With housing prices rising and this tightly packed neighborhood growing ever more dense, many residents are keen to avoid the overdeveloped effects of gentrification that have impacted nearby neighborhoods.

“There’s a huge effort to make sure Echo Park remains Echo Park,” said Kenya Reeves-Costa, 41, who leads the realty team The LA Homegirl, which is affiliated with Keller Williams, and who lives in Echo Park with her husband, Orlando, and their 6-year-old daughter. “People want to be part of this community.”

In Echo Park, Ms. Reeves-Costa said, neighbors look out for one another, and the players of daily life — the street sweepers, bakers and grocery clerks — make an effort to get to know you. “My husband says it’s like Sesame Street,” she said. “Everyone knows my kid and my dog. My daughter loves walking down the street and waving at everyone.”

Image Stories Books and Cafe, on Sunset, is a bookstore/coffeeshop hybrid with a wide selection of both new and used titles, and a tidy cafe menu that includes wine, beer, sandwiches and mezze. Credit... Beth Coller for The New York Times

Like many neighborhoods in central and east Los Angeles, Echo Park has seen rapid gentrification and price increases over the past decade; today it is shifting from a majority Latino neighborhood to one that is more racially diverse.

Longtime residents of the community say that much of the character that defined the area in the 1980s and 1990s has been erased.

Natalia Molina, a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, grew up in Echo Park and is working on a book exploring the neighborhood’s shifting populations. Her grandmother opened a restaurant in Echo Park in 1951, and her mother still lives there in a rent-controlled apartment. When Ms. Molina, 48, was ready to buy her own home, however, she looked elsewhere, opting to purchase in Altadena.