Chronicles of Old Los Angeles Read online

  © 2015 James Roman

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  ISBN 978-1-938450-76-1 (e-Pub)

  ISBN 978-1-938450-77-8 (e-PDF)

  ISBN 978-1-938450-78-5 (Mobi)

  ISBN 978-1-940842-00-4

  1451117

  Printed in China

  LA’s vibrant culture comes from the diversity of its people, and the challenge of merging their diverse ideas.

  From the hard lives of the early settlers, a new thinking emerged, where creativity and spontaneity prevailed, where individuals joined forces to overcome risk. That sensibility continues to define the City of the Angels today. As the epicenter of the entertainment industry, but also in its architecture and industry, its foods, fashions, and even its surfboards, Los Angeles is notoriously unique.

  These Chronicles bring those previous generations and the uniqueness of their bright ideas to vivid life, explaining to a new generation how Los Angeles became the world capital we know today.

  Hon. John J. Duran

  Mayor, City of West Hollywood

  CHRONICLES OF OLD LOS ANGELES

  CHAPTER 1. BAY OF SMOKES The Birth of Los Angeles 1781

  CHAPTER 2. FANDANGOS IN THE PUEBLO Wealthy Mexicans and the Siege of Los Angeles 1786–1848

  CHAPTER 3. CULTURE CLASH The Racial Tensions of Statehood 1850s–1860s

  CHAPTER 4. THE MASSACRE Chinese Tong War Ends as a Historic Tragedy 1871

  CHAPTER 5. HUNTINGTON’S BOOM The Iron Horse Pokes Its Head through San Fernando Tunnel 1876

  CHAPTER 6. Doheny, Canfield, and the Oil Queen of California 1890s

  CHAPTER 7. TAKE A RIDE ON THE RED CARS LA Sprawls with an Electric Railway 1901–1961

  CHAPTER 8. TROUBLED WATERS Mulholland Builds an Aqueduct 1905–1941

  CHAPTER 9. HOLLYWOOD PIONEERS Movie Makers Remake Los Angeles 1914–1928

  CHAPTER 10. HOLLYWOODLAND The Neighborhood Beneath the Iconic Sign 1923

  CHAPTER 11. SISTER AIMEE Los Angeles Gets Religion 1922–1944

  CHAPTER 12. GREYSTONE MANSION Doheny and the Teapot Dome Scandal 1921–1929

  CHAPTER 13. SUNSET STRIP UNINCORPORATED Mickey Cohen’s Territory, a.k.a. West Hollywood 1925–Present

  CHAPTER 14. PENTIMENTO The Controversial Art of David Siqueiros 1932

  CHAPTER 15. THE LEFT COAST Reinventing the Democratic Party 1934

  CHAPTER 16. THE PARTY IN LITTLE TOKYO Dancing in the Face of Hardship 1934–Present

  CHAPTER 17. ON THE AVENUE Jazz Nights at the Dunbar 1928–1948

  CHAPTER 18. LOVE ON THE LOT Romances at the Studios during Hollywood’s Golden Age 1930s–1950s

  CHAPTER 19. SWITCH HITTERS The Dodgers’ Home Run at Chavez Ravine 1957–1962

  CHAPTER 20. SURF CITY Freeth, Kahanamoku, Blake, Gidget, Dora and The Beach Boys 1907–1964

  CHAPTER 21. BOBBY KENNEDY AT THE AMBASSADOR A National Tragedy 1968

  CHAPTER 22. NEW VIEW LA’s Architectural Innovations 1921–2003

  CHAPTER 23. THE VILLA AND THE ACROPOLIS J. Paul Getty Changes the Art World Forever 1954–Present

  CHAPTER 24. LAST STOP HOLLYWOOD Where Fame Rests in Peace 1946–2012

  WALKING TOURS

  TOUR ONE EL PUEBLO AND CHINATOWN

  TOUR TWO BUNKER HILL

  TOUR THREE HOLLYWOOD

  TOUR FOUR HOLLYWOOD HEIGHTS

  TOUR FIVE SUNSET STRIP AND BEVERLY HILLS

  TOUR SIX SANTA MONICA AND VENICE BEACH

  INDEX

  For the Arlens,

  who gave my Los Angeles chronicle its start

  James Roman

  CHRONICLES OF OLD LOS ANGELES

  Sites that appear in the chapters

  CHAPTER 1. San Gabriel Mission

  CHAPTER 2. The Pueblo

  CHAPTER 3. Fort Hill

  CHAPTER 4. Chinatown

  CHAPTER 5. Wharf at Wilmington (San Pedro)

  CHAPTER 6. Colton Street and Glendale Boulevard (Doheny well)

  CHAPTER 7. The Huntington

  CHAPTER 8. San Fernando Valley

  CHAPTER 9. Lasky-DeMille Barn

  CHAPTER 10. Hollywoodland

  CHAPTER 11. Angelus Temple

  CHAPTER 12. Greystone Mansion

  CHAPTER 13. Sunset Strip in West Hollywood

  CHAPTER 14. Watts Towers

  CHAPTER 15. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner Building

  CHAPTER 16. Little Tokyo

  CHAPTER 17. The Dunbar

  CHAPTER 18. Hollywood Studios

  CHAPTER 19. Dodger Stadium

  CHAPTER 20. Malibu Beach

  CHAPTER 21. Ambassador Hotel (RFK Community Schools)

  CHAPTER 22. Hollyhock House

  CHAPTER 23. The Getty Center

  CHAPTER 24. Lake Shrine

  Los Angeles

  CHAPTER 1.

  BAY OF SMOKES

  THE BIRTH OF LOS ANGELES

  1781

  For 227 years, nobody told the Native Americans they were living in the Viceroyalty of New Spain.

  First, the Spanish won Alta California when they conquered the Aztecs in Mexico. Then, their explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo headed north, the first European to set eyes on the land that is today’s Los Angeles. He staked a claim for the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1542. What did Cabrillo see? Smoke. A fragrant cloud, stoked by two-dozen Native American campfires, permeated the area. Cabrillo named this indentation in the coastline Bahia de los Fumos, “Bay of Smokes.” (Yes, LA’s “discovery” was also its first smog joke.)

  The natives called their home Yang-na, but their story is no joke. When the Spanish first arrived, the Yang-na people were scattered in little clusters between the ocean and the Los Angeles River; their center stood where City Hall stands today. They spoke a language similar to the Shoshones (on the other side of the Sierra Nevada); they lived on fish, small game and the flour they milled from acorns; they wore almost no clothing. The Yang-na believed in an afterlife, they practiced cremation and they savored hallucinogens during coming-of-age rituals. Temescals, ceremonial sweat lodges, were used for cleansing and for communion with their god Chinigchinich, but most rituals revolved around cycles of life. They had no demons.

  The first recorded baptisms in Alta California were performed in The Canyon of the Little Christians.

  Compared to their colorful relatives the Aztecs and the Great Plains Indians, the Yang-na were lackluster natives. They didn’t farm the land, didn’t make war, didn’t build, didn’t weave blankets or make terra cotta pottery. Yet, unlike the Aztecs and Mayans, these simple natives held onto their land and their lifestyle for hundreds of years beyond those sophisticated civilizations. California was one of the last habitable places on earth that wasn’t being planned for the white man’s empires. However, in 1781, more than two centuries after Cabrillo first smelled smoke, the Viceroy needed a plan.

  Russian fur trappers were venturing too far south from their northwest trading posts; this concerned the King of Spain and his Viceroy in the New World. To protect Spanish holdings in California, the Viceroy appointed a governor. That governor, Gaspar de Portolá, was a romantic. Instead of lining Alt
a California with soldiers awaiting confrontation, Portolá installed an army of a different sort: the Franciscan Friars. They planned for the construction of 21 missions along an Indian path that was soon called El Camino Real, the Royal Road, from San Diego to San Francisco 500 miles away. Of course, every mission still had a military Presidio attached to it to keep the peace, but the king got his wish. The missions took 42 years to build; no nation challenged the Franciscan Friars or their Spanish sponsors, not even the local Yang-na. Roman Catholics would build California, mission by mission.

  Situated just six miles from the San Gabriel mission, Los Angeles was not a mission. It was to be a pueblo, a community. On an expedition in 1769, Governor Portolá named the local river El Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúnculá, “the river of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels of Porciúnculá.” The expedition’s journalist wrote that on August 2 they encountered “eight heathen,” the local Yang-na, who gave the strangers gifts of baskets “and strings of beads made from shells.” This friendly exchange marked the end of an era for the native people. In 1779, Portolá’s replacement, Governor Felipe de Neve, would populate El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúnculá. It would no longer be the Bay of Smokes.

  When word went out across Mexico that pobladores, settlers, were invited to this new land, the response was limp. Eventually, 11 impoverished farmers were recruited with promises of seven-acre farms, along with seed, tools, horses, 10 pesos a month and a plot of land 20 varas (55 feet) by 40 varas (110 feet) facing the plaza they planned to build. With their wives and children, they formed a community of 44 pobladores, the first settlers in Los Angeles. Two were full-blooded Spaniards, plus four Indians, one Mestizo, two Negroes and two Mulattos. Twenty-two were children. Governor Neve designed a traditional pueblo where each residence faced a common plaza with a church in its center. September 4, 1781, the day that Governor Neve completed his plan, is recognized as the birthday of Los Angeles. (The LA County Fair coincides each year to celebrate this date.)

  As the pobladores went to work on the community, the friars at the San Gabriel Mission went to work on the Indians. While learning to communicate with the Yang-na, they produced foods from seeds never seen before by the natives; they provided shelter to the native people in exchange for their labor. Then the friars introduced stories about evil, about Satan, and why the red man was destined to a place called Hell unless he was baptized immediately. An entire culture was lured into submission.

  San Gabriel Mission

  The friars were organized; they planned industries at the mission. They taught the native hunter-gatherers about farming, and the appeal of harvesting crops instead of scavenging for them. They soon had the Indians building a dam that diverted fresh water to irrigate the fields for the mission. They introduced citrus trees; they made olive oil. They built a granary and kept it stocked. Chickens and roosters held in captivity provided a steady supply of meat and eggs — captivity being a foreign concept to the natives. Eventually, the mission even expanded to include cattle for the manufacture of cowhides and tallow. Friars gave the orders, but natives did the work. Free Indian labor was the basis for nearly all the mission’s achievements. With the friars and the pobladores controlling all the suitable farmland, Native Americans were forced to work the lands they once occupied with abandon.

  The Founding of Los Angeles (mural at LA Public Library), Dean Cornwell, 1932

  Journalists who visited during those early decades decried what they witnessed. The Native Americans were slaves on their own land. In 1786, just five years after the founding of Los Angeles, visiting French sea captain Galaup de la Pérouse wrote: “The moment an Indian allowed himself to be baptized he relinquished every particle of liberty and subjected himself body and soul to tyranny from which there was no escape. The church then claimed him as its own … and enforced its claims with the strong hand of power.”

  If a baptized Indian ran away in an attempt to return to native independence, he was hunted down by soldiers from the Presidio, brought back and lashed into submission. There were stocks and a whipping post in the mission courtyard for discipline. Despite the broken spirits of the Yangna, the success of the pueblo actually attracted more Native Americans into the mission. Indians from the outlying islands and from San Diego found their way to Los Angeles, where they too learned about eternal damnation, then offered themselves up for baptism. The captain continues: “In a short while after the establishment of the mission, resistance was almost unknown. Three or four hundred [Native Americans] were driven to their labors by three or four soldiers like so many cattle.”

  The following year, in an effort to break the friars’ monopoly on free labor, the new governor delivered his “Instructions for the Corporal Guard of the Pueblo of Los Angeles.” It set some rules for engaging the Native Americans, who now had the freedom to choose between employment at the missions or the sprawling pueblo-associated ranchos.

  Native women watch men play a game at a mission.

  What the natives didn’t get was land or wages. They also didn’t get their god Chinigchinich, for the friars destroyed every trace of pagan idolatry they encountered. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, when Native Americans were shoved and slaughtered across the states, but there was no Trail of Tears in Los Angeles. With barely a skirmish, the land had been out of Yangna control for decades. Its people were raped, beaten and exploited, completely dependent upon the missionaries and the rancheros for their survival. Even children worked. In 1836, the last of the independent Yang-na abandoned the ancestral land, and the native culture ceased to exist in Los Angeles.

  Drawing by William Rich Hutton depicting a section of Los Angeles, c. 1847

  Torrential rains flooded Governor Neve’s original pueblo. The natives moved the pobladores to higher ground in 1818, where they built a new plaza and a new church that still stand today at historic Olvera Street. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. For generations, the plaza was the cultural gathering place for Los Angeles.

  A tragic surprise lurked when the natives mixed with the Catholics: syphilis, smallpox, measles and every other European disease to which the natives lacked immunity. Living in crowded, unsanitary conditions, they died in droves. More than 6,000 indigenous people are buried at the San Gabriel Mission, ravaged by diseases. By the time the missions were secularized and the last Franciscan departed in 1852, the Yang-na were decimated. Though the Franciscan Friars came to Alta California with high ideals, their efforts resulted in genocide.

  From this sad start, one of the world’s most vibrant cities was born. Native American muscle built the first structures, providing the grist for subsequent generations. At the same time, pobladores invested their souls to make Los Angeles work, and happily for us, they succeeded. Many generations later, this indentation off the coastline is still renowned as a Bay of Smokes!

  IN THE MOVIES:

  Much of Charlie Chaplin’s film The Kid (1921) is filmed in the rundown pueblo. Also, Double Indemnity (1944), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) and, on television, The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show (1962).

  CHAPTER 2.

  FANDANGOS IN THE PUEBLO

  WEALTHY MEXICANS AND THE SIEGE OF LOS ANGELES

  1786–1848

  Joy was in the air on September 4, 1786. The founding fathers were honored by the governor on this fifth anniversary of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúnculá.

  After five years of grueling labor, building the pueblo from the ground up, it was time to get paid. Each man had earned the title to a generous parcel of land, plus his small plot facing the plaza. One by one, the pobladores were called forward, then ceremoniously presented with a deed and a branding iron. Each neighbor signed for his property with an X because none of them knew how to read or write. Then, each one learned the unique insignia he would burnish into his livestock, enabling cattle to mingle across property lines in communal pastures
(since barbed wire wouldn’t be invented for another 100 years). From this day forward, the Spanish-speaking residents of the pueblo would be known as Californios.

  Prior to this day, the governor dismissed three of the original 11 heads of families for being “useless.” Only eight of the original settlers witnessed this memorable day, though property was awarded to two sons of a dismissed black man, Luis Quintero. One of those parcels eventually expanded to become the 4,500-acre Rodeo de las Aguas, known today as Beverly Hills.

  Old Spanish and Mexican ranchos of Los Angeles County, 1830

  It was also the day that the stipends from Spain officially ended. Now each family was expected to harvest wheat and grain for profit, and to pay taxes to the king. But after years of living in huts they made from willow branches, the prospect of a solid one-room, windowless adobe on the plaza was reason to celebrate. The pobladores gave thanks.

  As the pueblo’s good news attracted more residents, even bigger celebrations would follow. Twenty more families soon joined the pueblo, bestowed with spectacular land grants by the governor, thanks to their political connections. Chief among them:

  Juan José Dominguez, one of Governor Portolá’s original foot soldiers back in 1769, was granted 75,000 acres of land; he is acknowledged as the first ranchero in Los Angeles. He drove his herd of horses and 200 heads of cattle from San Diego to the site he named Rancho San Pedro, overlooking today’s port at San Pedro Bay, a distance of more than 100 miles. Dominguez was an instant celebrity, as every enterprising ranchero in the pueblo had to haul their goods through his vast territory to reach the port. (Today, it’s home to Boeing; Honda; California State University, Dominguez Hills; and the busiest seaport in America.)