In response to my response to the NYTimes idea that "Echo Park is in the early thoes of gentrification" a friend send me the following LA Times story written by Dial Torgerson in September, 1971 -- about gentrification and downward mobility in Echo Park. (Thanks, ProQuest!) "Echo Park is becoming a near-slum and a much-in-demand middle-class community at the same time," the story says. Headlined, "Which Way for Echo Park --- Inner City Oasis or Slum?" the story reads:

Change is coming to Echo Park, too: puzzling changes now being studied by sociologists, demosgraphers, city planners -- and, inevitablty, real estate developers--as a key to the Central City's outer fringe.

Would that they could see us now.