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    Historical Cities-Los Angeles
    Historical Cities-Los Angeles
    Historical Cities-Los Angeles
    Ebook221 pages2 hours

    Historical Cities-Los Angeles

    By Lyn Wilkerson

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    About this ebook

    This edition of our Historical Cities series explores the city and county of Los Angeles, including the surrounding environs of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Long Beach, San Pedro, and Pasadena. Over 230 historical sites and landmarks are provided with historical background and GPS coordinates. Reference maps provide simple navigation aids.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLyn Wilkerson
    Release dateDec 13, 2010
    ISBN9781452413433
    Historical Cities-Los Angeles
    Author

    Lyn Wilkerson

    Caddo Publications USA was created in 2000 to encourage the exploration of America’s history by the typical automotive traveler. The intent of Caddo Publications USA is to provide support to both national and local historical organizations as historical guides are developed in various digital and traditional print formats. Using the American Guide series of the 1930’s and 40’s as our inspiration, we began to develop historical travel guides for the U.S. in the 1990’s.

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      Book preview

      Historical Cities-Los Angeles - Lyn Wilkerson

      History of Los Angeles

      Downtown Los Angeles

      Tours and Loops:

      Wilshire and West of Downtown

      Industrial (Wingfoot and Whittier)

      Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Culver City

      Venice, Manhattan Beach, and Inglewood

      Glendale and East San Fernando Valley

      Griffith Park and Hollywood

      South County

      Northeast Los Angeles and Pasadena

      Santa Catalina

      History of Los Angeles

      The history of the Los Angeles area abounds with the gargantuan, the fantastic. Settled more than sixteen miles inland from a shallow, unprotected bay, it has made itself into one of the great port cities of the world; lying far off the normal axes of transportation and isolated by high mountains, it has become one of the great railroad centers of the country; lacking a water supply adequate for a large city, it has brought in a supply from rivers and mountain streams hundreds of miles away. In little more than half a century, lots listed at a tax sale at a price of 63 cents apiece have increased in value to the point where they are worth more than that price to the square inch. It is not surprising that a city of such incredible achievements should become the home of fantasy; the film industry could not have found a more stimulating environment.

      When Los Angeles became an incorporated city under American rule in 1850, there was little evidence remaining even at that time to show that North Broadway, near the Los Angeles River viaduct, once had been the center of an Indian village, and that this entire area had at one time been the exclusive province of the Gabrielino Indians. And yet it was that primitive village which became the nucleus for twentieth-century Los Angeles.

      The predominating linguistic stock was Shoshonean, the great Uto-Aztecan family which spread across North America from what is now Idaho southward to Central America. No less than twenty-eight Indian villages existed in what now constitutes Los Angeles County. One of these, Yang-na, was situated near the heart of modern Los Angeles. These Indians, although primitive, were much more peaceful than many North American tribes. They seldom warred with other groups. Robbery was unknown and murder was punishable by death, as was incest. From chief and medicine man to squaw and child, they lived according to strict ritual and taboos. They believed in only one deity, called Qua-o-ar, whose name never passed their lips except during important ceremonies, and then only in a whisper. The men seldom wore clothing, and women usually had only a deerskin about the waist. Along the coast, women clad themselves in the fur of the sea otter. The homes, of woven tule mats, resembled gigantic beehives. Agriculture and domestication of animals were unknown to these aborigines; they lived on what was at hand, edible roots, acorns, wild sage, and berries. Snakes, rodents, and grasshoppers supplemented the supply of such wild game as fell to their crude weapons. They knew little of basket weaving and nothing of pottery making. Cooking utensils and ceremonial vessels were made by the simple process of rubbing out a hollow place in a slab, or block of soapstone. Bows were unknown. Stone-tipped sticks and clubs were their only weapons. It is not recorded that these primitive people possessed boats of any character.

      Meanwhile, as the fifteenth century ended, adventurers from Spain and Portugal made their way to the New World. Cortez conquered Mexico in 1519. Twenty-three years later, in 1542, the age-long isolation of Yang-na and its fellow villages ended. In that year, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator in Spanish service, cruised northward along the Pacific and discovered what the present San Pedro Bay, naming it Bahia de los Fumos (bay of the smokes) because of the many Indian campfires he saw along its shore. Sixty years passed before another ship, captained by Sebastian Vizcaino, entered the bay in 1602. During the remainder of the seventeenth century, occasional heavily laden Spanish galleons, returning to Mexico from the Philippines, touched the shores of California to repair their leaking ships and rest their thirsty, half-famished, scurvy-stricken crews. Tales of these great canoes and their pale-face sailors circulated among the natives for decades before white civilization was introduced.

      In most sections of America, European colonists launched their settlements despite the Indians. In California, on the contrary, it was the presence of Indians that attracted pioneers and led to colonization and development of the region. Spain long had carried on missionary work among tribes in Mexico proper; as the eighteenth century drew to a close, the Spanish determined to bring Christianity to the natives along the Pacific slope. Conquest of California was to be achieved not by force of arms, but rather by the gentle means of persuasion and evangical preaching. But if the padres thought only in terms of spiritual conversion of the natives, government officials were prompted by more worldly consideration to promote colonization of the California slope. Spain spurred on the effort because other nations were casting covetous eyes on the section. Sir Francis Drake had visited its shores and had claimed it for Queen Elizabeth. Imperial Russia was reaching out across the Bering Sea to the American mainland. And France, with her newly acquired American empire between the Mississippi and the Rocky

      Mountains, was already contemplating a move to extend her domain to the Pacific.

      Frail, crippled, fifty-five-year-old Franciscan Father Junipero Serra and bluff, sturdy Captain Caspar de Portola were chosen to lead the expedition into hitherto unexplored Upper California and to select sites for missions. Father Juan Crespi, diarist of the expedition, was to give posterity its first description of the now famous route, El Camino Real (the King's Highway), which extends between San Diego and San Francisco. The expedition divided its forces, one group proceeding overland and the other by sea. After suffering great hardships, both parties arrived at San Diego Bay in 1769, and a few days later, on July 16th, Father Serra founded the Mission San Diego de Alcala, first link in the chain of twenty-one Franciscan missions in California.

      Without waiting to witness the founding, Captain Portola and Father Crespi, with a force of sixty-seven men, had begun the long overland trek northward to Monterey, breaking the trail for El Camino Real. After more than a fortnight of arduous travel, they made camp near the southern declivity of what now is Elysian Park, not far north of what was to become the very hub of Los Angeles. Crespi's entry in his diary for this day on which white men first saw the site of Los Angeles read:

      After traveling about a league and a half through a pass between low hills we entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river from north-northwest, and then, doubling the point of a steep hill (now Elysian Park), it went on afterward to the south. . . . This plain where the river runs is very extensive. It has good land for planting all kinds of grain and seeds, and is the most suitable site of all we have seen for a mission, for it has all the requisites for a large settlement. As soon as we arrived, about eight heathen from a good village came to visit us; they live in this delightful place among the trees on the river. They presented us with some baskets of pinole made from seeds of sage and other grasses. Their chief brought some strings of beads made of shells, and they threw us three handfuls of them. Some of the old men were smoking pipes well made of baked clay, and they puffed at us three mouthfuls of smoke. We gave them a little tobacco and some glass beads and they went away pleased.

      Crespi's diary for the next day reported: After crossing the river, we entered a large vineyard of wild grapes and an infinity of rosebushes in full bloom. All the soil is black and loamy and is capable of producing every kind of grain and fruit which may be planted. That day, he also reported that members of the expedition saw some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch; they were boiling and bubbling, and the pitch came out mixed with an abundance of water. Thus were discovered the La Brea tar pits (bordering on present-day Wilshire Boulevard); and thus was recorded the first indication of petroleum in western America.

      Two years later, Father Serra's associates founded the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel near the recommended site. It was yet another decade before some two score settlers, at the command of Governor Felipe de Neve, founded the town of Los Angeles at Crespi's delightful place among the trees on the river. This place, wrote Father Serra proudly to the Mexican viceroy in describing the site of San Gabriel Mission, is beyond dispute the most excellent discovered. Without doubt, this one alone, if well cultivated, would be sufficient to maintain itself and all the rest of the missions.

      San Gabriel, founded September 8th, 1771, more than fulfilled Serra's high expectations. The natives were converted easily to the new faith under the benignant but rigorous mission system. The Indians were trained in agriculture, stock raising, gilding, brickmaking, and other trades. They were clothed, housed, and fed at the mission they erected under the padres' tutelage. Their children were taught to speak Spanish. As early mission records eloquently attest, the natives quickly learned tasks assigned to them. They labored long and diligently. A few decades later, hundreds of natives were tending thousands of head of cattle, on a million and a half acres of land surrounding San Gabriel Arcangel, from San Bernardino Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.

      A cornerstone in Spanish colonial policy was the principle that active colonization must begin once the spiritual mission center and the military presidios were established. The new governor of California, Felipe de Neve acted in conformity with this policy when he recommended to the viceroy of Mexico that a pueblo be established at the place which Father Crespi in 1769 had suggested as an ideal spot for a mission. Thus was conceived the settlement that was to become Los Angeles. The town was ordained by royal decree, and Governor de Neve worked out every detail well in advance of actual settlement. Settlers were to be recruited and conducted to the site by government agents. Each was to be told where to live, what to build, what crops to grow, and how much of his time must be given to community undertakings.

      De Neve staked out four square leagues—a small plaza surrounded by seven-acre fields for cultivation; pastures and royal lands for leasing to citizens. To plan a town was one thing; to get settlers for it was another, as the governor soon learned. Despite inducements of land, money, livestock, and implements, he was unable to obtain settlers from Lower California, and it was months before a group was recruited in

      Mexico, chiefly Sonora. On August 18th, 1781, they reached San Gabriel Mission, a small and sorry-looking group of eleven men, eleven women, and twenty-two children. Only two of the adults were of Spanish origin, the remainder including one mestizo (half-breed), eight mulattoes, nine Indians, and two Blacks. Despite misgivings of the mission fathers over the venture, De Neve was determined to push his scheme to realization.

      Early in the morning of September 4th, 1781, the expedition left the mission for the official founding of Los Angeles. Governor de Neve himself led the procession, followed by soldiers, the forty-four settlers, mission priests and some of their Indian acolytes. The Yang-na Indians gathered en masse to witness the strange spectacle as the procession marched slowly around the spot selected for the pueblo, and the padres invoked a blessing upon the new community. Governor de Neve made a formal speech, followed by prayers and benedictions from the clergy. Thus came into being El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (Spanish, the town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels de Porciuncula), one of the few cities on earth which has been deliberately planned in advance and ceremoniously inaugurated.

      Governor Pedro Fages, successor to De Neve, inaugurated the policy of giving huge grants of land to his old friends and comrades-in-arms. One of the first of these grants, a rancho of approximately forty-three thousand acres, went to Juan Jose Dominguez in 1785, and embraced the territory now included in Wilmington, Torrance, Redondo Beach, and several smaller communities. It is the only one of the many Spanish grants of which a considerable part still remains in the possession of heirs of the original grantees.

      The Spanish, and later the Mexican, governors were lavish in their distribution of vast tracts, each of tens of thousands of acres. Except for the mission tract and that property directly assigned to the pueblo, nearly the whole of what now constitutes the coastal area of Los Angeles County passed into the hands of a score or more Spanish and Mexican hidalgos. When the eighteenth century ended, the region was already divided into mission, pueblo, and rancho domain, and for both the first and last of these the outlook was promising. Huge expanses covered with ever-increasing herds of cattle, fields of grain, vineyards, and orchards, all added to the prosperity and prestige of their owners. But the pueblo homes remained small, mud-colored, square-walled, flat-roofed, one-story structures with rawhide doors and glassless windows. Lawns, trees, and sidewalks were nonexistent, and the narrow streets were seas of mud in winter and clouds of dust in summer.

      The civic pride and courage of Corporal Vincent Felix, commander of the tiny garrison, held this uncomfortable community together. He not only took his military duties seriously but, unofficially, assumed every administrative, legislative, and judicial task. Respected, feared, and loved, the little corporal remained the real power in the pueblo long after the election of the first of the alcaldes. By 1790, Los Angeles numbered 28 householders and a population of 139. By 1800, the population was 315, and there were 30 adobe houses for the 70 families, as well as a town hall, guardhouse, barracks, and granaries.

      In this remote outpost, social gradations were unknown. No school existed to train the young in deportment and letters. Mail was carried to and from Mexico once a month a distance of 3,000 miles over the Camino Real. Few took advantage of these postal facilities, since the ability to read and write was rare among the first settlers. There was little trade or commerce

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