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 4: Ramona

There are two key areas of Southern California that actually treat their French roots with respect. The first, as I've mentioned, is the San Fernando Valley.

The second - and virtually no outsider knows this - is the tiny town of Ramona.

Situated in northeastern San Diego County, Ramona is an unincorporated town named after Helen Hunt Jackson's famous novel. (By the way, getting there can be a challenge. It's well off the beaten path, and some of the highway signage is confusing and/or missing. Do yourself a HUGE favor and take Highway 67 through Poway. The 78 SEEMS shorter and more direct, but trust me, it's not.)

The town was previously called Nuevo. But don't let the Spanish names fool you - Ramona's deepest roots are heavily French.

Like many other French families who came to Los Angeles, the Verlaque family moved farther afield in search of land. They raised sheep in San Diego, and by 1886 were making a good enough living to build themselves a little place out in the country.

This house - the Verlaque family's country retreat - was the first permanent building in the Ramona area. 

It's also the only known example of a French Colonial house built out of adobe.

The town of Ramona clearly respects its French pioneers.

When Henri Penelon painted the rebuilt Old Plaza Church, he was assisted by 21-year-old Bernard Etcheverry, who had just arrived from France. As you can see, Bernard and his family eventually settled in Ramona.

I should note that the Guy B. Woodward Museum, housed in the Verlaque adobe, does NOT allow photography. I was granted special permission to photograph two items in the museum because they are original to the Verlaque family.

This soup tureen belonged to Elizabeth Verlaque and was used in this house.

To the untrained eye, this might LOOK like any fireplace you'd find in an adobe house's kitchen...

Theophile Verlaque, however, had the roasting spit custom made (in Paris!) for the house. It has a built-in mechanical timer to ensure perfectly cooked meat. What can I say? Even way back in 1886...even in a humble country retreat...we like our food cooked perfectly (and I don't even eat meat).

The Verlaques, like most French families, buried their dead in the local Catholic cemetery. However, San Diego's Calvary Cemetery was turned into Mission Hills Park (previously called Pioneer Park) in the 1970s. They took out the tombstones, but not the bodies (I wonder if Pioneer Park might have been the inspiration for Poltergeist...incidentally, San Diego has quite a long history of flagrantly disrespecting its dead). In any case, two of the Verlaque family's tombstones were salvaged (most of the tombstones were simply thrown into a ditch on the edge of the "park") and can now be found outside the house.

The Etcheverry family home exists only in memories (if I had to take a guess as to why, I'd say it might have something to do with the fact that San Diego County's backcountry is prone to brush fires). But, a few miles south of the Verlaque house, Etcheverry Street still bears the family's name.