A pelican and the lotus flowers at Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles, California

Echo Park (or, locally, Echo Parque) is a district of Los Angeles located near downtown. It is just to the east of Hollywood and Silver Lake if you follow Sunset Boulevard, and to the south of Glendale, California.

Attractions of Echo Park include the annual Echo Park Lake , Echo Park Lotus Festival and Echo Park Film Center . There is also a Cuban festival held on the birthday of Cuban poet and patriot José Martí.

Echo Park was the original center of the film industry in Los Angeles, before the studios moved to Hollywood just before World War I. Mack Sennett's studio was located in Echo Park until the end of the silent era, and a large number of silent comedies were shot in the neighborhood.

The '60s TV series Gilligan's Island was filmed in Echo Park, and films such as Farewell, My Lovely which sought to replicate the Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s, as much of the area still looks like it did before World War II. Other films shot in Echo Park include the film of the same name and Mi Vida Loca .

A middle class neighborhood before World War II, nicknamed "Red Hill" for a concentration of political radicals living there, postwar flight to the suburbs resulted in Echo Park becoming overwhelmingly Latino; although other ethnic groups have always had a presence in the neighborhood, and working class. For example, several working-class Chinese immigrants have settled in Echo Park due to its proximity to Chinatown. The commercial district along Sunset Boulevard suffered greatly in the 1950s from the condemnation of the residences in nearby Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. The area in the immediate vicinity of the park itself became seriously beset by problems with drugs and gangs in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Echo Park Lake is the site of the annual Lotus Festival, a pan-Asian celebration with Chinese dragon boat races. It attracts mainly Asian Americans as well as other local residents.

In recent years Echo Park has been undergoing gentrification in the hills north of Sunset Boulevard, as the area has become popular with young, struggling musicians and other aspiring low-level entertainment industry types priced out of many neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Echo Park was named Edendale before the construction of the park itself; the local U.S. Post Office and public library branches are named Edendale.