As covered in the earlier blog post, The Cooperative Center and the Open Shop, after the Cooperative Center was established in 1925 by a group of Yiddish communists in Boyle Heights, the 3-story venue emerged as a busy center for an array of political leftists and labor activists. It was also the focus of a…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: Cooperative Center’s Court Victories a Win for Open Public Speech
As discussed in the previous post, the Los Angeles Plaza, or La Placita was the site of sporadic but violent and deadly clashes between capital and labor since the early 1900s, years before Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. In the late 1920s, especially after the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, a more organized…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: Radical Voices and the Free Speech Fight Move to La Placita
While an influx of East European emigrants with socialist inclinations began moving to Boyle Heights by the second decade of the 1900s, a powerful and organized Los Angeles coalition of fervent open shop proponents (“a union against unions”) were busy waging a war to crack down on a growing militant labor movement from establishing a…
New Pocket Park in Boyle Heights
Over at the LAist website there is a nice write up about the new Matthews Street pocket park, located between Cesar Chavez Avenue and Michigan Avenue. I attended the opening ceremonies in early spring of 2024. The park features a water fountain designed by Boyle Heights-based artist Mike Saijo as an interactive public art project…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: Cooperative Center Surveillance Photos
This blog post will primarily feature Los Angeles Police Department surveillance photos of the communist-run Cooperative Center at 2708 Brooklyn Avenue (now Cesar Chavez Avenue) in Boyle Heights. But first, a little background on these photos. In 1930, Rep. Hamilton Fish, Jr. (R-New York) chaired a congressional committee called the Special Committee to Investigate Communist…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: Raids and Riots on Brooklyn Avenue
On a February morning in 1919, a group of citrus growers and law enforcement officers decided to meet inside a packing house in the agricultural town of Charter Oak, 24 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, because of their concerns over a looming problem that threatened the region’s highly profitable citrus industry. Specifically, it was…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: The Cooperative Center and the Open Shop
Not long after it opened in 1925, the three-story Cooperative Center at Brooklyn Avenue and Mott Street in Boyle Heights was often described by both the Los Angeles Police Department and the city’s dailies as a “bastion,” or “stronghold” for local communist organizers and “labor agitators.” The inflated rhetoric referred to the fact that during…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS
Organizing and Redlining This blog post is the first in a series of posts that I’ve titled Red Boyle Heights. The series will focus on people and events in and around the community from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. The Red refers to two unique aspects related to Boyle Heights during that era. In…
Talkin’ Hadda
On January 31st 2023, KCRW Public Radio was kind enough to invite me on for a brief 9-minute segment to talk about Hadda Brooks, as someone had told the producer of the show of my series of blog posts about her. Hadda had a long, eventful, and interesting life, so it was challenge to convey…
The Kaspare Cohn Hospital and the Mt. Sinai Hospital and Clinic, Part Five
Editor’s Note: We come to the end of this very interesting and informative post by Boyle Heights Historical Society Advisory Board member Rudy Martinez on the eastside origins of one of the signal medical care facilities in Los Angeles, including a fascinating politicized issue over a fresco mural at the Mount Sinai Home for the…