Here is a great photo of over sixty persons, mainly young children and about twenty teens and adults, posed on the wide and tall stairs at the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Boyle Heights. Taken on 4 January 1925, the image is almost certainly for education classes for Japanese children, although there are no inscriptions…
All posts by Paul Spitzzeri
The Early History of Hollenbeck Park
In the early 1890s, Boyle Heights and Los Angeles were experiencing some tough times. A growth boom, often called the Boom of the Eighties, erupted a few years previously, peaking during the 1887-88 mayoral term of Boyle Heights founder William H. Workman, but it went bust by decade’s end.
The Hollenbeck Home Souvenir Manual, circa 1900
Several years after the untimely death of John E. Hollenbeck, an early resident of Boyle Heights, whose business activities and land ownership was significant in the Los Angeles region over the short span of the decade from 1875-1885, his widow, Elizabeth, created a “memorial monument” in the form of what was then called The Hollenbeck…
Ilya Tolstoy Speech: The International Institute of Los Angeles Centennial, Part Three
On 15 November, the International Institute of Los Angeles is celebrating its centennial and this is the third post commemorating that event by featuring some history related to the early days of the Institute when it was located in the former William H. Perry home, now at Heritage Square Museum. This entry concerns a notable…
Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The Cummings Block, circa 1889
This Friday, the Boyle Heights Historical Society will be hosting a talk and book-signing by Catherine López Kurland regarding her book, Hotel Mariachi: Urban Space and Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles, which was co-written by Enrique R. Lamadrid with photographs by Miguel A. Gandert and an introductory essay by Evangeline Ordaz-Molina and published by The…
“The Siren”: The Boyle Heights Junior High School Newspaper, 1922
With today being the first day of school for the Los Angeles Unified School District, this seemed like a good opportunity to share some great history from Boyle Heights Junior High School’s student newspaper, “The Siren,” which made its debut on 19 October 1922. The paper is a window into the community, the school, its…
The International Institute of Los Angeles Centennial, Part Two
As the International Institute of Los Angeles, which has an office in Boyle Heights, celebrates its centennial, this post looks back to the opening of the Institute’s office in the historic Perry Mansion, now located at the Heritage Square Museum, back in 1916. The previous post from 3 July noted that the mansion was purchased in…
Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The Macy Street (Old Aliso Road) Bridge, 1870s
This is a fantastic, rare stereoscopic photograph (an image printed twice and slightly offset, so, when viewed through a stereopticon with special lenses, “tricks” the eye into seeing the two images as one in a 3-D effect) of the bridge that was built across the Los Angeles River on the old Aliso Road, later Macy…
The Hostetter Tract of Boyle Heights
In the southwestern section of Boyle Heights, below where the 5, 10, 60 and 101 freeways come together, is an area that was known as the Hostetter Tract. Subdivided in 1887, when Los Angeles was engulfed in a population and real estate boom often known as “The Boom of the Eighties,” the tract was created…
Historical Photos of Boyle Heights: Breed Street School, 1891
Breed Street School in Boyle Heights might just be the oldest continuously operating elementary school in the city of Los Angeles. The school began sometime in the 1870s as simply Boyle Heights School, though there isn’t much information out there about those early days. An 1880 history of Los Angeles County, for example, merely noted…