Echo Park's Real Ghost Stories Are Hiding Along Glendale Boulevard
"Edendale…is a very beautiful suburb of Los Angeles. It is the motion picture center of the Pacific Coast." That was the film trade journal Motography in July 1911. The line now sits on the Historic Echo Park Edendale page, next to a list of studios that once lined Allesandro Avenue, the street we now call Glendale Boulevard.
Today the Edendale name hangs on very little. It survives on the post office on Alvarado and on the branch library, and almost nowhere else. The buildings that made Edendale famous are still a short walk apart, but they're unmarked, marked in the wrong spot, or gone. This Halloween season, the neighborhood's best ghost stories are about places that don't announce themselves.
On Saturday, October 24, from 1 to 3 p.m., the Echo Park Historical Society is screening The Ghosts of Edendale in the Edendale Library meeting room. Writer and director Stefan Avalos will introduce it. The event is free.
Avalos moved to the area in 2001 and researched its forgotten moviemaking past for the film. His 2003 independent horror movie follows a young couple who buy a house on a hill called Edendale, where all the neighbors are "in the business" and something lives in the walls. The library says it was shot entirely on nearby streets that locals will recognize. Before the film, Avalos will talk about the neighborhood history behind it. He's also a concert violinist who has played with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and his 1997 film The Last Broadcast came out shortly before The Blair Witch Project made found-footage horror popular.
The film is fiction. The places it draws on are real, and most of them are on Glendale Boulevard or just off it.
At 1712 N. Glendale Blvd., near Effie Street, there's a big concrete building inside a Public Storage campus. The Eastsider called it one of the most historic film studios in America and noted that most people never notice it, because it's tucked behind a Jack in the Box and blends into the storage complex.
This was Keystone Studios, later the Mack Sennett Comedies Corporation, founded in 1912. Historic Echo Park dates the complex itself to 1909. Citing the Los Angeles Times, The Eastsider calls its stage the first permanent reinforced-concrete movie stage built on the West Coast. Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin and Harry Langdon all worked there. Historic Echo Park says Chaplin made his first film here. It also says the site produced the first pie in the face on film: in the 1913 short "A Noise from the Deep," Normand throws a pie at Arbuckle.
The building became Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 256 in 1982. Its survival after that was close. By 1985, when "Soul Train" producer Don Cornelius bought it, the building needed major work. He dropped his renovation plans within two years and sold to Public Storage in 1987. The storage company planned to tear it down, then reached an agreement with the city's Cultural Heritage Commission two years later. It's still used for storage today.
The Sennett building's plaque has a story of its own. A "Birthplace of Motion Picture Comedy" plaque was presented on March 10, 1954, but it went up at the old Selig Polyscope site instead of the Sennett site. It was removed in 2007. The Los Angeles Times reported in February 2015 that it had been unveiled again, this time at the correct address.
The Selig site was an easy mistake to make. Selig Polyscope's studio stood on the west side of Glendale Boulevard between Clifford and Duane streets, a short walk up the same boulevard. Local historian Eric Brightwell writes that roughly thirty film operations once filled the stretch south from Selig's studio, and that only the Mack Sennett building was preserved. The location researcher behind Silent Locations puts the old Selig studio at 1845 Glendale Blvd.
The mix-up runs the other direction too. Silver Lake has an event venue called "Mack Sennett Studios," and The Eastsider points out that its history has more to do with comic actress and director Mabel Normand. The Echo Park storage building is where Sennett actually did his work.
All of these sites are on or near Glendale Boulevard and the hills above it. Here is what's at each one now, as far as the record shows.
| Site | Address | What you'll find today |
|---|---|---|
| Keystone / Mack Sennett stage | 1712 N. Glendale Blvd. | Surviving stage, HCM No. 256, inside a Public Storage campus |
| Pathé West Coast studio | 1807 Glendale Blvd. | Former headquarters building; current use not documented |
| Selig Polyscope Company | 1845 Glendale Blvd., between Clifford and Duane | Demolished, no studio structure remains |
| Mixville, Tom Mix's ranch studio | 2450 Teviot St. | No trace of the studio, per a 2024 local history |
| Echo Park Lake | Echo Park | City park, HCM No. 836 |
| Music Box Steps | Base near 935 N. Vendome St., Silver Lake | Public 133-step stairway with a plaque at the bottom |
Pathé's old headquarters shows up in the Academy Museum's Hollywood Past and Present series, which pairs an archival image with a present-day view taken in July 2022. Mixville is where the "nothing left" pattern goes furthest. William Selig leased part of a ranch nearby to shoot westerns, and Tom Mix later bought it and named it after himself. The Edendale Cyclorama blog places it at 2450 Teviot St. In his 2024 history of the area's studios, Brightwell writes that no trace of Mixville remains.
The lake's film history depends on who's telling it. The library's event page says the Keystone Kops drove their paddy wagon up and down the nearby hills and crashed it into Echo Park Lake. An older Silver Lake history page tells a different version, with the lake drained and filmed as a lake with its plug pulled. Either way, the shoreline you walk past today was a film set.
The Music Box Steps are the one stop that actually looks like a landmark. The stairway climbs 133 steps between Vendome Street and Descanso Drive and has been officially named since 1995. A plaque at the base honors Laurel and Hardy's 1932 film "The Music Box," which is later than the Edendale studio era. In 2024, the city also named the Vendome Street and Del Monte Drive intersection for the film.
The pattern isn't only from 1915. On March 29, 2026, Taix closed after 99 years in business, 64 of them at 1911 W. Sunset Blvd. In her Eater LA farewell, longtime regular Karen Tongson described stepping from the harsh Echo Park sunshine into the restaurant's "welcoming darkness," with its burgundy booths and the smell of butter and garlic from the first escargot orders of happy hour.
By late summer, The Eastsider reported that the building was gone and the lot was an active construction site. The six-story project going up will have 166 apartments, including 24 affordable units. Plans call for Taix to come back in a smaller ground-floor space with an outdoor patio, but the reopening is still several years away. For now, Taix fits the Edendale pattern: one of the best-known names on Sunset, with nothing on the block to show it was there.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood keeps reusing its old spaces. On September 24, Tijuanero by Tijuanazo opened in the former Los Burritos stand at 1312 Echo Park Ave., serving tacos, burritos, mulitas and vampiros. Eater LA reported it was open Tuesday through Sunday. It's an easy place to eat before or after Saturday's screening.
Here's what's still ahead between this weekend and Día de los Muertos, all from The Eastsider's 2026 Halloween and Día de los Muertos guide and the organizers' own pages. Check each link before you go, since times can change.
If you drive down Glendale Boulevard after the screening, look past the Jack in the Box to the concrete stage behind it, where Chaplin made his first film.
At Backbeat Homes, we love a neighborhood whose best stories are hiding in plain sight, and we're always collecting Echo Park's. If you know about a plaque, a stairway or an old storefront with a history we should hear, Work With Us and tell us about it over tacos on Echo Park Avenue.
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