Curious Trips on Memory Lane

Weller Street was a dusty, tree-lined road leading to downtown when stagecoaches raced up it in the 1850s carrying passengers from ships at San Pedro.

Travelers sometimes placed bets on which rival coach would reach Los Angeles first. The trip from the harbor to the city seemed like great fun, until it simply turned hair-raising.

“Many a newcomer to Los Angeles of that day wrote enthusiastically -- or with pious gratitude -- of his safe arrival over the route,” wrote Joe Seewerker. “Weller Street was what might be called the homestretch of the races.”

But the street had a sedate, businesslike look in 1939 when Seewerker recounted its past in a newspaper story illustrated with a pen-and-ink drawing of “modern” Weller Street leading toward a looming Los Angeles City Hall.

The profile was part of a regular Times feature called Nuestro Pueblo, or “Our Town.” Between 1938 and 1940 it was a popular feature. Seewerker collaborated with newspaper artist Charles Owens as he explored sights around town.

Some of the series’ 168 stories and sketches dealt with landmarks such as St. Vibiana’s Cathedral and the San Gabriel Mission. Most, though, chronicled obscure corner curiosities that had surprisingly interesting stories to tell.

One told of the mysterious carved-stone lion in front of Rebecca Pesqueire’s Yale Street home in what is now Chinatown. Another explained why there was an ornate, church-like stained-glass window at the old Central Jail on downtown’s Hill Street. A third revealed how Shiro Nakamura’s 10-foot-wide pharmacy on 1st Street in Little Tokyo came to be.

Most of the duo’s subjects -- such as John Pitts’ blacksmith shop in the shadow of City Hall and Clyde Brown’s hand-built wedding chapel in Highland Park -- are gone now. Waves of urban renewal in Los Angeles over the past half-century have seen to that.

But Weller Street survives as Weller Court, a mall popular with Japanese tourists. And in Hollywood, the storybook “Country Church,” built by onetime Tennessee preacher William Hogg and chronicled in a 1940 Nuestro Pueblo, hangs on. Until 1966 it was used as the setting for a nationally broadcast radio ministry. Today the rundown wood structure is hidden by trees and shrubs at 1750 Argyle Ave. and could end up being replaced by a restaurant or nightclub.

At Exposition Park, the “Tree that Grew with Los Angeles” still stands. It was planted downtown nearly 125 years ago and moved to South Figueroa Street in 1914. It remains marked by the same plaque calling it “a mute witness to the growth of Los Angeles from a community of pueblo days to a great world metropolis of today” that was there in 1939.

Nearby at the corner of Figueroa and West Adams Boulevard is apparently the last remnant of Los Angeles’ 1870s-era zanja system. That was the network of concrete ditches that until 1904 carried irrigation water taken from the Los Angeles River above Griffith Park. The surviving ditch segment looks remarkably similar to how it appeared in Owens’ sketch in 1938. Now filled with dirt and decorated with wrought iron, the 3-foot-deep channel is visible next to the Figueroa sidewalk outside St. Vincent’s Catholic Church.

Many of the Nuestro Pueblo stories and sketches were published in book form in 1940. As one reviewer put it, the collection “preserves many scenes which will stir our memories and awaken pleasant reveries.”

Or, failing that, “the book seems the answer to the doctor’s prayer, as anyone killing time in a waiting room will find it just the thing,” the reviewer added.