High-Class Trash Gives Look at Life in Old L.A.

Back when the Los Angeles River still meandered and its banks were lined with vineyards and ranchlands, someone committed a timeless act--he left a Budweiser bottle.

Archeologists recently unearthed a century-old pile of high-class rubbish just southeast of downtown, including a glass quart container that once held the King of Beers. The excavation is in conjunction with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s construction of a maintenance yard for its Red Line trains.

The artifacts, dating from 1860 to 1890, paint a picture of what life might have been like for the elite class living in Los Angeles at the time, said John Foster, an archeologist with the project.

Broken dishes and bottles of champagne, wine and ale made the journey from exotic towns in China, France and Scotland.

The opalescent bottle of Bud made the journey from St. Louis.

Foster said he suspected that the trash relics came from a fancy hotel or restaurant--left there in hopes that one of the seasonal floods would take them downstream, he said.

But the water must have steadily seeped over the refuse, carrying cloth and paper away while depositing sand and silt over the heavier bottles and plates, said Foster.

Back then, a city-owned vineyard sat on this parcel of land on the outskirts of town. Just upstream, Chinese and Japanese communities’ vegetable gardens skirted the bank.

Also littered on the bank were broken English chamber pots, shellfish scraps and steak bones. But more than anything, there was evidence of liquor--not the cheap whiskey that the working class drank, but the good stuff from Europe.

“None of the material here is modest,” said Foster.

That is, except for the Bud.

The embossed bottle of beer cost about 20 cents back then, said Bill Vollmar, company historian for Anheuser-Busch Cos. This specific bottle was made only from 1876 to 1878, when Bud was first brewed.

In those years, Budweiser was shipped around the nation in double-walled railway cars, Vollmar said. At company icehouses along the tracks, workers dumped ice between the double walls to keep the beer cold.

“When the ice melted, you would go another hundred miles to the next icehouse and put more ice in,” Vollmar said. Usually the beer was shipped in barrels. At bars, a nickel would buy a 7-ounce glass of Bud that came with a lunch for no extra cost, Vollmar said. But, as they are today, barkeeps were clever--they served only heavily salted meat and condiments that stirred up an unquenchable thirst.

“They talk about a free lunch. Nobody ever got a free lunch,” Vollmar said. “You ended up paying for it by buying more beer.”

In the last several years, archeologists working for the MTA and the Metropolitan Water District have uncovered hundreds of artifacts that will help to piece together a more complete picture of old Los Angeles.

Last May near Union Station, scientists unearthed the largest “red light” district ever excavated in California. In 1995 in the same area, artifacts from Old Chinatown were uncovered, about six decades after the settlement was razed.