Echo Park Is Equal Parts Indie & Hip-Hop

The word on the street is that Vanilla Ice just moved to Echo Park to achieve some “indie cred.”  The fact that I cannot determine whether or not this is a joke is perhaps just the right degree of irony that is compulsory for the average hipster brain inhabiting this east of Silver Lake, west of the river, locale in Los Angeles.I’m from New York, my novel No Alternative takes place in New York in the 1990s, and the tourist websites tout Echo Park as Los Angeles’s equivalent to New York City’s Lower East Side.  If they’re talking Katz’s corned-beef, streetwalkers, and somewhere the second-coming of the CBGB’s…I’m in.  Joking aside, in a lot of ways Echo Park is just the place where the characters in No Alternative would have grown up if given the choice.For the full guest blog post, click here: EchoPark.patch.com