The Fourth Annual Echo Park Home Tour provided not just a chance to punish our lungs walking up streets so steeply graded I often go out of my way to avoid driving them, it offered a chance to gossip (about houses, dogs, people), snoop and set aside ambivalent or guilty feelings about how “fancy” the Echo has become since the latest turn of the century. True to Echo Park, several of the nine houses were very small. I would guess that one of them – a “stair street” cottage (even though there were no stairs, just a paved somewhat vertical walkway) seemed about 800 square feet total; it has been occupied for the last forty years by a pair of ballet dancers, a married couple who painted murals in the living room. Walking through was like visiting a music box – albeit one with pictures of John Lennon and yellowed cloth-bound books. Another small, exquisite house was originally built from a Sears kit for garages: tiny house, huge view, enormous personality. Not on the tour: The smallest Echo park home I know of is on a stair street and is about two hundred-some square feet; not surprisingly, it recently rented to a young woman relocating from New York City.

Photo: November 2006, by Martin Cox

The Steinbeck House, named for a cousin of the author, the house’s former owner, is not small by Echo Park standards. It, too, featured wall painting – stencils in almost every room – by the owner-occupants and the most elaborate tiki room I could even imagine. Just recently completed, the Steinbeck tiki room outdates the notion of tiki revival being outdated.

At every house, I ran into people I knew from different parts of the neighborhood, and at every house I got into at least one conversation about dogs, usually along the lines of, “Oh, right, I remember you, you used to have that black and white dog who.…” Or, “I don’t know how they keep this house looking so pristine with five large dogs… I only have three, and my house is a mess.” The sun was shining; about two dozen high school kids from the neighborhood were volunteers; no one seemed to be talking about gentrification.

Without saying so, this tour highlights the idea that style does not require a load of money, just a unified sense of taste and the will to go yard-sale-ing on an obsessive basis. Some might say there's even a moral dimension in the joyful, adpative reuse of discarded picture frames and the like. A bohemian value system that for some nears religion. Depending.

While docenting I learned about a property I had always admired based on the slightly eccentric fence that blocked the house from view. The Lemoyne Street fence is painted green and is decorated with all manner of inlays, quite fanciful: a good example of old-style hippie Echo Park. The new owner said he and his wife had just bought it from a couple who had owned it since 1967. The couple were from Germany and Sweden and they had raised a child in the house, which originally had been a hunting shack. They had spent decades terracing, gardening, building things by hand. And now it was time to move on. The house itself will be replaced, as it has no real foundation. But the new owner said he bought the place in appreciation of what had been created, and changes would be minimal. He said the fence probably would stay.

Speaking of classic Echo Park: this year's tour did not include the pack rat homes in which found materials are stored in tall piles in the front yard. Nor did it include the blue bottle house on the other side of Lemoyne Street and other one-of-a-kinds that defy categories and sometimes city codes.

Disclaimer: I am on the board of the Echo Park Historical Society, for which the Home Tour was a fundraiser.