Echo Park residents scolded and pleaded about the deterioration of their community.

Angry calls of distress, livened by a few profanities, arose uncharacteristically last week from that white, columned, Pantheon of a temple beside Echo Park Lake.

These were not the usual supplications to the Higher Power that is associated with Angelus Temple, built by L.A.’s first and possibly still most memorable religious healer, Aimee Semple McPherson.

They came from the people of Echo Park as they alternately scolded and pleaded with their city leaders about the deterioration of their community.

The meeting was called by the Echo Park Action League, a new group that formed recently out of opposition to the conversion of a derelict Echo Park building into a home for the mentally ill.

Although the group’s organizers have conceded defeat on that front and are resigned to seeing the facility go in this year, they hoped to use the anger it stirred up as leverage to get other things they want.

High on their list would be better pickup of abandoned trash, more police patrols and a new library.

Having no adequate public hall in their community, leaders of the group turned to the Foursquare Gospel Church, whose 1920s neo-Roman building remains the most impressive sight around.

While a Wednesday night worship service went on in the church’s main sanctuary, a couple of hundred residents gathered in the smaller, 1,200-seat Angelus Auditorium. It is a solemn and impressive hall with dark wooden chairs, white walls and red velvet curtains on stage and on the balustrades of a wrap-around balcony.

The format was carefully arranged, seeming to bestow the power to the people of the community. Half a dozen of them sat at tables on the raised portion of the dais. For an hour, they cross-examined about a half a dozen city officials, including Councilwoman Gloria Molina, who sat at tables below them.

Words got pretty rough.

Dumas Robinson, a retired state worker, wanted to know why appliances and even automobiles dumped beside the road would sit around for what seemed to him an eternity. He showed photos of trash on a street called Laguna Terrace.

A city sanitation official said the property owner could call for a special pickup.

“Somehow, this has not gotten out to the community,” a frustrated Robinson snapped back. “We have people who put everything from automobiles to refrigerators, to old television sets, you name it, big appliances, on the curb and leave it. They don’t call anyone. No one picks them up. They stay there until they’re completely rotted.”

The official said the city’s limited cleanup crews should get by the area a couple of times a year.

“Well, might I say that if you’re going to pick up regularly no more than once or twice a year, we might as well forget it. We need a pickup once or twice a day in Echo Park until it’s clean.”

Kathy Martinez then asked when the community might expect a replacement for its temporary library, moved into rented quarters after the old library failed in the 1971 earthquake.

“The location of the library is atrocious,” she said. “There is an atmosphere of gangs to congregate there, and there is an invitation to graffitists. It is a mess. It is a disaster.”

The news was not good.

A library official said the hopes of a new Echo Park branch, in the planning since 1971, rest on a library bond issue that will be on the ballot in November or next April and must be approved by a two-thirds vote.

After the city’s 15 unreinforced branches are either repaired or replaced, Echo Park would be the third on the list for a new building, she said.

“I don’t mean to be sarcastic or anything,” Martinez said, “but when this happened, my children were little. Now, they have children. And I would like to have it done before they have children.”

That raised a loud cheer.

But even the audience grew weary of the bitterness released by some who stood up during the question-and-answer period.

In particular, a middle-aged red-headed woman who spoke with a British sort of haughtiness said she was “mad as hell” and worse--and refused to sit down.

Near the end, Molina began to speak up. Her words, though not exactly healing, still seemed to appease. Police response time--found by a recent study to be at its worst in Echo Park--would be improving under a new deployment formula, she promised.

Concerning trash, she urged her constituents to call her and promised to make sure it was picked up.

Then she instructed a man across from her--community safety bureau chief Mel Bliss--to check into the trash on Laguna Terrace the very next day.

Bliss did, and it turned out the process was working. After receiving a complaint, the department’s commercial division had already cited the property owner on March 15. That would give him to April 15 to clear up the mess.

Then, the department will send a 10-day warning, and then, if the trash remains, refer the matter over to the investigative branch.