Echo Park

Rather obviously, this is a view of Echo Park looking toward downtown Los Angeles.  The lake was drained for a couple of  years, and has only recently completed restoration and refilling.   People are loving the park, and it was impossible to do any kind of faithful rendering of it that didn't have at least a few people. By chance, we crossed paths with the Barnsdall Park plein air painting class.  

I don't have a lot of really useful knowledge about Echo Park.  I'm not even sure where or if there's an echo.  I don't have any really interesting personal Echo Park stories either.  I ate a machaca burrito there around dusk one time.  The best Echo Park story is the recent one that everyone seems to have read or heard.  A man with a fondness for plants stole tubers from the famous lotus plants and nurtured and raised them.  A few years after that the park's lotuses pretty much died out, probably because of stuff that drained into the lake.  Then the city drained the lake and cleaned it and fixed it, including adding a water filtration system.  But there were no lotuses.  The old ones had been planted in the 1920s.  But the day was saved by the lotus thief.  He didn't exactly give the lotuses back, but he sold them at price of his asking.  There's a awful lot of them, and they are very beautiful.  They are outside the painting, to the left.