An early story about the budding “sanctuary movement” among U.S. churches includes news of the Episcopal Cathedral in Echo Park. An LA Times story Friday by Louis Sahagun said a coordinated effort to house immigrants facing deportation will be announced in late April. The whole “faith-based initiative” scenario has always made me shudder (and worse), so I am glad to see it turned around and reclaimed.

According to the story, Episcopal Cathedral may participate in hosting “families broken by broken laws” – i.e., people who have come here to work and live and are being ripped away from their news roots and their relatives. We'd be glad to have them in Echo Park.

After the jump, the print edition shows a photo of a young church worker it identifies as Daniel French (not on the web site). I think this is the same young man I ran into one time when I was walking among the empty houses on Mohawk and St. Inez streets, with my friend Cindy Bennett, who was taking pictures. Daniel asked if I was looking to document the gentrification of the neighborhood. Despite the fact that what I saw in front of me was the opposite of gentrification. It was the express-mail creation of a ghost-town slum. Nonetheless, his question was rational. In a neighborhood where immigrant families have been moved out one-by-one to make way for homeowners with more money, who would assume that the shuttering of fifty-some homes wasn’t a result of the same tidal wave?

Other Echo Park in the news: A full-page photo of Angelino Heights in Los Angeles Magazine shows Murray Burns and Planaria Price (with a name like that she was born to live in Angelino Heights) in front of their lovingly restored 1887 Victorian. Murray, who is a well-established feature of the coffeehouse landscape in Echo Park, owns a number of rehabilitated Victorians in the neighborhood. The photo is part Los Angeles Magazine’s roundup called Real Estate 2007, and Angelino Heights-ers who prefer to say they live in Angelino Heights and NOT Echo Park will be pleased by the headline and the blurb, which does not mention EP. It’s like saying, “I live at the Colony. Malibu? Never heard of it.” And Echo Park being as large as it is – though, of course it’s not a separate city – everyone here can claim a sub-neighborhood if they want to. Maybe we should all give our houses pretty names. So perhaps I live in Phoebe-bird Cottage Heights. Never heard of Elysian. Can I buy a vanity zip code? 900-hear-I-am?

(Disclaimer: My husband is an editor and writer for Los Angeles Magazine, but he was not involved in the above-mentioned Real Estate story, except perhaps to wonder why our own house doesn’t look like that.)