The seven-foot stuffed monkey. Manny the Monkey to be precise. For probably a year he spent his days and nights clowning or frowning, depending on his posture, on some lawn furniture in front of a small Baxter Street bungalow court. He was a charmer who brought a sense of fun and mystery, and my daughter loved Manny, who was one of the landmark events of all our walks in that direction. But Manny is gone. Word on the street: Manny was stolen. Now the teak-looking lawn furniture sits empty -- it's just furniture now, no longer a stage set. It's a testament to the meanness of thieves.

That said, while thieves have taken Manny, it has occurred to Chicken Corner just what a living art gallery Echo Park and surrounding neighborhoods have become. I love my first hometown of Washington, DC, a gorgeous city, but nowhere in Washington* will you find the murals, the yard-installations, the sense of fun and freedom -- e.g., in EP alone we have at least two houses with significant glass-bottle art; there's a shark on Sargent Place; there are sculptures all over, including the on-ramp to the 2 Freeway; some of my neighbors had an installation made of vinyl records; there is so much public art on private property we take it all for granted, not least of all the mainly Latino-owned shops with their traditional painted signage (though there has been less and less of that in the days of gentrification). Manny was public art, too.

*In Washington, much of the public "art" is statues of military men on horses -- that and the gardens at people's homes. On Capitol Hill, a lot of Greco-Classical grace notes, lions and ivy, in front of Victorian attached brick houses (my own house was a bit of an exception to the orderly rule). It's beautiful, but no Manny.