shade of terra cotta red with mustard trim.  The colors might be too bold for some but the new look has helped highlight the steeple and the old stained [...]

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