The Montana Tract (Los Angeles, California)

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Echo Park's lake started out as a city a reservoir, storing water in a section then known as the city’s “West End.” In those years, these hills and canyons were thought of as the city’s extreme west side. The Los Angeles Canal and Reservoir Company created Reservoir No. 4 in 1868. The company obtained the water by digging a ditch that sent water flowing from the Los Angeles River along a zigzag path that emptied into the reservoir. Los Angeles had passed up on the chance to purchase the land around the lake, and in the late 1880s Thomas Kelley (a carriage maker whose name was spelled both with and without an “e” in various documents) purchased this property along with five other speculators.

Kelley subdivided the area into the Montana Tract, listing it's 68 lots for sale in an 1887 edition of the Los Angeles Times. In those years, Angelino Heights had just gone through its first major development boom, with cable cars sending prospective buyers from downtown Los Angeles west on Temple Street. The notion of waterfront property must have sounded very appealing to the half-dozen businessmen who owned the lakeside property, but they soon discovered that the city still held the right to overflow the reservoir by up to 40 feet – an option that, if exercised, would have rendered their land worthless.

In those years, Reservoir No. 4 was held in check by a dam in the vicinity of Bellevue Avenue. From there, water traveled down the Woolen Mill Ditch to a mill near present-day Fifth and Figueroa Streets, not far from where Kelley lived. Kelley petitioned the city to provide a quitclaim, essentially a land swap, converting the reservoir lands into a park and private residences. That request, and quite possibly a legal challenge, led to three years of debate by the parks commission, the city council and the mayor.

In 1891 the city’s health officer inspected the dam and determined that, if it were to hold a greater volume of water, it would pose a danger to residents who lived south of Bellevue Avenue. “The existence of this reservoir at its present site I consider a menace to the life of everyone living along the Arroyo de los Reyes,” according to his statement in the council’s minutes. “I have seen this reservoir so full during the rainy season that I feared the bank would give way.”

Two months later, city leaders struck a deal with the men who owned the land around the reservoir. Kelley and his associates (including William LeMoyne Wills, who like Kelley, would later serve on the school board) gave up 33 acres of land around the reservoir so that it could be used as a park. In exchange, the city agreed not to overflow the reservoir land, making the remaining land held by Kelley and his associates (including the dirt road that would soon become Sunset Boulevard) far more valuable.

When Mayor Henry Hazard signed the paperwork in 1891 allowing the park to be created, he envisioned a grand boulevard on Alvarado Street that would transport residents from Westlake (now MacArthur Park) to Echo Park Lake and then northeast to Elysian Park.
By 1912 there were already calls to replace the Victorian-style boathouse. One resident complained about the peanut shells that littered the park grounds. Another voiced outrage at the sight of couples “spooning.”

By 1919, motion picture companies on Allesandro Street (now Glendale Boulevard) began using the park as a filming location. City leaders responded by barring Keystone Studios, home of the Keystone Cops films, from shooting any more of its comedies at the lake on the grounds that too many flowers were being trampled.

As of 1920 many of the hills surrounding the lake were still untouched. Farm houses lined the northern edge of the lake, while four-unit, Craftsman-style apartment flats ran up Echo Park Avenue and Alvarado Street. Kelley died in 1906, the same year he built a house for his sister at 1467 Echo Park Avenue. Within a few years Kelley’s heirs sold off much of his land to Henry Christian Jensen, who built the Sunset Pharmacy at Sunset and Echo Park and the motion picture house known as the Globe Theater (now Guadalupana)at 1624 Sunset Boulevard.