For the final blog post for 2025, I thought it would be fitting to feature a brief, but historically significant, newspaper article describing the dedication festivities for the newly constructed building that housed the former Cooperative Center, which opened 100 years ago this year, at 2708 Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights. Established by local Yiddish…
All posts tagged Communists
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: City Hall Corruption Brings the Red Squad to an Explosive End
This is the second-to-final blog post for this series about the founding of the Cooperative Center in Boyle Heights in 1925 by the local Yiddish branch of the communist party. The previous post looked at the center’s presence as a hub of leftist activism until it began to transition into a dance hall and nightclub…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: The 100 Year Evolution of the Cooperative Center
As covered in the earlier blog post titled, 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…
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
Blogger’s note on an update: This post was updated on 10/15/2025. I’ve added a single image of an article about the upcoming opening ceremonies for the Cooperative Center, published in The Daily Worker on February 12 ,1925. Not long after it opened in 1925, the three-story Cooperative Center at Brooklyn Avenue and Mott Street…
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. Red refers to two unique aspects related to Boyle Heights during that era. In the…