A Rebirth for L.A.’s Birthplace

Jean Bruce Poole donned a hard hat one recent morning and made her way past the construction fence surrounding rundown 19th century buildings on a downtown site known as the birthplace of Los Angeles.

While workers drilled and pounded overhead, Poole steered her visitors into the Pico House, a once-elegant but long-neglected hotel built in 1869-70 by Pio de Jesus Pico, who had been the last governor of Mexican California.

Inside the Italianate building--the city’s first three-story structure--Poole smiled broadly at the sight of its naked skeleton. Gone were the false ceilings and heating ducts that, installed two decades ago in a misbegotten attempt at modernization, had blocked the tops of the building’s distinctive arched windows. Its grand staircase, with two curving sets of steps, stood exposed, awaiting renovation, and its ceilings and large chunks of its roof had been stripped away as construction crews worked to reinforce the structure against earthquakes.

“It’s a thrill to see this,” said Poole. As museum director since 1977 for the 44-acre El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument, she has waited a long time for these and other improvements civic leaders hope will provide at last a fitting and successful revival of the site where the nation’s second-largest city--and one of its most culturally diverse--began.

The seismic strengthening and exterior renovations underway at the long-shuttered Pico House and the half-dozen neighboring structures known collectively as the Pico and Garnier blocks are the most visible signs of the latest effort to turn El Pueblo, lying just northeast of the Civic Center and the Hollywood Freeway, mainly between Los Angeles and Main streets, into a first-class attraction of shops and historic exhibits worthy of its heritage. The goal is to extend to the rest of the site the interest tourists and locals alike show in Olvera Street, the bustling Mexican marketplace of shops and restaurants that is El Pueblo’s best known feature.

“We look at this as a really great opportunity to make [El Pueblo] a very welcoming place for all the people who contributed to its history,” said Los Angeles Councilman Nick Pacheco, whose district includes the site. “My goal is to make sure we have a collaborative, inclusive effort,” he added, apparently alluding to the ethnic battles that have marked some past efforts at restoring the area.

Many hurdles and key decisions remain, including how some of the buildings will be used and who will operate them. And the current plans must overcome a sorry history of widely touted efforts that went by the wayside, mired in political bickering, a dearth of funds or the lack of successful commercial prospects.

But the prospects of the current efforts are buoyed by several new factors, including a booming economy, an increasing interest in downtown --and a desire to showcase El Pueblo during the Democratic National Convention next summer.

“I’m very excited that the city is pushing on this,” said Linda Dishman of the Los Angeles Conservancy. The city efforts, coupled with a growing interest in preserving Los Angeles’ historic landmarks, should add momentum to improve an area that has always been popular with tourists and schoolchildren despite its less-than-stellar condition, Dishman noted.

By mid-August, when the city hosts the convention, officials expect to have completed the exterior renovation of the Pico-Garnier blocks and placed new trees and lighting around the entire district. Thanks to recently negotiated new city leases with the merchants, new puestos, or stalls, and paving will soon appear along Olvera Street.

Public Hearings to Be Held

The city has hired a team of architects, historians and archeologists led by Luis Hoyos of the Los Angeles architectural firm Castro-Blanco, Piscioneri & Associates and expects to unveil streetscape plans and start public hearings within weeks. The plans must pass muster with at least three city panels, including the commission created almost a decade ago to run the El Pueblo monument after the state and county relinquished their role to the city, ending what had been an awkward, multi-agency management system.

“Now, finally, we’re taking a huge step forward,” said Gerry F. Miller, who was assigned by the city’s chief legislative analyst, Ron Deaton, to shepherd the various projects at El Pueblo. Many observers believe the interest on the part of Deaton--considered the most powerful non-elected official at City Hall and a key negotiator on the new Staples Center sports and entertainment complex south of downtown--will help ensure that the current effort to boost El Pueblo will succeed where others have failed.

Civic leaders want to show off El Pueblo and its collection of museums and historic features by holding a convention party for Democrats at Pico House and staging other events along Olvera Street and the Plaza.

Sometime in 2001, the city hopes to have completed a renovation that will see new uses for the dilapidated 19th century buildings, which also include the Merced Theater, an 1858 Masonic Hall, the Hellman-Quon Building and a museum in a historic firehouse. There will be a new Museum of Chinese American History in the Garnier Block--a center for Chinese commerce in the latter part of the 19th century--and an Italian heritage museum in the Italian Hall, built in 1907-08 behind Olvera Street, aided by $500,000 apiece in state grants.

City officials also envision a multilevel parking structure to replace an inadequate lot at Main Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue. And with the help of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, civic leaders want to create a more pedestrian-friendly bridge across the Hollywood Freeway, which divides El Pueblo from the Civic Center and the rest of downtown. The MTA also plans to create a better link with the recently renovated Union Station across Alameda Street to the east.

In addition, the city, after much delay, is making plans with the Getty Conservation Institute to save a deteriorating mural painted in 1932 on a wall of the Italian Hall by Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros and to create an accompanying interpretive exhibit.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County has begun planning what to do with a separate collection of decaying historic buildings next to the 1818 Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, across Main Street from the city-owned historic district. Supervisor Gloria Molina recently led the charge to get the leased buildings back under county control and to put $5 million into planning and feasibility studies for the site. Two of the less historically important buildings, used by a pharmaceuticals company early in this century, recently were demolished, a signal that something is happening there at last.

Molina has hired Barrio Planners to review the county site’s history and help assess the remaining buildings. Although it is too soon to say whether they can be saved, Molina said she is determined to see the site at least is used for cultural and educational purposes that would complement, but not compete with, El Pueblo’s mix of historic and commercial uses.

“This is just the beginning, but we [the city and the county] are giving each other a kind of energy, and you’re going to see it mushroom,” Molina said. “There are some real opportunities here for us to work together to create something grand.”

Advocates for El Pueblo hope the various activities may provide the critical mass needed to turn the city’s birthplace into the kind of thriving cultural, historical and commercial hub enjoyed in such cities as Albuquerque, Baltimore, San Antonio, Boston, Philadelphia and, closer to home, San Diego and Sacramento.

Like Los Angeles itself, El Pueblo has been shaped by many cultures. It began when 44 settlers from Mexico, then under Spanish rule, arrived on the site close to the river in September 1781 to found El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles--the Town of the Queen of the Angels.

The pueblo’s plaza served as the heart of Mexican society for all of Southern California as the region came under the control of Mexico in 1821, then the United States in 1848. In the latter part of the 19th century, Chinese, French, Italians, African Americans and other groups contributed much to the area.

But by the early part of this century, the site was a largely neglected, industrializing area ignored by civic leaders of the growing city. When the Avila Adobe, built about 1818 along what is now Olvera Street and the oldest surviving house in Los Angeles, was threatened with demolition during the 1920s, civic activist Christine Sterling launched a campaign to save it and to rescue the fading historic area by turning Olvera Street into a Mexican marketplace that opened in 1930.

In 1953, the district was designated a state historic park, then turned over to the city in 1991. Of the monument’s 27 historic buildings, 11 are open to the public in some form or another, and four are restored as museums, such as the firehouse and the Avila Adobe.

Questions About City Funding

While Olvera Street thrived, despite skirmishes over its future and rents and periodic civic neglect, much of the rest of El Pueblo languished, especially the Pico-Garnier buildings on the south end, empty for decades.

The latest effort to restore the buildings came less than two years ago, when Catellus began negotiations with the city to lease the buildings and turn them into shops, restaurants and a bed and breakfast.

But Catellus “had trouble making it pencil out, and there were a number of issues we weren’t able to resolve with the city,” said Douglas Gardner, president of the firm’s mixed-use group. So Catellus bowed out to concentrate on its Union Station plans but “remains very interested” in the site and has not ruled out making another bid in the future, Gardner said.

Some have privately questioned the wisdom of the city’s going ahead with the streetscape and seismic strengthening work, suggesting that it might hamstring future leaseholders with a preordained vision. But others say the projects--the seismic work alone is worth $7.2 million and the price tag for all the projects combined will exceed $20 million--provide an economic incentive that will draw healthy competition. Some of the funding sources include a 1990 city bond measure for seismic work and the MTA.

Elizabeth Jackson, president of the Washington-based International Downtown Assn., said the city’s seismic work and other contributions represent “a huge asset to a private developer who may be interested in the area but still sees it as risky. . . . This really helps improve the bottom line.”

Pacheco said the plans represent “an exciting time right now for the heart of the city,” but he indicated he is not unaware of the challenges:

“It will be interesting to see how well we can market it after it is completed.”

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Preserving History

A new effort to restore the birth place of Los Angeles is underway at the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument, which lies northeast of the Civic Center downtown. Although some of the plans still are being drawn up and must be approved by several city boards, officials hope to have enough of the restoration done to show off the historic area during the Democratic National Convention in August.

Source: El Pueblo de Los Angeles