Open Letter To All The Snobs Who Say SoCal Has No History

(Dear readers: permit me, if you will, to veer slightly off topic tonight. I've been wanting to get this off my chest for quite some time now.)

Dear Snobs:

Look, I GET it. Your East Coast hometowns look and feel like they've been around forever. You're proud of your roots. Unless you have a connection to someone or something absolutely despicable (i.e. slaveowning ancestors), you have every right to be proud.

You do not, however, have the right to loudly, nastily, and inaccurately claim that "Southern California doesn't have any history."

Our history may not look like yours, but that doesn't make it any less real. 

Some of you seem to think the history of North America didn't begin until the first English settlers landed. Wrong - there were already people living here. Southern California, which still has a large Native American population, knows this and doesn't pretend the world began when the Spanish invaded.

North Carolina famously has the lost colony of Roanoke. It's an intriguing story. But we famously have ghost towns (and they're still standing!).

The South has retained many of its historic plantations. Similarly, we have the missions established by Spanish Catholic priests. (I've seen historic homes in Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. Funny how I don't recall EVER seeing slave quarters on properties that definitely had them. Meanwhile, Californians don't kid ourselves about the fact that Native Americans in the mission system had miserable lives.)

You say Coney Island. I say Knott's Berry Farm (turning 100 next year!), Balboa Fun Zone, and the Santa Monica Pier. (Hey, remember the beautiful antique carousel from "The Sting"? The Looff Hippodrome has been on the Santa Monica Pier for over a century.)

New Yorkers are proud of Central Park. Bostonians are proud of Boston Common. Both are very nice urban parks. But Griffith Park - which has a very unusual history of its own - is nice too. And it has a beautiful Art Deco observatory.

Virginia has Jamestown and Williamsburg. I've been to both and they definitely have educational value. But so does Los Angeles' historic plaza. Ditto for Old Town State Historic Park in San Diego.

Virginia also gives us the heavily sanitized story of Pocahontas. The San Gabriel Valley gives us the true story of Toypurina, a powerful Kizh shaman who helped orchestrate a plot to overthrow the padres at Mission San Gabriel and take back the land occupied by the Spanish. (The plot failed, but the Spanish didn't dare to execute Toypurina when she was convicted.)

Are you from a town with a history of piracy? Cool. I'm not. BUT Southern California did have lots of rum runners and bootleggers during Prohibition (some of them with close ties to Los Angeles City Hall...you can't make this stuff up), along with all the other misbehaving characters you'll find in a classic noir film. There are tunnels under downtown Los Angeles to this day, although many have been blocked off over the years.

San Diego was founded in 1769. That makes San Diego older than Louisville (1778), Nashville (1779), and Montpelier (1781).

Los Angeles was founded September 4, 1781. Which makes Los Angeles older than Asheville (1785), Columbia (1786), Cincinnati (1788), Buffalo (1789), and Washington, D.C. (1790).  Not to mention older than Chicago (1803), Montgomery (1819), Indianapolis (1821), Kansas City (1838), and Atlanta (1843). Just saying...

New Yorkers have every right to appreciate Grand Central Terminal. It is a beautiful building. But so is Los Angeles Union Station, built in a style that perfectly combines both Mission Revival and Art Deco. (And Union Station has outdoor green space - an extreme rarity for a train station in a major city.)

Oh, your hometown has beautiful Victorian houses? Great! So does mine. It's true that many of SoCal's Victorians have vanished over the years, but there are still surviving specimens in Los Angeles (Carroll Avenue and Heritage Square in particular), Santa Monica, San Pedro, Santa Ana, San Diego, Orange, Anaheim (yes, really), and even sleepy old Riverside. (There are more, but it's late and I'm tired.)

You say your hometown has unique architecture - things you won't see anywhere else? That's very cool. But guess where else that holds true? Yup - here! Charles and Henry Greene elevated the humble Craftsman house to an art form, especially in Pasadena (two words: Gamble House). Frank Lloyd Wright designed houses completely unlike his earlier work, doing things with concrete blocks that no one else had ever done before. We have the Bradbury Building. And Los Angeles in particular has many of the earliest, and best, examples of fantasy architecture in the world. My personal favorites are the Snow White cottages in Los Feliz and the Coca-Cola building (full disclosure: my dad worked there).

Chicago has the Field Museum. New York has the American Museum of Natural History. Both are world-famous, and for good reason. But have you been to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which boasts four of the ten complete (or near-complete) Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons known to exist? (My favorite exhibit? "Becoming Los Angeles", beginning with the area's Native American roots and continuing until the present day. I have seriously considered becoming a museum member just so I can visit that exhibit whenever I want.)

East Coast cities (and Chicago) have excellent art museums. Someday I'd like to see them all. But Southern California has LACMA (don't underestimate LACMA, seriously), the Getty, the Broad, and the Huntington Library and Gardens (which has quite a lot of priceless art - Gainsborough, Fragonard, etc. in addition to the rare books and antiques). If you're a snob on a layover in LA, forget the tourist stuff and just spend the day at the Huntington. You'll thank me later.

The East Coast and the South have beautiful cemeteries (especially New Orleans). But Hollywood Forever, Angelus Rosedale, and the many iterations of Forest Lawn are beautiful too. I'm not thrilled about Evergreen Cemetery's shameful history of neglect, but there are neglected cemeteries in every part of the United States.

Does your hometown have a famous ghost story? We've got those too. San Diego's Whaley House is one of only two that the State of California acknowledges as "haunted". There are way too many other ghost stories for me to list, but suffice it to say that there are plenty of books on the subject. (This one is the best. You'll thank me later.)

Did something very, very bad happen in your hometown? Salem, Massachusetts has learned to live with its legacy as the site of North America's most infamous witch trials (coincidentally, my 10th great grandmother, Rebecca Nurse, was hanged in Salem). Los Angeles acknowledges, but is definitely not proud of, the 1871 Chinese Massacre. That's right - the deadliest race riot in 19th century America happened in Los Angeles. In fact, it was the first time most people around the world ever even heard of Los Angeles. (Los Angeles is also known for the Manson family murders and the creepy Hotel Cecil, which inspired "American Horror Story: Hotel". We're not proud of this stuff, but we don't pretend it never happened. You know what they say about learning from the past.)

When most people think of LGBT+ rights, the 1969 Stonewall riots immediately come to mind. While Stonewall was a major turning point, it wasn't the first such incident in the United States. Los Angeles experienced its own Stonewall on December 31, 1966/January 1, 1967, when the Black Cat bar was raided by police. The Stonewall Inn moved, burned down, and is now located in half of the original site; the Black Cat building is still intact (although these days it's a gastropub). Oh, and the Black Cat building just so happens to be a charming Art Deco specimen.

Any Art Deco in your hometown? We have tons of it - Los Angeles and Long Beach especially. Los Angeles exploded during Art Deco's heyday; Long Beach collapsed and burned in a 1933 earthquake and rebuilt itself as an Art Deco city. (And yes, the Queen Mary, in all her faded Art Deco glory, is dry-docked in Long Beach...and yes, I belong to the Art Deco Society.) We also have lots of surviving Googie architecture. (You call it "tacky", I call it "fun".)

Does your hometown have a beautiful old movie palace, preferably still screening films? We have lots of those. Some have been converted to retail spaces or houses of worship, some are closed, and some only screen films occasionally. But we love our surviving movie palaces. Los Angeles has its own Historic Theatre Foundation (I'm a member), and one downtown stretch of Broadway has the highest concentration of historic movie theaters in the world. (One of my bucket list items is to see a movie in every surviving SoCal movie palace that still does screenings. I'm working on it.)

Does your hometown have lots of maritime history? So does San Diego. (Full disclosure again: Dad did some work for the Maritime Museum.) Military history? San Diego, Coronado, Long Beach, Orange County, and Wilmington too. Long Beach even has the oldest tattoo parlor in the United States, due at least in part to the Navy's long tenure in the city.

Do you belong to a historic preservation society? The Los Angeles Conservancy is the largest such group in the United States (you guessed it...I'm a member). If the greater Los Angeles area didn't have any history worth preserving, there wouldn't BE a Conservancy in the first place.

Finally, if Southern California doesn't have any history...how, exactly, are you reading this on a niche local history blog?

"Our" history may not look like "your" history. But that doesn't mean we have no history at all. Shut the %&@# up!

Goodnight from Frenchtown,

C.C.

We're Still Here, Part 5: The Natural History Museum

It may seem odd to some of my readers that the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County would have, let alone display, anything related to the city's French community. The words "Natural History Museum" tend to conjure up images of rocks, dinosaur bones, and dioramas of taxidermy wildlife. (Yes, the museum has plenty of those things too, but that's beside the point.)

When it opened in 1913, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County was named the Museum of History, Science, and Art (Le Guide calls it "our County Museum", and I'm sure I don't need to point out that Los Angeles' population was about the same size as Anaheim's is today). The museum's art department spun off into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and moved to Wilshire Boulevard in 1965. Today, the Museum's emphasis is firmly on science, but our history remains - in the "Becoming Los Angeles" exhibit.

And there are some nice surprises in store for French Angelenos.

General John C. Frémont is said to have signed the treaty ending the Mexican-American War at this humble kitchen table.

Jean-Louis Vignes' brandy still and strainer

The father of French migration to California used this brandy still and strainer. They're intact (if slightly battered) and safe in a glass case. I'm amazed these humble items survived when so much of our history has been demolished, paved over, renamed, or actively erased.

Charles Ducommun's scales and shotgun

Charles Ducommun was a half-blind smallpox survivor when he loaded up a donkey with as much as it could carry and WALKED from Arkansas to California, with this shotgun for protection. Incredibly, in spite of his reduced eyesight, the Swiss-born, French-speaking Ducommun continued to ply his trade as a watchmaker, opening a combination jewelry/hardware store. Ducommun's store grew into Ducommun Industries, a defense/aerospace supplier and California's oldest corporation.

I can't even tell you how much time I spent staring into that case, in awe of the fact that California's oldest corporation began with that tiny set of jeweler's scales.

Original log pipe, wrapped in heavy-duty wire

Jean-Louis Sainsevain and the ill-fated Mayor Damien Marchesseault tried to solve LA's water problems with pipes made from hollow logs. It backfired horribly (over and over...), but at least their struggle is remembered in the Museum. (The artifact information doesn't list them by name, but at least there's a surviving log pipe on display. And if you're reading this blog, you probably already know I'm used to this sort of thing. Still...this would make a GREAT segment on Mysteries at the Museum.)

Feliciana Yndart, painted by Henri Penelon

In the 1950s, Henri Penelon's granddaughter took two of his paintings to the Museum to donate them.  Less than a century after his death, no one at the Museum had any idea who he was. I can only imagine how badly that must have stung.

Don Vicente Lugo, painted by Henri Penelon

Today, the Museum's Seaver Center for Western History Research owns thirteen of Penelon's surviving paintings. I wasn't expecting to see any of them on display and yet...there they were!

Don Francisco Sepulveda, painted by Henri Penelon

I have yet to visit the Seaver Center, but will be reaching out to them to do further research.

Animator's desk, chair, and multiplane camera - developed by Walt Disney

Few people realize that Walt Disney had French ancestry. "Disney" is a corruption of "D'Isigny", after Isigny-sur-Mer in Normandy. I have never considered it a coincidence that Disney's Los Feliz home was influenced by traditional Norman architecture.

And then there's the city model.

Built in the 1930s as a WPA project, the model is an amazing tool for seeing what downtown looked like before freeways sliced right through Frenchtown (and a couple of Beaudry tracts). 

Do note that the street we now call "Paseo de la Plaza" was labeled "Sunset Boulevard" on the model. You read it here first: Marchesseault Street was (at one point) renamed Sunset Boulevard.

Beaudry Avenue on the model.

Pershing Square as it appeared before that hideous redesign in the 1950s.
Do note the tiny Doughboy statue in the upper right corner.

Sadly not on display: a portrait of Therese Bry Henriot, who emigrated from French-speaking Switzerland, married a French-born gardener, and established LA's first French-language private school. (Le Guide makes reference to Mme. Henriot's portrait hanging in the Museum. I can only presume it was moved to storage long ago.)

Nonetheless...can you imagine the tears of joy that seeing this exhibit brought to this French/Quebecois/Anglo-Norman Angeleno's eyes? (Who am I kidding? I'm crying as I write this.) For the first time in my life, I felt represented and acknowledged in my hometown. I have argued that we deserve our own museum (and my position on the matter isn't going to change), but just for one afternoon, it was as if the city had tapped my shoulder and whispered into my ear "I hear you".