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…

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: 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 Four

Editor’s note:  Sorry for the delay in getting this fourth part of this great post by Boyle Heights Historical Society Advisory Board member Rudy Martinez published.  This part involves the later ownership of the former Kaspare Cohn Hospital property and introduces us to the early history of Mt. Sinai Hospital.  The fifth and final part…

The Kaspare Cohn Hospital and the Mt. Sinai Hospital and Clinic, Part Three

Editor’s note:  This third part of this excellent post by Boyle Heights Historical Society Advisory Board member Rudy Martinez takes us into the move and renaming of Kaspare Cohn Hospital to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in East Hollywood, as well as the fascinating and timely controversy involving a purported cancer treatment trial supported by cereal…