Peter Moruzzi - Greetings from Los Angeles

Greetings From
Los Angeles

Peter Moruzzi

Greetings From Los Angeles

Digital Edition 1.0

Text 2017 Peter Moruzzi

All images from author Peter Moruzzis collection except those noted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

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The area that would become the city of Los Angeles began as a village established by the Native American Tongva (or Gabrieleo) people. In the 1760s, the Spanish Crown expanded its reach from Mexico north to Alta California, founding a pueblo in 1781 that they named El Pueblo de Nuestra Seora la Reina de los ngeles (the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels), or Los Angeles for short.

Starting in 1769, the government of New Spain established a series of Franciscan missions from San Diego to San Francisco, each separated by about a days horse ride. New missions continued to be founded even after Alta California came under the jurisdiction of a newly independent Mexico in 1821. In the vicinity of Los Angeles were the San Gabriel and San Fernando missions, each of which was a self-sufficient compound of agriculture, livestock, and accommodations for the priests. Local Native Americans compelled into servitude provided most of the labor.

Women packing oranges for shipment east.

Spanish and Mexican land grants became the famous ranchos of the Los Angeles region controlled by extended families of Californios. They included such familiar names as San Pedro, Los Feliz, Topanga Malibu, La Brea (Hollywood, West Hollywood), Boca de Santa Monica, Cahuenga (Burbank and Toluca Lake), and Los Encinos. In the years following the American takeover of Alta California in 1848 at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, the ranchos eventually ended up in the hands of Yankees who either married into Californio families or purchased the land outright. These trends were hastened by the discovery of gold in Northern California in 1849 and the granting of statehood by the United States in 1850, when Southern California became a key source of beef cattle and agricultural products for the northern miners.

Los Angeless original civic, social, and commercial heart was La Plaza, now a historic district where the Avila Adobe, La Placita parish church, and the elegant Pico House hotel from 1870 still stand.

Franciscan friar Junipero Serra established the first nine California missions.

Image: Chris Nichols Collection.

The ruins of the San Fernando Mission, built in 1797.

A rare photo of La Plaza, the historic heart of Los Angeles, circa 1873. The actual plaza is in the center. Pico House on the right fronts Main Street. Note the misspelling of the citys name.

With a population of around 1,600 in 1850, Los Angeles remained geographically isolated until the Southern Pacific Railroad extended their intercontinental line from San Francisco to the dusty frontier town in 1876. Then, in 1885, the competing Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway reached San Diego, and two years later Los Angeles, instigating a price war between the rail companies. For one day in 1887, the fare from St. Louis to Los Angeles was one dollar, touching off a real estate boom as investors rushed to Southern California. In 1887 alone, 36 cities or towns were established in the San Gabriel Valley as middle-class midwesterners and easterners purchased lots for speculation without any intention of actually building homes there. Monrovia, Pomona, South Pasadena, and Azusa were a few of the towns born in the boom that survived the real estate bust of 1888 and the resulting economic depression that descended upon the region. Dozens of other townsites disappeared entirely.

When palm trees were exotic.

Meanwhile, a fortuitous event occurred in the inland city of Riverside, located 60 miles east of Los Angeles. There, 50-year-old suffragette Eliza Tibbets was nurturing a Brazilian citrus tree sapling that had been sent to her in 1873 by a friend at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When the tree finally produced fruit a few years later, the oranges were plump, sweet, juicy, and most importantly seedless. Dubbed Washington navel oranges, the trees were ideally suited to Southern Californias semiarid climate, and because of their naturally thick skins could be successfully packed and shipped. By the 1890s, vast tracts of Washington navel orange groves had been planted across the region from budwood initially cut from Mrs. Tibbetss tree. Consequently, an entire agricultural empirethe Southern California citrus industrywhich would come to define the region through the 1940s, was the result of a social activists interest in horticulture.

Mrs. Tibbetss Washington navel orange tree that started the citrus boom.

Citrus groves framed by oranges and snowcapped mountains.

By 1890, Los Angeles was a city of 50,000, having grown fivefold in population in just 10 years. Large, bustling commercial blocks along Main Street, Broadway, and Spring Street were served by horse-drawn streetcars, then cable cars, and finally electric streetcars. Wealthier residents built elaborate Victorian mansions on Bunker Hill and in Angelino Heights overlooking downtown. One of the citys first suburbs was Boyle Heights on the east side of the Los Angeles River, where from the 1890s through the 1940s, waves of immigrants would initially settleAnglos, Mexicans, African Americans, Russians, Japanese, Jews. After World War II, Boyle Heights would become the center of the Mexican American (Chicano) community in Los Angeles.