It looks like no more than a path of desire. Fellowship Parkway is one of those public streets in Echo Park that motorized vehicles are unable to use. All over the neighborhood, there are stair streets (which are stairways), streets that are pathways, streets that are used as no more than a driveway, and then, of course, there are paper streets. These are the streets that simply don’t exist. We are about to lose one of the paper streets (read wooded areas) near Elysian Park as an architect-developer plans to build two houses – she promises no more – on what has been a wooded clump of lots near Park Drive. Neighbors are watching anxiously lest any of the protected trees be disappeared.

Fellowship Parkway is an old street. Some of it exists as a stair street, but most is the aforementioned dirt path. One way to get to it is to follow a mostly hidden stair street (Lemoyne St.) past a number of houses tucked away in the woods. Then, when you get to the dirt path, follow it. It winds among hills and along a steep crevasse, steep enough that, on a recent walk, I carried my daughter past the spots where the trail narrowed. Many of the homes we passed are tiny cabins, with glorious views. This is the part of then neighborhood that once was known as the Semi-Tropics Spiritualists’ Tract, an early bohemian enclave (dating from around 1920). The Semi-Tropics Spiritualists’ Tract was in the northwestern corner of what is now Echo Park. It was favored by artists, musicians and activists.

Paul Landacre, a wood engraving artist who lived nearby for several decades, did many prints of the wildlife on the “Hill,” as the area also is known. Middleton Manigault, a painter who starved himself to death in his 30s and whose paintings now trade in the $90,000s, also lived on the Hill. The legendary bookseller and zeitgeist man of the 1920s and 30s, Jake Zeitlin’s name comes up repeatedly in reminiscences of the Hill.

According to Anothony L. Lehnman in "Paul Landacre: A Life and a Legacy," published by the rare book dealer Michael Dawson,

Modern City maps have yet to render accurately teh confusing cartography of the area, nor do the homeowners mind because the delivery-man's nightmare preserves the peace of their sanctuary.

Lehman wrote this in 1983. But I doubt the street looks any more modern today than it did then.

On our recent walk down Fellowship Parkway, we passed a house guarded by a pair of white, hard-working poddles. Then we headed into the pines, palm trees and walnuts that form the semi-natural, semi-imported fauna of the area. A single chair, covered by leaves sat in a lookout spot. There were a couple of lawnchairs – seemingly unused for quite some time, in another flat area beneath some trees. At one point the path splits in three, and there is no sure way to know which one is the parkway except to pick one and see where it goes.