Dennis Hollingsworth

LA DriveBy / E.P. Frame

This is a view of Echo Park from the top of a hill at Reservoir Street. Finally, my long abiding idea about how to frame the presence of the community of Echo Park will be able to be expressed within the platform of this weblog, all due to an errand to El Rancho Market, the one stop source for all your Mexican cuisine needs off Sunset Boulevard. Due to the tricky access to the market's parking lot, I had to circle back onto Reservoir Street before I could ride back towards Echo Park Avenue back home in the hills of Elysian Heights. At the top of Reservoir Street, I stopped and snapped this pic so as to share my idea for an Echo Park Urban Frame.

A pipe dream, a message in a bottle, from my mouth to G-d's ear.

A train of pics and plans follow below the fold....

OK, so here's the deal: Sunset Boulevard starts downtown at Olivera Street and travels quite a distance west to the ocean. Shortly after the beginning of the east end, Sunset turns twice to frame the community of Echo Park, my home in Los Angeles. What I would like to propose is to plant two rows of jacaranda trees, notable for their beautiful purple flowers that bloom every spring. A slice of Wikipedia seems appropriate:

Jacaranda (usually pronounced /ˌdʒ?kəˈr?ndə/ in English) is a genus of 49 species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to tropical and subtropical regions of South America (especially Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay), Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. It is found throughout the Americas and Caribbean, and has been introduced to Australia, New Zealand, India, Fiji and parts of Africa. The genus name is also used as the common name.

Growth
The species are shrubs to large trees ranging in size from 2 to 30 m (6.6 to 98 ft) tall. The leaves are bipinnate in most species, pinnate or simple in a few species. The flowers are produced in conspicuous large panicles, each flower with a five-lobed blue to purple-blue corolla; a few species have white flowers. The fruit is an oblong to oval flattened capsule containing numerous slender seeds. The genus differs from other genera in the Bignoniaceae in having a staminode that is longer than the stamens, tricolpate pollen, and a chromosome number of 18.

Panicles and corollas, nice words.

Here is the aerial shot, diagrammed for your conceptual convenience. The only drawback is that this design only speaks once a year... maybe a serpentine trellis of bougainvillea. The only drawback is that the City of LA would have to pay for a serpentine trellis, and I would imagine that it's far easier to get my fair city to pay for thirty or forty trees instead. Here we are, as always, with the vicissitudes of design.

One way or another, one could plant a colorful shock of plants at these two locations. The objective is to frame, to underscore and enhance the existence of the physical community of Echo Park, like a little bit urban eyeliner. At Reservoir Street, there is a sleight of hand as Sunset Boulevard veers west past the Citibank tower (it has a nice helipad), Taix restaurant, the Edendale library (why isn't it called Echo Park Library?) and finally Alvarado street. Drive on en passant.

Here is a tilt-up drawing to emphasize the hill-ness of the situation. It makes for a nice urban bracket.

And on the other side, the east turn of Sunset Boulevard, the legendary street veers away again from another tilt-up elevation at a street called.... Lilac Terrace. How appropriate! It was almost as if this design was meant to be.