This is the first of four posts by Boyle Heights Historical Society Advisory Board member Rudy Martinez about the origins of electric lighting in Los Angeles, consisting of tall mast lights including one in Boyle Heights. – Paul R. Sptizzeri Since this time of year is a time of holiday celebrations, often involving bright and…
Ilya Tolstoy Speech: The International Institute of Los Angeles Centennial, Part Three
On 15 November, the International Institute of Los Angeles is celebrating its centennial and this is the third post commemorating that event by featuring some history related to the early days of the Institute when it was located in the former William H. Perry home, now at Heritage Square Museum. This entry concerns a notable…
Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The Cummings Block, circa 1889
This Friday, the Boyle Heights Historical Society will be hosting a talk and book-signing by Catherine López Kurland regarding her book, Hotel Mariachi: Urban Space and Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles, which was co-written by Enrique R. Lamadrid with photographs by Miguel A. Gandert and an introductory essay by Evangeline Ordaz-Molina and published by The…
“The Siren”: The Boyle Heights Junior High School Newspaper, 1922
With today being the first day of school for the Los Angeles Unified School District, this seemed like a good opportunity to share some great history from Boyle Heights Junior High School’s student newspaper, “The Siren,” which made its debut on 19 October 1922. The paper is a window into the community, the school, its…
The International Institute of Los Angeles Centennial, Part Two
As the International Institute of Los Angeles, which has an office in Boyle Heights, celebrates its centennial, this post looks back to the opening of the Institute’s office in the historic Perry Mansion, now located at the Heritage Square Museum, back in 1916. The previous post from 3 July noted that the mansion was purchased in…
Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The Macy Street (Old Aliso Road) Bridge, 1870s
This is a fantastic, rare stereoscopic photograph (an image printed twice and slightly offset, so, when viewed through a stereopticon with special lenses, “tricks” the eye into seeing the two images as one in a 3-D effect) of the bridge that was built across the Los Angeles River on the old Aliso Road, later Macy…
The Hostetter Tract of Boyle Heights
In the southwestern section of Boyle Heights, below where the 5, 10, 60 and 101 freeways come together, is an area that was known as the Hostetter Tract. Subdivided in 1887, when Los Angeles was engulfed in a population and real estate boom often known as “The Boom of the Eighties,” the tract was created…
Historical Photos of Boyle Heights: Breed Street School, 1891
Breed Street School in Boyle Heights might just be the oldest continuously operating elementary school in the city of Los Angeles. The school began sometime in the 1870s as simply Boyle Heights School, though there isn’t much information out there about those early days. An 1880 history of Los Angeles County, for example, merely noted…
José Adolfo Bernal: An 1899 Booster Pamphlet for Boyle Heights, Part 3
In the 1899 publication Beautiful Highlands of Los Angeles, promoting Boyle Heights, Brooklyn Heights and Euclid Heights and issued by the Ninth Ward Improvement Association, almost all of the people and buildings discussed and visually presented were middle and upper middle class Americans and Europeans, like the target audience of the pamphlet who were solicited to come to…
William Mulholland, Longtime Boyle Heights Resident
Tomorrow is the centennial anniversary of the opening ceremony for the massive Los Angeles Aqueduct, which delivered water from the Owens River in eastern California to the Los Angeles region over a 220-plus mile system of finely engineered tunnels, channels, pipes, pumps, reservoirs and other elements in a scheme that was filled with controversy, but…