First Park Has Undergone Transformations

Like many an Angeleno, the city’s first public park has changed its look and name numerous times over the years. Yet the five-acre parcel at the center of today’s downtown is one of the very few pieces of local real estate that has not changed hands since El Pueblo de Los Angeles was founded in 1781.

Most Angelenos know it as Pershing Square, jubilantly renamed a week after the World War I armistice of 1918 in honor of Gen. John J. Pershing, the onetime officer of African American cavalrymen who went on to lead the U.S. Expeditionary Force in Europe.

More than 30 years earlier, the square was 6th Street Park, a lush oasis edged by small cypresses planted, like many of its other trees and shrubs, by civic do-gooder George “Roundhouse” Lehman, who owed his nickname to the popular beer garden he operated on Main Street.

Lehman always carried a lemon around town, held before his nose like a Tudor gentleman, to ward off street smells. For 20 years he watered the greenery he had planted in the park, and was such a fixture that when the city wanted to build its first public library there, voters defeated the measure because they thought the land was his.

By 1887, the park was cultural Los Angeles. On the north side stood Hazard’s Pavilion, which ultimately became the Philharmonic Auditorium. It closed in 1964, two weeks before the Music Center opened.

Over the 75 years the hall operated, Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington lectured there. Vaudeville buffoons took their pratfalls and Nijinsky danced there. The Los Angeles Philharmonic began its rise to fame there, and George Gershwin played what would be his last concert on its stage.

In that same boom decade of the 1880s, St. Paul’s Episcopal school for boys and the adjacent cathedral with its soaring landmark spire rose on the square. The Episcopalians arrived just as the Catholics were leaving; St. Vincent’s College, which had moved to the square from the old Plaza in 1867, found the bustle of nearby businesses too distracting, and moved its young scholars again.

By the time the square was given its current name, it had already gone through seven others, beginning with La Plaza Abaja, the plaza below the plaza of the original pueblo. Over the years it also bore the unoriginal names City Park, Central Park, St. Vincent’s Park and Public Square.

In the downtown heyday of the 1920s and ‘30s, its nighttime habitues were smartly dressed couples out for a breath of flower-scented air during the intermission of a play or concert. And it was never without its spellbinding orators, its preachers of old-time religion or newer creeds like socialism, anarchy or the Townsend Plan. There also were mass rallies of those who raised funds for war bonds and the Red Cross.

On the southeast corner of the square stood the Pantages vaudeville house, built by immigrant theater magnate Alexander Pantages.

This real estate was so valuable that its ownership was evidently worth blackmail. In 1929, a 17-year-old dancer named Eunice Pringle ran into the street screaming that she had been raped by Pantages. At his second trial, Pantages was acquitted.

On her deathbed, Pringle confessed that she had been paid to make the accusations by Joseph P. Kennedy, owner of the competing Orpheum Circuit and patriarch of the Kennedy clan, who had hoped that a scandal-tarnished Pantages would sell his property cheaply.

In the daylight hours, the place took on a Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner feel as businessmen and shoppers mixed with firebrand agitators and a growing population of homeless people, who colonized the park almost from its beginning.

One account from the Depression characterized the park’s denizens as “discouraged, ragged, jobless, sick people, bums, lonely tourists who want someone to talk to, Reds breathing communism.”

Joseph Scott was “Mr. Los Angeles,” a passionate advocate of civic reform and one of many who drew lunchtime crowds to raise funds for war bonds and the Red Cross.

After World War II, the park shared the fate of the central city, which was abandoned by residents who fled to the suburbs. Others, however, moved in: As early as 1948, the city campaigned to rid the park of the rats that came out at night to feed on scraps left by visitors. To starve out the rodents, it also prohibited the feeding of birds.

The place still had a hold on the imagination, though. In that same year, Aldous Huxley published his dystopian novel “Ape and Essence.” In it, mutant survivors of an atomic war in 2018 gather in Pershing Square to warm themselves by the flames of books taken from the Central Library and set ablaze.

As the downtown businesses moved west, the park was brutally excavated in 1952 for an underground garage. Where cypress trees had stood, auto ramps were installed. It was covered with concrete and frosted by a thin layer of indifferent grass and a few disconsolate trees.

The city was sufficiently embarrassed by the park’s appearance to spend $1 million on a face lift in time for the 1984 Olympics. Property owners, encouraged by this show of civic conscience, taxed themselves to refurbish the rest of the park.

That 1993 redesign installed bright pavilions, a fountain and a concert stage. A seasonal ice rink was added five years later, luring workers, shoppers and tourists onto the ice at what ice-skating Mayor Richard Riordan, who dedicated it, called “Rockefeller Center West.”

In one of history’s small but engaging ironies, the site across the street that was once home to a college named for St. Vincent de Paul, whose name is synonymous with helping the destitute, became the St. Vincent Jewelry Center, nationally renowned for gorgeous and costly precious stones.