Salvador Apablasa, 75; Descendant of Pioneer Los Angeles Landowners

Salvador Apablasa, whose forebears once owned much of the land on which Los Angeles’ Union Station and Chinatown now stand, died Friday in Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.

He was 75, and since retiring as an Army lieutenant colonel had worked with his wife, Margaret, as a volunteer at Braille Institute.

Apablasa was a fourth-generation descendant of the Portuguese family that immigrated from Chile to Los Angeles in the 1840s.

The family built what was believed to be the city’s first frame house but it was moved in 1933 to make room for what was then Union Passenger Terminal, the nation’s newest train depot when it opened in 1937-38. The house was to have been preserved in a museum but it later was destroyed.

The Apablasa family also was believed responsible for Los Angeles’ first subdivision when, late in the last century, it sold land to Chinese squatters who turned it into what is now Chinatown. An “Apablasa Street” once ran through the Chinese quarter.

Besides his wife, Apablasa’s survivors include six cousins.