Echo Park Lake

After its two-year, $45-million makeover, Echo Park Lake will soon shed the green tarp-covered fence that lines its circumference, revealing to the public a similar-but-spruced-up version of the neighborhood's landmark. "Welcome to 29 acres of paradise," L.A. City Engineer Gary Moore said at a news conference Friday, where officials announced the lake would reopen June 15. Before it was refilled and restocked with plants, the lake was completely drained and cleaned. During the cleanup, Moore said, workers found two guns, one toilet, 20 Frisbees and a pay telephone.

The 1st District City Council race has garnered more than four times the money of previous races there, buoyed by the deep pockets and independent spending of labor and business leaders. In the runoff to replace council member Ed Reyes in the district near downtown Los Angeles, a combined $1.97 million has been raised on behalf of former Sacramento lawmaker Gil Cedillo and Reyes' chief of staff, Jose Gardea, according to campaign finance reports. The election almost ended in the primary: Cedillo received 49.32%, less than 1% shy of winning outright.

On May 27, Vicente Vasquez was digging into the bed of Echo Park Lake with his backhoe when he scraped a solid object buried under 4 feet of muck. What could it be? During the city's months-long dredging and rebuilding of the lake, workers have found lots of old bottles and assorted junk, but nothing sexy or sensational. No bodies, no bones, no rusted weapons used in unsolved crimes. Vasquez cleared a space around his discovery and saw the outlines of the buried treasure.

After its two-year, $45-million makeover, Echo Park Lake will soon shed the green tarp-covered fence that lines its circumference, revealing to the public a similar-but-spruced-up version of the neighborhood's landmark. "Welcome to 29 acres of paradise," L.A. City Engineer Gary Moore said at a news conference Friday, where officials announced the lake would reopen June 15. Before it was refilled and restocked with plants, the lake was completely drained and cleaned. During the cleanup, Moore said, workers found two guns, one toilet, 20 Frisbees and a pay telephone.

Echo Park Lake was stocked with hundreds of rainbow trout last week as part of a California Department of Fish and Game program to provide trout fishing opportunities to city dwellers. Echo Park, one of five urban lakes in the program, received about 400 pounds of trout (between 700 to 800 half-pound fish) from the Fillmore Hatchery in Ventura County, according to hatchery manager Jim Adams. He said that this is the first time the lake has been planted with fish in six years.

One thousand pounds of live trout are scheduled to be dumped into the Echo Park lake for the third annual Becky Thatcher / Tom Sawyer Fishing Derby and Easter Egg Contest this weekend. The event, sponsored by Concerned Citizens of Echo Park, Friends of Echo Park Lake, the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division and local merchants, is scheduled for Saturday at Echo Park and is free and open to the public.

MY NEW angling pals at Echo Park Lake had never seen a trout fly until I pulled a box from my fishing vest and opened it. My ties look good, and they seduce wily native trout. The boys peer in, "Are they real flies?" We're at the old boathouse this summer day as I share my 45 years of experience on this small lake. I give Eduardo Balldovenos, 13, and Kevin Ramirez, 12, each a woolly bugger, a deadly subsurface pattern, and tie the flies with a simple clinch knot.

A search for a missing little girl last year in the murky waters of Echo Park Lake may pay off in unintended dividends with cleaner water for the popular spot. The lake cleanup is part of an ambitious $1-million plan that will also target Machado, MacArthur Park, Debs and Reseda Park lakes. Officials said that plans were in place last summer but were accelerated, in part, by Jessica Cortez's disappearance Aug. 4 at Echo Park, just west of downtown Los Angeles.

It's not the Lotus Festival that's gone missing this weekend. The dragon boats are still speeding across Echo Park Lake, the drums are beating and the scent of chicken satay and papaya salad wafts through the crowds. It's the lotuses that are gone, dead after gracing the lake with their broad leaves and delicate flowers for decades. Visitors stood solemnly Saturday, alone and in small groups, gazing at the empty water as if paying their respects at a gravesite.

A wealth of wildlife was stirring in Echo Park on this first evening of spring. The squawking of geese and gulls drifted across the lake, mingling with children's calls from the little playground. Palms barely swayed in the cool air. But in the lake's famous lotus beds, only dry orange-brown stalks protruded from the murky water, most bent over like weary elders.

On May 27, Vicente Vasquez was digging into the bed of Echo Park Lake with his backhoe when he scraped a solid object buried under 4 feet of muck. What could it be? During the city's months-long dredging and rebuilding of the lake, workers have found lots of old bottles and assorted junk, but nothing sexy or sensational. No bodies, no bones, no rusted weapons used in unsolved crimes. Vasquez cleared a space around his discovery and saw the outlines of the buried treasure.

So far there have been no dead bodies, no safes stuffed with soggy cash, no rusty stolen cars. The only things exposed by the receding water at Echo Park Lake have been shopping carts, 55-gallon steel barrels, a parking-enforcement "boot" and lots of skateboards. But who knows what is still hidden in the muck at the bottom of the 13-acre lake, soon to be dredged and outfitted with a leak-proof clay liner? Officials say that leaks once required them to replenish the lake with valuable drinking water.

L.A., up close and personal I have lived in Los Feliz since 1984. I agree with Christopher Reynolds ["There's a Name for It: Fun," March 20] that the neighborhoods contain a wild mix of the eclectic. However, he failed to mention one of the great sources for urban chic, the Goodwill on Hollywood Boulevard, between Wacko and the Vista theater. I know I am not the only resident of the area who feels that this branch of Goodwill, with employees who seem to have been chosen specifically because they fit right in, is something akin to a home away from home.

Maria the goose, who became a media sensation last month when photographed flying alongside an Echo Park Lake visitor's motor scooter, turns out to be Mario the gander. Experts at the Los Angeles Zoo made that discovery after city officials arranged to have the graylag fowl relocated there to make way for a park renovation project, goose benefactor Dominic Ehrler said Thursday. The newly renamed Mario will remain in quarantine at the zoo for 30 days before being put on public display, Ehrler said.

The honking you hear along Park Avenue in Echo Park isn't coming from motorists. It's just Maria the Goose, out for a spin with her friend Dominic Ehrler. Ehrler is a retired investor who was befriended by the web-footed waterfowl 10 months ago at Echo Park Lake. "When she first started following me around like a dog I got goose bumps," Ehrler said. "David Foster, one of the parks people here, finally introduced me to her. He said, 'You know you're being stalked! Her name is Maria.

It's late on the night before Thanksgiving, and the stretch of Sunset Boulevard through Echo Park, from Mohawk to Douglas Street, is littered with young revelers. Lines form in front of bars, including the Short Stop, the Little Joy, the Gold Room and El Prado; taco trucks and gourmet food trucks idle curbside; and laughter, shouts and the occasional breaking of glass can be heard in the apartments above the street. Ten years ago this bit of road was a no-man's land at night -- at least for the kind of hip party people that now consider the area their stamping ground.

Fourteen-year-old Choem Ngiam felt a tug on his fishing pole as he reeled in his line. "I got one! I got one!" he shouted to his friends standing beside him. He quickly drew in the line so the fish couldn't escape. When his friends saw Choem's catch, they laughed. It was only a baby trout, a measly 3 inches long. Choem tossed the fish back into the calm waters of the lake and then quickly cast his line again, hoping for better luck.

Gathering on a breezy afternoon overlooking a sprawling bed of pink lotus flowers adrift on Echo Park Lake, thousands gathered Saturday to celebrate the 20th annual Lotus Festival. The event, promoted as a cultural exchange between Asian and Pacific Islander communities, took its name from the flowers, which in some Asian cultures symbolize growth, purity and rebirth.

The Lotus Festival, Los Angeles' annual tribute to cross-cultural Asian heritage, reemerged in Echo Park this weekend after a one-year hiatus but still without one significant participant: the lotuses. The 32-year-old festival has grown over the years from a modest one-day event to a weekend-long extravaganza that has attracted as many as 150,000 people, organizers said. This year, organizers said they expected roughly 30,000 visitors. The festival, put on by the nonprofit L.A. Lotus Festival Inc. and the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, took a year off in 2009 because of the city's budget problems.

Rather than being a month of new beginnings, for me January is a month of regret. Why did I eat three helpings of pecan pie after dinner for six nights in a row? Was it really a good idea to follow a martini with a glass of bourbon before popping open a bottle of Champagne? Did curing my hangover actually require a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish? Those cigarettes did nothing to curb my orgiastic appetite. So goes the inner monologue in rueful post-holiday minds across America, which is why those same minds so easily alight upon the cheerful idea of cleansing.