It’s been a big media week for Chicken Corner. First, I hear from a freelance writer for Los Angeles Magazine. She’s doing a shopper’s list for Echo Park. Then I hear from a writer for the Los Angeles Times. She is working on a story about housing in Echo Park. I feel like a rooster on a hot tin roof crowing: Echo Park Echo Park Echo Park.

I met the Times’ Nancy Cleeland for coffee at Chango this morning. She is following the fate of the families who once lived in a building on Delta Street, next door to the Del Mor Apartments, where Chango coffeehouse is located. Nancy, who has written for the Times on labor issues, said she was trying to suss out some of the complexities in the gentrification issue, of what has happened to the families who once lived in the gray-ish mauvish 16-unit shell with the vacant signs pasted around the front doorway. It sits directly across from an empty bungalow – the Chicken Corner bungalow, to those who know it in the neighborhood – for which the Echo Park Historical Society has been trying to find a new “home.”

We’ll have to wait and see, but it seems that Nancy’s story is not the usual hit-and-run (i.e., the stories I have already complained about, the annual “You thought Echo Park was dangerous, but it’s cool!” stories) as she has been working on the Delta Street piece for several months. And I am glad to see the paper taking the trouble with a story about Echo Park (including a recent, if odd, editorial about how the neighborhood was getting attention from the west side).

In the meantime, Los Angeles Magazine intends to sell the neighborhood as a place to visit and spend money. Yvette Doss emailed me saying she was compiling a list of the best places to shop and hang out in the Echo. I wrote back, saying I spent a lot of time at Chango and the Downbeat and a few other places, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized a lot of the best things in Echo Park are to be seen or adopted, not “purchased.” Like the ducks in the lake; the abandoned dogs who need homes; the teepee next door to Saint Andrew’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church; the owls; the Baxter hills; the huge mural of Room 8, the most famous cat in the world.* I started to make my own list, and, immediately, it started getting very long. So I stopped. (Full disclosure: my husband works for LA Mag.)

*Room 8 was a cat who lived at Elysian Heights Elementary School and once was written about in Time Magazine. He died quite a while ago, but a two-story mural remains as does the testimony of dozens of children, who wrote their remembrances in the cement on two sides of the school. They say things like, “I love Room 8 because he sleeps on my desk.” The majority of the kids’ signed names are Latino, but several are Japanese and Anglo. Disclaimer: recently a longtime neighborhood activist and parent of grown children was overheard saying, “The thing you have to know about Room Eight is…he wasn’t a very nice cat.” But the children’s testimonies say otherwise. In fact, I have a friend, Jeff Duck, who grew up in Echo Park, attending Elysian Heights Elementary. Jeff knew Room 8, and he remembered the tabby as “quite nice.”