Twin Views of Echo Park  

 

By Becky Kopenhaver

 

    The year was 1922. Thomas Lynch and Dorothy Leigh were newly wed and living in the small, cozy cottage at 2501 Preston Street. Dorothy was pregnant with twins and suffering from uremic poisoning. Her doctor told her she would probably nor survive the birth of her babies.

 

 On the evening of February 2, 1922, Dorothy died while giving birth to her daughters, Dorothy and Elenore. Devastated and grieving, Thomas Lynch feared he would not be able to care for his newborn daughters. As it turned out, Dorothy's aunt, Bertha Holway and her husband, Arthur, lived behind the newlyweds in a small house at 1916 Vestal Street. They immediately adopted the twins and raised them as their own.

 

 As children, Dorothy and Elenore spent their days playing in the yard of their small house on the corner of Vestal and Baxter Streets, and on the staircase that runs from Baxter up to Preston Street. Arthur Holway had purchased the vacant hillside in 1912 and then built four small houses on the property, two of them facing Vestal, the other two behind them facing Preston Street.

 

 "One of my earliest memories of our house was when we were little, we would sit out in the yard and watch the model Ts try and make it up the hill to Lemoyne from Vestal," said Dorothy, "a lot of the model T salesmen would drive their customers to Echo Park, they would speed up the hill from Echo Park Avenue to Vestal, but they usually couldn't make it to Lemoyne, and they would slowly roll backwards, back down the hill."

 

    Sometimes the twins would walk up the Baxter Street stairs with their mother to walk their dog in the park. "Back then, there was nothing up on that hill, no houses, no paved street, there was nothing but the park up there," says Elenore. The small former storefronts along Echo Park Avenue used to be a place to stop in for a quick lunch, for eggs or milk, or even to get a haircut.

 

    "We used to walk down (Baxter Street) to Shore's Market to buy bread, it used to be on the corner of Baxter and Echo Park, but for most of our shopping we took the Redline downtown, that's where everything was back then, stores, theaters, restaurants," says Elenore. "Later on, we started going to USO dances during the war."

 

     As children, the girls were rarely given a chance to explore the neighborhood alone. Many of the roads in Echo Park were unpaved and many of the hillsides that are now populated with houses, were barren. "Our mother was very protective of us," says Elenore. "We didn't know a lot of kids in the neighborhood because we weren't allowed to [wander] far from the house without her. We went to Catholic school instead of Elysian Heights where most of the kids in the neighborhood went."

 

    Dorothy and Elenore were witness to a period that most Echo Park history enthusiasts have only read about. In the 1920's and 30's Echo Park was the hub of  the city's motion picture industry. The area was a frequent filming location for many of the early comedy shows like Laurel and Hardy, and The Three Stooges. " I remember hearing that Laurel and Hardy were in the neighborhood shooting a movie," says Dorothy, "and I remember walking up the street with my mother to see if we could see them-they were filming all over."