Excavation and Grading in Silver Lake & Echo Park

Two old reservoirs, two kinds of ground

Echo Park Lake began as a reservoir in 1868, and the Silver Lake Reservoir followed in 1907, named for Herman Silver. The land around both is where the hills flatten out, and it is also where the state’s liquefaction mapping picks up: around the reservoir, along Glendale Boulevard and down toward Riverside Drive and the river. A few blocks uphill the parcel map switches to City Hillside Area instead. So the first question on any job here is simply which kind of lot it is, because the permit path, the soils questions and the equipment all follow from that answer.

Lots you reach by stairway

Both neighborhoods are threaded with public stairways, and where a house sits on a stair or a footpath rather than a street, that changes the dig more than the drawings do. Soil may have to leave by small tracked loader or by hand to a truck parked below, and backfill arrives the same way in reverse. For an ADU pad behind a stair-access house, access planning can be the largest single decision, ahead of depth or volume. We walk the route from the curb to the work area before settling on machinery.

Methane mapping in southern Echo Park

The City’s Methane Zone and Buffer Zone reach into the southern part of Echo Park. The code wording is broad: it covers new paved areas as well as new buildings. That means a new driveway slab or a concrete parking pad can bring a site into the methane rules, not only a new unit. Site testing, overseen by an architect, engineer or geologist, sets the design level, and the mitigation that follows is built into the slab and the ground under it. We wait for that design before we cut and grade the subgrade, so the pad is dug once to the right depth.

Nearby areas

West past Los Feliz are the Hollywood Hills; to the northeast are Highland Park and Mount Washington and, beyond Atwater Village, Glendale.

Silver Lake & Echo Park excavation questions