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…
All posts tagged Boyle Heights history
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…
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…
José Adolfo Bernal: An 1899 Booster Pamphlet for Boyle Heights, Part 3
In the 1899 publication Beautiful Highlands of Los Angeles, promoting Boyle Heights, Brooklyn Heights and Euclid Heights and issued by the Ninth Ward Improvement Association, almost all of the people and buildings discussed and visually presented were middle and upper middle class Americans and Europeans, like the target audience of the pamphlet who were solicited to come to…
William Mulholland, Longtime Boyle Heights Resident
Tomorrow is the centennial anniversary of the opening ceremony for the massive Los Angeles Aqueduct, which delivered water from the Owens River in eastern California to the Los Angeles region over a 220-plus mile system of finely engineered tunnels, channels, pipes, pumps, reservoirs and other elements in a scheme that was filled with controversy, but…
An Early Chinese Resident: An 1899 Booster Pamphlet for Boyle Heights, Part Two
The 1899 pamphlet put out by the Ninth Ward Improvement Association and introduced in the last post was intended to lure new residents and business owners by promoting (perhaps with some excess) the manifold benefits of living and working in the community. Consequently, photos of dozens of homes and biographical sketches of many of the…
An 1899 Booster Pamphlet for Boyle Heights, Part One
Recently, Boyle Heights Historical Society stalwart Rudy Martinez came across a pamphlet on an Internet search called Beautiful Highlands of Los Angeles, Comprising Boyle Heights, Brooklyn Heights, Euclid Heights. Apparently published in 1899 by the Ninth Ward Improvement Association (the city was then divided into “wards,” a common designation in American cities then), this remarkable document was…
John Edward Hollenbeck and Boyle Heights
His tenure in the emerging neighborhood of Boyle Heights was short, just under a decade, but the mark John E. Hollenbeck made in the community and in the Los Angeles area generally was notable and is still maintained in some key ways. Hollenbeck was born in Summit County, Ohio, south of Cleveland and near Akron,…