Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

Today we talk about Biddy Mason — and by extension Pershing Square. I have covered this topic previously in June 2024, and September 2026.

I am not here in any way, shape, or form, to disparage Biddy Mason, who was certifiably great and justifiably important. What I *am* here to do is investigate not what we know about Biddy Mason, but how we know what we do.

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TL;DR — The Biddy Mason narrative is full of untruths and half-truths.

This post runs 10,000 words, so if you’ve only got two minutes, click here.

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Recently, our City Council voted unanimously to strip the Pershing name from our central square, so that we could have two separate parks named for Biddy Mason.

Have you wondered why this happened? Spoiler: it had nothing to do with the merits of Biddy Mason; it had everything to do with Ysabel Jurado and Eunisses Hernandez being DSA.

One might argue that that’s not the reason at all; rather, naming two parks after Biddy Mason is objectively reasonable, because Biddy Mason was so significant that she requires two parks within blocks of each other.

Pardon me for asking, but what exactly is so important about Biddy Mason? Because seriously, I’m asking you. At this point you’ll tell me about how she was forced to walk across the continent, then bravely sued for her freedom, and her impassioned testimony to the judge secured liberty from slavery for her and thirteen family members; she emerged as an innovative healer, respected nurse, and revolutionary midwife; that she founded schools and nurseries and orphanages, and founded a Black church when none existed, and in fact was a founder of Los Angeles and instrumental to the development of our downtown…Oh! and can you believe that even after all this, she was dumped in an unmarked grave! Biddy Mason remained absolutely forgotten, until recently rediscovered by fearless folk who have now told you Biddy Mason’s history, and thus we need a park to share the good news with the world.

I understand the utility of believing those things. They imbue Angelenos with moral uplift. They allow Angelenos to feel comfortably on the “right side of history.” But have you ever paused to ask how you came to know these things? Of course not. Nobody has.

So, just for fun, let us examine the fifteen primary tenets of the Biddy Mason mythos, because why wouldn’t you believe them? You believe them because you have been told by a cadre of “truth-tellers” that these elements are unimpeachable. The reality, however, is far less settled.

Let me say out the outset, though, I’m not an expert on the matter — but apparently no-one is, given that our current authorities repeat unchecked, incomplete, and frequently false claims. The only books that exist about Mason are children’s books, which might explain the infantile level of discourse. There exists no scholarly biography of Mason, but one is slated for publication next month in the form of Kevin Waite’s The Boundless Biddy Mason, to be published by the University of California Press. I look forward to reading it, praying it serves as genuine historiography rather than mere hagiography.

As I have said innumerable times: I welcome to be proven wrong. If you possess primary evidence contradicting my analysis, contact me at oldbunkerhill@gmail.com — and by evidence, I mean verifiable, documented sources, and not the typical anecdotes or unsubstantiated claims that define this modern civic religion.

Here is a roadmap of what we will dissect today:

Biddy Mason walked all the way from Mississippi to California
Biddy Mason petitioned for her freedom
Biddy Mason testified to Judge Hayes in his private quarters
Biddy Mason was a midwife
Biddy Mason was a nurse
Biddy Mason was an herbalist healer
Biddy Mason founded FAME, our first Black church
Biddy Mason founded the first Black school
Biddy Mason fed the poor
Biddy Mason said the “Open Hand” quote
Biddy Mason was a founder of Los Angeles
Biddy Mason was important to downtown city-building
Biddy Mason was an entrepreneur
Biddy Mason was a capitalist
Biddy Mason was buried in an unmarked grave

Ok? Let’s begin!

“She walked all the way from Mississippi to California”

Regarding the claim that she “walked 1,700 miles on foot,” there exists no contemporary account. The narrative first emerges in the 1909 Los Angeles Times feature by Kate Bradley Stovall, “The Negro Woman in Los Angeles and Vicinity – Some Notable Characters.” Stovall writes of Biddy it “was her especial work to care for the sheep which were to be brought across the desert, and during the greater part of the six months’ journey she trudged patiently behind them, ever mindful of her charge.”

So, the claim was originally “the greater part,” not the entire journey. Do not mistake my skepticism for a lack of empathy: even if one were to trudge behind livestock for 51% of a six-month trek, the experience would be grueling and dehumanizing.

However, context matters. Stovall’s use of the verb “trudge”—implying slow, laborious movement—likely describes the progress of a mounted drover. Historically, livestock were managed by riders; managing a herd alongside a wagon train from the back of a horse or mule was standard. One “trudges” while mounted if the animal is moving slowly. In short: there is no evidence Biddy Mason walked, and logic dictates that she rode.

The notion that Biddy personally drove the livestock does not surface again until 1919, in Delilah L. Beasley’s The Negro Trail-Blazers of California. Beasley cites Biddy’s daughter claiming her mother had “drove the livestock across the plains into California.” Notably, the daughter makes no mention of her mother walking. Beasley further embellishes: “But think of this slave woman coming to California in 1851 by ox-team… at the end of these wagons, Biddy Mason driving the cattle across the plains, notwithstanding she had her own three little girls to care for en route!”

The first explicit claim that she walked behind the wagons did not appear until 1971 — 120 years after the event:

Reasons’ article describes two distinct and separate roles: driving loose livestock behind the wagon train (a “drover”), and handling yoked oxen pulling the wagon (a “teamster”). When you transition between the two, the entire logistical requirement changes. If you are a drover tasked with trailing a mixed herd of sheep and loose oxen behind a wagon train, you would undoubtedly, by necessity, be mounted (I go into this more, here).

However, if and when you are at the front of the train driving a yoked ox, there are mechanical and logistical reasons to be on foot. While driving yoked oxen often requires one to be on foot, especially in rough terrain, the assumption that she was on foot for the duration of a two-thousand-mile journey is an unsubstantiated leap.

“She petitioned for her freedom”

Countless government and university sources—along with folk who claim the title of “historian”—persistently assert that Biddy Mason “petitioned the court” for her freedom. This is a fabrication.

The reality of the 1856 proceedings is a matter of record. Robert Owens, a free Black man, discovered that the slaveholder Robert Smith was attempting to flee California with fourteen enslaved people. Owens organized a posse, intercepted the party, and brought them to Los Angeles. Owens then filed a writ of habeas corpus, and Judge Benjamin Ignatius Hayes presided over the case, ultimately ruling that all fourteen individuals were free.

If I am to be exceptionally generous, I might suggest that those repeating the “she petitioned the court” error are merely illiterate in legal terminology. To the modern layperson, the title “petitioner” implies an active verb—that she herself drafted and filed a petition. This is categorically false. “Petitioner” is a legal noun designating the subject of the writ, the person whose liberty is the object of the court’s inquiry.

While Mason and thirteen others—ten of whom were not her kin—were named as petitioners in the proceeding, the historical evidence confirms she was neither the architect nor the initiator of the filing. Robert Owens and, quite likely, Elizabeth Rowan, mobilized the intervention. Mason and the others were the beneficiaries of an action taken by others; she possessed zero agency in the construction or execution of the legal filing itself. To credit her with the legal maneuver is to engage in a deliberate distortion of the historical record, elevating the status of the “petitioner” to that of a modern activist, when in fact, she was the passive subject of a rescue operation.

Another detail warrants scrutiny: the pervasive claim—found in over 2,000 online instances—that Biddy Mason “sued” for her freedom.

First, to reiterate: Mason performed no legal labor to secure the freedom of the fourteen enslaved individuals. However, if you were to assert that it was Robert Owens who sued (on her behalf), you are wrong asserting such, for that is a gross mischaracterization of the legal process. Filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus is a specific judicial procedure through which a petitioner invokes the court’s authority to challenge the legality of state or private custody. It is not a “lawsuit,” and no one is “suing” in the colloquial sense of a civil trial.

This may seem like a minor semantic quibble, but it is fundamentally important. It exposes the infuriating “la-dee-da, close enough” attitude that characterizes the modern hagiography surrounding Biddy Mason. When history is reduced to soundbytes for the sake of moral signaling, the truth is sacrificed to satisfy the contemporary urge to cast historical figures as modern activist-litigants. Precision is the enemy of myth, which is precisely why the standard Biddy Mason narrative so aggressively avoids it.

So, no, Biddy neither petitioned nor sued for her freedom, so for the love of God stop repeating that. But while we’re on the subject, here’s something else that irks me:

“Ok so maybe she didn’t petition for her freedom, but, she marched in to Judge Hayes’ private chambers and she testified and that convinced him and that’s what freed them all!”

Yeah, about that. The slaveowner Robert Smith was saying “hey, don’t worry about it, they all want to go with me to Texas!” And Judge Hayes was obviously like “(X) doubt“. While Hayes sought to ascertain the truth, California law at the time strictly prohibited Black individuals from testifying against white people in open court. Judge Hayes said, ok, I got a workaround. He convened an informal inquiry, questioning the three adult women—Hannah, Biddy, and Ann—to determine if they truly consented to the journey. While Hannah initially acquiesced, she later confessed to the San Bernardino sheriff that she had misgivings.

You will frequently encounter the romanticized claim that Biddy “bravely stated her case in his private chambers” but the record tells a more grounded story. Judge Hayes called Biddy into his chambers (accompanied by no less than Abel Stearns and James Brown Winston) “for the purpose of testing the state of her mind, a question was framed” which asked about the forthcoming move to the slave state of Texas, to which Biddy replied, “I have always done what I have been told to do; I always feared this trip to Texas, since I first heard of it.”

The judicial outcome hinged on the depth of Smith’s undue influence. Hayes concluded that, given the circumstances of their bondage, these women were incapable of providing meaningful, binding consent. Thus, they were declared free. To be precise: Biddy never filed for freedom; she was interrogated regarding her willingness to enter a slave state, and she indicated her fear of doing so.

Much digital ink has been wasted asserting that Biddy “testified.” This is historically and legally illiterate. There were no oaths, no penalty of perjury, and no formal rules of evidence. It was an informal judicial inquiry. Furthermore, Hayes questioned several members of the group; his finding of duress relied on the broader pattern of evidence, not merely a single statement from Biddy.

If you want to read lots more about the case, here is the case decision, and Judge Hayes’ opinion.

“Biddy Mason was a midwife”

She was indeed a midwife, and perhaps a highly proficient one. However, the modern attempt to brand midwifery as a counter-cultural aesthetic—an act of rebellion against a “medical-industrial complex”—is a total historical reversal of its status in mid-Victorian Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles from the 1850s through the 1880s, midwifery was the baseline. It was entirely anodyne, essentially invisible, and absolutely essential. In that era, calling a physician for a standard birth was often the “alternative” choice—and usually a poor one.

Here, for example, are some of the midwives in Los Angeles during part of the time Biddy Mason worked, from the mid 1870s to the late 1880s:

Furthermore, the tale that she was trained by “wise plantation elders” in the South is supposition, and contradicted by the historical record. In June 1887, while testifying under oath in the Horace Bell libel suit, Biddy Mason stated, “I have been a midwife for thirty-seven years.” By her own account, she began her practice in 1850 in the Salt Lake Valley, not in Georgia. She was thirty-two years old and far removed from any Southern plantation when she began her medical work.

“Biddy Mason was a nurse”

Biddy Mason was not a nurse—at least not in the sense we imagine today. She was a confinement nurse, and while the title shares a root, she walked in an entirely different world than, say, Clara Barton. Before insisting that the word alone defines the trade (“it has nurse in the name, that makes her a nurse!” I already hear everyone yell at me), consider the house painter and the portraitist: both share the title of painter, yet one coats siding while the other renders the human face. To mistake a sovereign domestic matron of the lying-in chamber for a clinical sick-watcher is an error just as vast.

In nineteenth-century America, a general nurse and a confinement nurse occupied entirely different spheres. General nurses were custodial laborers—often hospital subordinates—who managed disease, injury, and dying patients under strict physician oversight. By contrast, a confinement nurse was an autonomous matron hired to preside over the private lying-in chamber. She governed a healthy physiological threshold rather than pathology, managing two interdependent patients—mother and infant—through labor, lactation, cord care, and recovery. She held domestic sovereignty, often defying male doctors until clinical medicine dismantled her traditional, woman-led authority. (More about the subject, here.)

“Biddy Mason was an herbalist healer”

Yes, she used herbs, but this was a necessity in an era before the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, when “druggists” primarily distributed patent medicines containing dubious mixtures of alcohol, opium, and arsenic.

The standard narrative insists her methods were “root doctor” traditions imported from the South. However, as noted, she did not become a midwife until she reached the Utah Territory and later California. While she may have absorbed some botanical knowledge in Mississippi, her practice matured in the Victorian-era melting pot of Los Angeles.

There, the partera traditions of the Mexican population, the botanical wisdom of the indigenous peoples, and the folk traditions of American pioneers collided. Crucially, Mason’s practice evolved through rigorous exposure to formal Western medicine. Working alongside Dr. John Strother Griffin—an elite, university-trained physician—Mason absorbed obstetrical scholarship. She mastered European materia medica, dosage protocols, and clinical standards. To credit her efficacy solely to “Southern folklore” is to strip her of the professional development she achieved by operating at the highest levels of medical practice available in the nineteenth-century American West.

“She founded the first Black church in Los Angeles”

The narrative rests on two pillars: first, that Biddy Mason founded the First African Methodist Episcopal (FAME) Church in Los Angeles, and second, that prior to its construction, no other Black church existed in the city.

Second things first: I’m not convinced there wasn’t another church already. We know that the First AME congregation purchased land at the corner of Fourth and Charity on Bunker Hill in March 1869, proceeding to raise capital for a structure that opened in the spring of 1871.

And yet, there’s earlier mention of a “colored church,” recently built, on Third Street, in September 1870:

The Biddy Mason church was not on Third Street. Moreover, the Biddy Mason FAME church did not have Norton as a pastor; the African ME pastor in Los Angeles was Jesse Hamilton.

Moving on: the claim that Biddy Mason founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church originated in Philadelphia in 1816. Following the Civil War, the congregation-planting movement accelerated across the nation; membership rolls surged from approximately 70,000 in 1866 to over 207,000 by 1876. The Reconstruction era witnessed the most explosive religious expansion in American history, making the establishment of an AME presence in Los Angeles an entirely natural—and largely inevitable—development.

It is crucial to distinguish between being the founder and being a founder. According to the Eagle, Biddy Mason was one of 12 founders:

The California Eagle states above Mason was one of twelve founders. Despite the Eagle saying that, documentation for Mason’s role as even a co-founder is conspicuously absent. In 1868, Mason was a charter member of the predominantly white Methodist church on Fort Street; that we know. But when the First AME church was legally established in March 1869, the list of trustees included Charles Owens, John Ballard, Jeremiah M. Redding, Lewis Green, George Smith, John Hall, and Samuel Johns. Mason’s name does not appear among the administrative architects.

What early documented sources attribute the founding, or even co-founding, to Biddy Mason? We’ve got Thompson and West’s History of Los Angeles County, California (1880) which listed Winnie Owens, Bridget Mason, and Alice Coleman as the church’s first members — membership, however, is not synonymous with founding.

It’s tricky, because the term “founder” is malleable. There is a divide between the “Ideational Founder” (the primordial group) and the “Incorporating Founder” (the administrative architect). Biddy Mason did nothing a traditional administrative “founder” would do, in the sense of navigating legal bureaucracy—securing the deed, filing the articles of incorporation, or establishing a financial infrastructure. Rather, she was a founder in the vein of the primordial group, where she and eleven others — the “Twelve Apostles,” coalesced around a core doctrine and vision, providing the spiritual or ideological impetus.

Now you say “maybe she was or wasn’t a founder, but she definitely donated the land and paid for the church!” Well, who told you that? Because there’s no evidence for that either. After the church bought the undeveloped Bunker Hill land in March 1869, they then went on a funding campaign.

In late August of ’69, the Bishop of the AME Church, T. M. D. Ward, had visited Los Angeles and wrote about Los Angeles’s AME church-building efforts in an issue of The Elevator. He listed in his piece those members of the Roll of Honor:

What do you notice? Did Biddy Mason give a thousand dollars? Did she at least give more than anyone else? Uh, no.

By the end of the month, they were still looking for money to build a church —

As usual, the first mention of Biddy Mason’s greater-than-average role in something comes from Stovall’s 1909 piece in the Times…

…in which all she says is that Biddy paid the taxes and expenses on the property (ten years later, Negro Trail Blazers adds nothing to this story). But don’t forget how that turned out:

So how and why do people believe the idea that she was the founder? The Los Angeles Times, of course. They first came up with the idea in 1990:

…and it’s been off to the races ever since.

“She founded the first school for Black children”

Ha! If you say so. This claim collapses under the slightest archival scrutiny.

The 1909 Kate Bradley Stovall article is the earliest historical narrative about Mason. But Stovall’s lengthy account of Mason (February 12, 1909 Los Angeles Times) conspicuously omits any mention of her founding a school. That’s important because Stovall was writing only 18 years after Mason’s death and was documenting the memories of the older Black Los Angeles community. Similarly, Delilah Beasley’s 1919 The Negro Trail Blazers of California—which drew directly from interviews with Mason’s daughter, Ellen Owens Huddleston—remains silent on the matter.

The myth is a modern fabrication, birthed in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. On March 28, 1988, writer Gregory Couch simply hallucinated the claim into existence (the same article, tellingly, that popularized the fictional narrative of her “unmarked grave” — we’ll get to that in due course).

Paul R. Spitzzeri, a diligent historian of Los Angeles, wrote an excellent piece about Black schools in LA up to 1875. You know who it doesn’t mention? Biddy Mason.

While the Board of Education leased the “colored people’s church” from 1875 to 1880, fitting it with desks and chalkboards for the purpose, this was a municipal arrangement, not a private philanthropic endeavor by Mason.

At the end of the day, if Biddy Mason did start, or at least partially fund, a school, it must not have been much. Her grandchildren were sent all the way to Oakland for their schooling!

Actually, there is one school we can actually link to Mason. The First AME fell apart in the mid-1870s. She helped it get back on its feet in 1882 when she paid the back taxes (she then closed the church two years later, because the church wouldn’t reimburse her). Anyway, during the reopening of the church, First AME started a Sunday School.

“But,” I hear you say, “she started a nursery! And started a home for orphans!” These claims, repeated by no less than the LA Conservancy and the LA City Historical Society, are entirely devoid of historical legitimacy. The nursery myth was made up by the Los Angeles Times in 1989; it existed in no form whatsoever before that.

And, surprising absolutely no-one, the “orphanage” fabrication was also made up out of thin air by the Los Angeles Times. It existed in no form whatsoever before 1991.

Since we’re discussing stuff that didn’t happen, let’s talk about how Biddy Mason visited prisoners. Don’t get me wrong, she did, in fact, visit prisoners, to give them a cheery prayer! This story exists in no contemporary account, but is a part of the famous 1909 Stovall article:

But let’s move on to one of my absolute all-time very favorite Masonisms, which was penned by the esteemed Dr. Kelly Lytle Hernández in City of Inmates (2017), in which Hernández writes:

Biddy soon found work as a nurse and a midwife. One of her jobs was back at the county jail, because the white doctor selected by the county government to service the county’s imprisoned population preferred not to do the work and, instead, subcontracted it to Biddy. As a paid nurse, Biddy tended to all who ailed in the county jail. When the contracts expired, she kept going, volunteering her healing hands to all those incarcerated in the L.A. County Jail.

In the great tradition of academic frauds, the good professor just made it up. Doesn’t even have a footnote! The “white doctor” to whom she refers is John Strother Griffin, who in May 1859 had been appointed as Physician to the County Hospital and Jail; also, in 1859, Biddy Mason went to work for Griffin as a midwife. It’s a baseless and absurd premise: an elite physician, after having been tasked by the Board of Supervisors to be the city’s jail physician, then delegated his clinical responsibilities to a non-physician contractor. Now, unless there’s a Griffin diary out there that literally says “dang, I prefer not to do this work at the prison! I’m gonna sub this out to that new midwife hire!” then I say Hernández is a fraud, because she is knowingly fabricating evidence, by presenting something as documented when she knows it isn’t. I don’t know if that gets me sued for slander, or what, so I’ll do her a professional courtesy and rephrase it as “what we currently have is evidence of a potentially unsupported or inadequately sourced historical assertion.”

I am more than willing to retract that criticism if and when Dr. Waite’s book comes out and he repeats this claim, but with the verifiable evidence, that is, with a source other than the 1909 Stovall report that Biddy visited the jail to “speak a word of cheer and leave a token and a prayer.” Hey, maybe Waite got his hand on that juicy diary of prison-hating Griffin, who knows!

“She fed the poor“

She likely did. We do have one contemporary report of such activity:

This is great, and I accept it as fact, despite it being reported “only” twenty-five years after the event (because conversely, many frequently-repeated Biddy Mason “truths” came into being a full hundred years after her death).

The 1909 Mason revival narrative goes on to say:

Again, likely true. Eighteen years is close enough that Stovall’s account deserves substantial evidentiary weight, especially because she was writing about a living memory of the Black Los Angeles community. Of course “likely true” isn’t the same as “verified” — though you and I may accept the story of “in later years Mason’s home became a refuge for settlers,” let us never forget this crucial methodological point: proximity in time doesn’t automatically authenticate an anecdote. Stovall was only repeating oral tradition, thus possibly relying on an unreliable informant; or perhaps misunderstanding something; or simply embellishing. (And no, it’s not something Stovall herself would have recalled, since she was a child, likely still in Texas, during Mason’s “later years.”)

Biddy Mason is never, during her lifetime, described as philanthropic. Her obituary alludes to her philanthropy, though (mentioning her “good works”).

The best account of her philanthropy was the piece on her Christian efforts, published the day after a memorial window was dedicated in her honor. On Sunday, March 6, 1904, two windows were dedicated at the new First African Methodist Episcopal Church at Eighth and Towne. One window was of the Good Shepherd, and another was of Biddy Mason (depicting her? or not? I’ve never seen a photo of it though it presumably existed until the church burned in 1972 — I’m sure there will be an image of it in Dr. Waite’s forthcoming book).

The following day, the Liberator reported on the ceremony, where Mayor Meredith P. Snyder and others praised her “life of good deeds” and her contributions to the construction of the original Bunker Hill edifice.

Here is the inconvenient truth about Biddy Mason’s philanthropy: it was neither exceptional nor uniquely significant.

The modern caricature of the Victorian capitalist as a rapacious miser is a myth. In Victorian America, charity was compulsory, not optional. Before the advent of the federal income tax (1913) or welfare state, the poor had no state backstop; the church and private purse were all that stood between need and starvation. A Christian property holder who gave nothing defied the plainest scriptural mandate — the Good Samaritan, “unto whomsoever much is given,” stewardship of wealth — and the era’s governing creed, noblesse oblige. If Biddy Mason did not give freely, she (as would have been true with any rich man) would have been read as spiritually bankrupt and socially dangerous: stingy, selfish, unfit for trust. Carnegie made it doctrine in The Gospel of Wealth (1889): the rich man who dies rich “dies disgraced.” Newspapers, clergy, and peers policed this norm relentlessly. To withhold was to confess you had no honor to spend. Giving was therefore predictable, not exceptional — the expected rent on privilege.

Furthermore, we must emphasize the Christian dimension of this giving. Whether Mason acted out of pure altruism or a sense of social duty, she remained bound by the scriptural imperative: “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord” (Proverbs 19:17), while Jesus teaches, “Give to the one who asks you” (Matthew 5:42). Likewise, 1 John 3:17 condemns withholding compassion from those in need. Motive mattered, but obedience to God demanded generosity regardless of motive. (For more on these topics, see what I wrote about her life vis-à-vis noblesse oblige, and Christian stewardship.)

Finally, consider the sixty-five religious institutions listed in the Los Angeles City Directory just before Mason’s death. Every one of these organizations relied on founders, benefactors, and donors, and yet, you do not know their names. Why? Because they were part of a functioning society where fulfilling one’s duty to the community and the faith was the expected baseline, not a cause for secular beatification.

“She said the open hand quote!”

The “open hand” quotation is now inextricably linked to Biddy Mason, appearing in titles ranging from Open Hands, Open Heart and With Open Hands and Biddy Mason: The Open Hand. There’s artwork like Biddy Mason’s House of the Open Hand and The Open Hand is Blessed. A Google search yields over 5,500 hits.

Of course, there’s no account of her ever having said it, nor is it even mentioned for a full sixty years after her death. In 1951, Sue Bailey Thurman interviewed Gladys Owens Smith—Mason’s great-granddaughter, who was born after Mason’s death and could not have heard the phrase firsthand. Smith claimed the aphorism had been a Biddy saying and a popular family legacy, which Thurman subsequently repeated in her Pioneers of Negro Origin in California. The quote likely would have faded into obscurity had Dolores Hayden not elevated it to the centerpiece of her Power of Place project in 1989.

The aphorism itself is a vernacular synthesis of standard Methodist theology, drawing on the biblical mandates of Deuteronomy 15:7–8, Proverbs 11, and Acts 20:35. It is a palatable, generic moral sentiment that renders Mason’s life legible and emotionally resonant to a secular contemporary audience.

So why, then, did Gladys Owens Smith only mention the Mason creed, embodied in a core maxim, only once? The suspicious nature of this “Biddy/family motto” is laid bare by its total absence from the historical record. Smith was, after all, the public face of the Mason legacy (e.g., Smith was there when they unveiled the Biddy Mason mural at the Golden State Mutual Insurance Building in 1949; and in attendance when the Biddy Mason sculpture was unveiled at Zion Hill Baptist in 1950; and at the dedication of the Biddy Mason Plaque at the County Museum in 1957; and then there’s Smith’s interview in the television program “Black Angelenos: The True Story” which aired on KCOP Channel 13 in 1988) yet she managed to recount this “family dictation” to Thurman just that single time.

If this were truly the reigning ethos of the Mason family, why did none of the other family members or heirs—Manila, Robert, Winnie, or Martha Owens, daughters Ellen Huddleston or Harriett Washington—ever record it? For nearly a century, between Mason’s death in 1891 and the popularization of the quote by Hayden in 1989, this supposed “defining family ethos” was apparently kept in complete silence.

“Biddy Mason was a founder of Los Angeles“

Biddy Mason was a founder of Los Angeles? No. Categorically, no.

I do not say this to diminish her; Biddy Mason was an objectively remarkable individual. However, we must adhere to the definitions of words. There is no historical reality—alternate or otherwise—in which she can be classified as a founder. You are free to use the term, of course; it is a free country, and you are welcome to be wrong. However, when government entities—as seen in the documents stripping Pershing Square of its name—codify this claim, it ceases to be a mere “mistake.” It is a lie.

Despite the assertions made by the state, the facts remain stubborn. The city was founded by the Pobladores in 1781, under the specific direction of the Spanish Governor of Alta California, Felipe de Neve. If one wishes to expand the definition of “founder” to include those who built the city’s early power structures, one might point to figures like José Vicente Féliz, Pío Pico, Abel Stearns, or Juan Bandini.

Mason, however, arrived long after the city’s inception. Her proponents often retreat to what I call the “Refounder Fallacy”— (AKA the Metamorphic Stretch). This occurs when a settlement undergoes such a radical transformation that the modern city bears no resemblance to the original. In this context, folks often retroactively label the architects of that change as the “real” founders. We see this with figures like Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, or William Mulholland; without their railroads, aqueducts, and press, Los Angeles might have remained a stagnant outpost. But was Mason a catalyst for such structural transformation? Does she belong in the pantheon of industrialists like Phineas Banning, without whom a deep-water port—and thus the modern city—would not exist? The answer is a resounding no.

“But she was a founder of Black Los Angeles!” the rejoinder inevitably exclaims. Perhaps so. But even that claim is debatable; one could argue she was less central to Black civic infrastructure than the Owens family, the Ballards, Lewis Green, Peter Biggs, or Jessie Hamilton. More importantly, the city’s official proclamations do not specify “Black Los Angeles.” They identify her, quite explicitly and quite erroneously, as a founder of Los Angeles itself.

“Biddy Mason was vital to the development of Los Angeles”

Let us dispense with this fantasy immediately. In the political resolutions mentioned earlier, Mason is characterized as a foundational figure in the city’s development. This is objectively false. We must distinguish between a life that is extraordinary and a life that is historically transformative on a municipal scale.

Mason’s story is undoubtedly remarkable: she was a Black woman who navigated a hostile era to accumulate significant wealth. In 1880, Los Angeles had a total population of 33,381; the Black population was a mere 188 (0.56%). Her financial success was an anomaly, and her philanthropy was commendable. However, to translate her personal resilience into a narrative of city-building is to commit a category error.

To claim she “built” or “helped build” Los Angeles is to ignore the actual engines of the city’s growth. The development of Victorian Los Angeles was driven by massive capital infusion, large-scale land speculation, and structural engineering. The men who actually transformed the downtown core were the land barons—the Temples, the Workmans, the Picos, and the Stearns—and the financiers who supplied the capital, such as Hellman, Downey, Hollenbeck, Childs, and Baldwin—and the commercial block and residential tract developers like Baker, Roeder, Kerckhoff, Newmark, Cohn, Haas, and, most crucially, Prudent Beaudry.

These figures operated on a scale of millions; they redirected geography, financed massive infrastructure projects, and determined the physical trajectory of the city. Mason, while a property owner, was a participant in this landscape, not an architect of it. She did not direct the growth of Los Angeles; she occupied a small piece of the terrain they cleared.

“Development” is an elastic term, but we must use it with precision. Yes, she contributed to a church, and built a single commercial/residential building. If you are under the impression that Mason’s real estate holdings allowed her to steer the municipal growth of the city, you are simply incorrect. I am really, really hoping someone will try and argue this point with me, because I find the history of downtown’s Victorian development far more compelling than the modern political fables being substituted for it. (I would suggest, of course, before we engage in this spar, you read this book!)

“Biddy Mason was an entrepreneur”

The term entrepreneur has a particular meaning and carries a specific weight: it denotes the creative drive to organize land, labor, and capital to produce something novel—an industry, a service, or a tangible product. Biddy Mason was not an entrepreneur; she was a capitalist. There is a fundamental distinction.

Capital is a tool, not a culture. A pure capitalist seeks to maximize the return on investment, largely indifferent to the source of that profit or the broader impact on the national body. Mason’s wealth was primarily the result of real estate accumulation and rent collection. She did not innovate new industries or organize complex systems of production; she participated in the land market, a vehicle that rewarded those with the capital to enter it.

A 1939 California Eagle article provides a clear account of Mason’s financial life, detailing her real estate acquisitions. Whether she was an exceptionally savvy investor or merely the beneficiary of fortunate timing is a matter of speculation. It would have been difficult not to profit in Los Angeles during the late nineteenth century; had the commercial center not shifted south of First Street, her property would not have appreciated with such velocity.

To label her an “entrepreneur” is a post-hoc attempt to retroactively assign a narrative of industrious ingenuity to what was, in reality, the pursuit of capital gains in a rapidly expanding land market. Capital accumulation in a bubble economy is a skill, certainly, but it is not the same as entrepreneurship. We do her a disservice by mythologizing her as a heroic business visionary when the record simply reflects the standard behavior of a nineteenth-century property owner navigating a period of unprecedented urban growth.

Which brings us to…

“Biddy Mason was a capitalist!”

Ok, this one is very different. It’s literally the opposite of the point of this post, since no-one has ever said Biddy was capitalist —

Ergo, this penultimate entry in our Biddyfest is not “here’s something everyone says, that isn’t true,” but “here’s something no-one says, that is true.” (I have covered this a bit in this post.)

Biddy Mason earned a steady income as a midwife and confinement nurse in the employ of Dr. John Strother Griffin. At a wage of $2.50 per day, with disciplined and frugal spending, it would have taken only a few years to accumulate the $250 necessary to purchase her first property. Having begun her employment with Griffin in 1859, she reached this savings milestone by 1866, leading to the acquisition of her first real estate holdings.

This point is critical. Without that 1866 land purchase, Biddy Mason would be forgotten, or at best an obscure footnote. Her midwifery would be unremembered, as it was a common trade; her philanthropy, if any, would have remained unrecorded. While the 1856 habeas corpus ruling stands as a landmark in enforcing California’s free-state status, Mason would have remained as historically invisible as Hannah Embers, who shared that same legal victory yet lacks a city park—let alone two—named in her honor.

One must ask why she chose to invest in real estate. It was, in truth, the only logical path in an era before Los Angeles possessed a functioning banking system. It was natural that she looked to land, given that Robert Owens—the man who catalyzed her legal liberation—was an established property holder, and her employer, Dr. Griffin, was among the city’s preeminent real estate magnates.

Furthermore, Mason was a congregant of the Fort Street Methodist Episcopal Church. Established in 1853, it was one of the few predominantly white Protestant institutions that permitted Black congregants. Within those pews, she rubbed shoulders with the city’s most influential developers, men like Robert and Joseph Widney, Charles Maclay, Marion Bovard, and Asahel Hough.

The property she acquired in 1866—a parcel nestled in the block bounded by Third, Spring, Fourth, and Fort (later Broadway)—was inexpensive, reflecting the depressed state of the Los Angeles market following years of drought, catastrophic cattle losses, and smallpox epidemics. The sellers, William M. Buffum and James F. Burns, were not merely offloading land; the record suggests that Burns actually doubted Mason’s sanity, questioning whether she might be “deranged” for wishing to purchase that particular plot.

Let’s look at that land, shall we.

First of all, I hear all the time that Biddy Mason developed some vast swaths of downtown. Well, here is her purchase, in a map bounded by Second, Fourth, Hill, and Main, in 1888:

See that green area? That’s what she owned; that’s lots Three and Eight of Block Seven. In the comments sent in to the City Clerk, the aforementioned Dr. Waite shared a map from his forthcoming book The Boundless Biddy Mason:

Mason’s home burned on July 31, 1885; she used her money to build a two-story brick mixed-use commercial building, the Mason Block, in 1885.

Here it is:

One last thing — Horace Bell Jr. was interviewed about his mother’s hospitalization during her madness (Georgia Herrick Bell suffered from, in all likelihood, postpartum depression) and Biddy Mason had cared for Georgia in 1870. The interview was done in 1887, after Biddy had retired from pretty much everything. Note how Harriet has taken up the family mantle and was still going strong!

In summation: there is a strong historical argument that Biddy Mason’s transformation from an enslaved woman into a successful capitalist/property owner is the central story—and that her philanthropy, church involvement, and community work become more intelligible once you put her economic independence at the center.

This is the reason I find Biddy Mason so spectacularly interesting: to any consistent modern leftist, Biddy Mason represents everything their ideology despises. Rather than resisting the capitalist system, she eagerly assimilated into it. She became a real estate speculator and a private landlord, hoarding scarce land to extract unearned rent from working people. Her massive personal fortune derived directly from capitalist exploitation and urban development. Furthermore, her celebrated philanthropy was simply paternalistic charity that reinforced church authority and pacified unrest instead of dismantling oppressive class structures. By choosing personal enrichment and private property over collective liberation, Mason abandoned revolutionary solidarity to join the ranks of the propertied oppressor class.

And so on. Which is why her supporters jump through so many hoops to pretend that she didn’t “act white.” For the modern identity-politics framework, her behavior is indistinguishable from the “pioneer” or “settler” archetype they are conditioned to revile. To admit she was essentially a local version of a standard 19th-century real estate entrepreneur would be to admit that her values were indistinguishable from the very American heritage these same activists work to dismantle.

But me, I love 19th-century downtown real estate developers, every single one of them, especially those who made something from nothing.

Viva Biddy Mason!

and lastly … “She was buried in an unmarked grave“

In 1988, the Los Angeles Times asserted that Biddy Mason was buried in an unmarked grave. Since then, the claim has taken flight; a search yields over 2,000 results, including entries from the National Park Service, the LA Conservancy, and FindAGrave. As recently as June 20, 2024, the Times repeated their fabrication as established fact.

What these chroniclers fail to grasp is the magnitude of the insult they are leveling against the Mason and Owens families. Biddy Mason left her heirs as some of the wealthiest individuals in the city—not to mention her in-laws, the Owens family, who were wealthier still. The implication that such a prosperous, prominent, and cohesive family would allow their matriarch to be consigned to an “unmarked hole” is not only historically illiterate but deeply offensive. If one were to believe the Times, one would have to conclude that Mason’s descendants were utterly derelict in their duty and indifferent to their own kin.

This tomb and obelisk erected at Biddy Mason’s grave was in the Mason family plot at Evergreen Cemetery, Lot 320. Biddy’s daughter Ellen Mason Owens had purchased the family plot for $100 in 1887, at the time Evergreen opened.

The question, then, is what happened to the Mason monument between 1943 and 1988? Apparently no-one knows. Ok, to indulge in some speculation: perhaps the 1971 earthquake toppled the obelisk—that “white marble shaft pointing to heaven”—crushing the surrounding markers, and the cemetery authorities simply…cleared the rubble? Perhaps the family was not notified; perhaps they were notified and remained indifferent? Or, considering the long, contentious history of the Mason-Owens lineage, perhaps the monument fell victim to some internal family score-settling? (I will refrain from diving into that particular rabbit hole of intergenerational discord.)

It is a genuine mystery. One hopes that Kevin Waite’s forthcoming biography provides the archival evidence we currently lack, rather than relying on the same lazy conjecture that has defined this narrative for decades. We shall have our answer in October!

*******

So that’s it in a nutshell. Again, I love Biddy Mason, but the actual house of cards upon which Jurado builds her case for stripping Pershing’s name — and giving us a redundant Biddy Mason park — is a sickly stew of unsourced assumptions and assertions.

Jurado and her ilk are revisionists. It’s not just “whoops! we let our confirmation bias run away with us!“, it’s a masterclass in the conscious — not negligent — exclusion of evidence and recrafting of fact. Their hagiography rewrites history (in what’s often termed “narrative forcing”) to serve their political and ideological agenda; it is a tactical distortion of the past to legitimize steamrolling us with their doctrine and dogma.

Or maybe they’re just sloppy and stupid, and too excited by the childish psychological comforts of their Manichean Fairy Tale to care.

Honestly, I don’t know which.

All that said, I’ll just end with one more thing about this, and get a little John J. Pershing in here, too:

Right before Council voted to rename the park, Jurado reiterated in chambers that “Pershing never set foot in Los Angeles.” See her say that, here. She is reading from someone’s letter to Council, because God forbid she have an original thought (after all, her motion is just a rehash of a dead two-year-old proposal from de León). But although the letters to Council were overwhelmingly against the renaming, she gleefully read one that included the stupid falsehood regarding “Pershing never set foot in Los Angeles.” Jurado, in theory, could have read or considered all the communications from the public regarding the renaming. But why should she listen to the peons, those unenlightened lumpenproletariat?

I bring it up, of course, because I made that topic a specific part of the letter I sent in to Council:

Wait, you say, she’s not a tyrannical autocrat with a diaper full of dogma, she’s a very important and busy woman! She doesn’t have time to read everything the dumb public says! It’s not her job!

I’m just going to have to disagree. She only has to go to work three days a week, (though she voted to make that once a week). And for that, she gets paid $245,000 a year (our councilmembers are the highest-paid local legislators in the nation, raking in more than double what the same job pays in New York or Chicago; and that $245k number is actually $400k+ per annum when you factor in the fat stacks funneled into their retirement plan, and the Cadillac-tier health insurance plan, plus the city-funded vehicles, and generous stipends for travel and “official business,” ad nauseam).

I mean, someone in her staff could have taught her some history as she soaked in a bubble bath — someone FROM HER STAFF OF TWENTY. As in, literally a staff of twenty people who help her work those three days a week. A staff of twenty that costs taxpayers $3,000,000 a year. Who still put out an Official Government Document that said Biddy Mason bought lots south of Fourth Street!

Therefore, yes, it irks me that she just stands in front of Council and repeats long-debunked lies like “Pershing was never in Los Angeles.” Damn, Jurado, do you need to see film of Pershing cruising through Los Angeles??? Ok, here you go:

Pershing heads down Broadway, January 26, 1920: first six seconds, headed south from First toward Second Street; the Tajo Block can be glimpsed at upper right. He then passes through the intersection of Third Street, the Irvine-Byrne in the background (CriticalPast).

Pershingphobes have tossed John J. Pershing into an ever-widening gyre of fabrication and deceit, and if you’re interested in what they say, click here.

And that’s it for today! Enjoy your superfluous Biddy Mason Park! I will certainly eat crow if naming the park for Biddy Mason magically transforms it into someplace welcoming and comforting, instead of being a sun-bleached hardscape of ugly architecture designed to make you nervous, where postmodern purple towers loom over a urine-soaked wasteland of open drug use and despair. But hey, new name!

TL;DR — having two parks called Biddy Mason is silly, and stripping the Pershing Square name is wrong. Click here, hit the “NEW” button, and leave a comment for City Council telling them so.

→→→ IMPORTANT! Your comment will NOT go to Council unless you “verify” it. After you post your comment to the site, it will send you an email (which will likely go to your spam folder) and you HAVE to click “verify” in it, or your comment will disappear into the void.

Greetings friends,

Friday morning, the City Council is going to vote to strip the name off Pershing Square, renaming it after Biddy Mason, so that we may, for some reason, have two Biddy Mason parks.

Look, I get it, we all love Biddy Mason. She was a badass capitalist who saved her money and bought land that appreciated greatly, upon which she built mixed-use commercial/residential buildings which she would rent to people, and thus make more money. It’s ironic, of course, that Jurado and Hernandez are so hot to promote her; if Biddy were alive today, she’d be being yelled at by them, not lauded!

Biddy Mason naturally used some of her money for philanthropy, which was expected of any very rich person during that era, especially a devout Christian. Mason exemplified the two reigning principles of the Victorian wealthy: noblesse oblige, and Christian Stewardship. She kept a tight ship (for example, though Biddy Mason was one of the twelve co-founders of our local branch of the African Methodist Church, she famously locked the parishioners out when they couldn’t pay her some back some money).

On Friday, the Council will likely be swayed by many of the impassioned letters about Mason, despite many of those letters being filled with “history” that is either misleading or downright incorrect, e.g. “she bravely petitioned for her own freedom” (not true, click here), or other aspects of her life reworked through a modern lens to appear incredible (like herbal midwifery), and sprinkled with some dubiously sourced quotes. Again, Mason is important as a formerly enslaved Black woman who by navigating the economic landscape with relentless industry, demonstrated that property ownership and market participation are the most effective vehicles for empowerment. Her legacy confirms that individual ambition, when paired with private ownership, creates lasting social influence.

But none of the effusive letters to Council will mention that we already have a park honoring Mason, literally on the site of her former home. It’s a great park, it tells Biddy Mason’s story, including great sculptures by Sheila de Bretteville and Betye Saar, and we’ve had it for thirty-seven years. Many of Biddy Mason’s descendants were there to cut the ribbon when it opened in July 1991, and Mayor Bradley was there to exclaim “Today Biddy Mason comes home to stay.” In short, renaming Pershing Square into a second Biddy Mason park was silly two years ago, and it’s silly now.

Now let me take a minute to tell you about General Pershing. Pershing forged the American Expeditionary Forces into a professional combat power during World War I, allowing us to emerge victorious over autocratic tyranny. Sure, you’ll be told he never set foot in Los Angeles—which is of course untrue: his roots ran deep here, as good friends to many local families (he got engaged to Nita Wilson Patton in 1917 at the Patton home in San Marino); when he was here for the 1920 dedication of the park, 50,000 people saw him speak; he spoke to thousands more in 1923 and planted trees at our War Memorial Building. You will be told Pershing did all sorts of terrible things to people of color all over the world—which is also B.S., and I take those claims apart here.

And Council will undoubtedly be swayed by idiotic communications like this:

This makes me spit tacks because one of the things I dig about Pershing is the fact that his relationship with Black people stands out sharply against the backdrop of his era. Before entering West Point, Pershing taught African-American students at Prairie Mound School in Missouri, from 1878-1881. Pershing then asked for the commission to serve in a Black Infantry Regiment early in his career (which was considered career suicide) and then fought alongside the the 10th Cavalry — the famed Buffalo Soldiers — whom Pershing openly commended for discipline, courage, and exemplary professionalism. Pershing supported Colonel Charles Young, one of the first Black West Point graduates and the highest-ranking Black officer of the era, and expressed frustration at the military’s refusal to promote Young to general (a promotion blocked explicitly because it would have put Black officers in command of white troops). Though under enormous political pressure, Pershing assigned Black regiments like the 369th Infantry—the “Harlem Hellfighters”—to the French Army, where they fought with distinction and were decorated with the Croix de Guerre. To be sure, Pershing was a man of his era, not a modern egalitarian. But by the standards of the American military establishment of 1890–1920, his consistent defense, employment, and public praise of Black soldiers set him conspicuously apart.

Be advised, if you actually read the City Council declaration of 1918 naming Pershing Square, it was not just for Pershing, who was the figurehead name, but dedicated to the American Expeditionary Forces in general, all four million who fought for freedom. Thousands of Angelenos were shipped overseas to fight in WWI; more than 450 never came home. Pershing Square honors them, too. But apparently it’s more important to have a second, redundant Biddy Mason Park, and forget about our war dead.

So! All that said, if you agree with me about this whole renaming-Pershing-Square-as-“Biddy Mason Park II” is just goofy, self-serving performative justice, click here https://cityclerk.lacity.org/lacityclerkconnect/index.cfm?fa=ccfi.viewrecord&cfnumber=24-0751 and then click this button:

And then give ’em what for!

I should mention, as well, that there was all sorts of funny business before the final renaming got sent by the clerk to the Friday docket for a forthcoming Council vote.

For example, last Tuesday, it was the the three-member Arts, Parks, Libraries, and Community Enrichment Committee that unanimously voted yes to send this thing to Council. And guess what? They were legally not allowed to do that. It was supposed to be heard by a totally different committee, the Arts, Parks, and City Facilities Committee, which is made up of a different group of councilmembers! And yet the Council is going to vote on it anyway?

So this mess was incorrectly heard by Arts, Parks, Libraries, and Community Enrichment Committee, and committee Chair Ysabel Jurado, along with Eunisses Hernandez and Adrin Nazarian, didn’t debate the matter, even after many public comments were against the proposal. And to make matters worse, Jurado thought it prudent to make rude and snippy comments at a public commenter! It was the City Attorney’s job to stop Jurado, but of course nothing happened. This is the sort of rot you see behind every fallen regime, and ours is beginning to teeter hard.

I would heartily and heavily advise you click here

https://esotouric.substack.com/p/biddymason3

to read Esotouric’s take on the matter!

Note in the video at 21:45 Jurado says “I don’t know if you saw that Monuments exhibit that was at the MOMA, that was recasting some of these southern memorials to Confederates that were deeply deeply racist” and (first of all, it was at MOCA, not MOMA, but, whatever) the very idea that you could refer to Pershing Square in the same breath as Confederate statues is shockingly insulting (as a child, John J. Pershing’s hometown of Laclede, MO was invaded by Confederates hunting for his father, who defiantly flew the Union flag above his general store). And then Jurado goes on to say that we need to “invest our public dollars in the leaders that are untold” and, um, yeahhhhh…NOT UNTOLD. There’s a 37-year-old public park on the site of her homestead, Councilmember.

Thank you dear Bunker Hill reader! Pershing Square has been Bunker Hill’s front yard for a very long time — let’s keep it the famed Pershing Square that has had so many wild stories in the last hundred years…more on those later! For now, though, please take five minutes (if you are so inclined) and tell the Council so, and send an email directly to actual Committee Chair Monica Rodriguez at councilmember.rodriguez@lacity.org

Thank you!

And as long as I’ve got you here, allow me to share this excellent comment to Council from Sons of the American Legion 283:

On Saturday, September 19th, the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles is having a cocktail shindig in the basement speakeasy of Clifton’s. Waitaminnit, you say, I’ve been in Clifton’s and don’t remember a basement speakeasy! No, you don’t: it’s something that previous owner Andrew Meieran worked on for years (before giving up the ship) and it’s only now being opened to the public.

So come on out! There will be cocktails, and food, and mingling with other weirdos who like Old LA and the gorgeous design of days past. But wait—there’s something else that will make it even better!

Doors open at 6:30 — start drinking, then at 7:00 have a seat for my 45-minute lecture about Clifton’s!

At which point you say huh? how can you possibly talk for 45 minutes about a…cafeteria?

Ha! The story involves the history of themed environments, science fiction writers, Walt Disney, LAPD corruption, house bombings, feeding the world, Jim Crow, a mayoral downfall, mid-century modern suburbs, Kerouac, Bukowski, Christ in the Garden, Scientology, sex toys, and even….murder!

If you’re not familiar with the Clifton’s story, you have to come. If you’re pretty familiar with the Clifton’s story, don’t worry, I guarantee I’ll tell you some stuff you didn’t know. And if you’re a bona fide expert on the Clifton’s story, I can promise you, there are a lot of images you’ve never seen before!

Then after my lecture, stay the rest of the night, amble about the revamped Clifton’s (including the Pacific Seas) and marvel at the wonder of Los Angeles.

↓↓↓ Get all the details by clicking this link ↓↓↓

https://artdecola.org/events-calendar/cliftons-cafeteria-evening-in-the-speakeasy

↑↑↑ And don’t forget to join ADSLA! ↑↑↑

(the ticket-purchase button on the above link is not “live” yet — to get tickets, click here!)

*********

Oh, one last thing: before you say hey! this is supposed to be a Bunker Hill blog! well GUESS WHAT. Clifford Clinton’s first digs in Los Angeles — much like James Oviatt, who made his way to Los Angeles and settled into Bunker Hill — were on Bunker Hill.

Clifford Clinton is working in the family cafeteria up in San Francisco, 1931. A buddy of his from Los Angeles, the architect Charles F. Plummer, says “Clifford! You gotta come down here and run your own place! There’s an old Boos Brothers cafeteria that’s giving up the ghost and you can get the space for next to nothing!” So Clifford packs up his recipe cards and Clinton Cafeteria’s Manual of Operation, grabs his wife, kids, and brother Joe, cram into the old Studebaker and head south.

And where do they get their apartment? At the Winton, of course, 219 South Flower:

It is in this very Bunker Hill apartment-house that Clifford Clinton devised the portmanteau of “Clifton’s” …

… see? Full of interesting and useful information! See you at Clifton’s!

Yes, I know—the last piece I wrote about the subject, fifteen months ago, was literally titled My Final Words on Cooper Donuts. But the other day a journalist called out of the blue to talk CDN, which meant I glanced at the Cooper Do-nut website for the first time in a long while...and…yeahhhhh. The site has added a piece of breakthrough news, albeit buried in an ill-conceived jumble of claptrap. My final words were evidently anything but, for while I certainly tried to ignore these new developments, they were too juicy to withhold comment. Plus I was repeatedly mentioned by name, so, can’t not pick up that gauntlet. And here we are.

********

The Evans descendants—heirs to and gatekeepers of the Cooper Donut legacy—revamped their website recently. The new version contains a revelation: there was a Cooper Donuts in the 500 block of South Main!

This is a significant discovery. My very first post about the subject five years ago contended that Rechy’s account—already improbable on several levels—was particularly suspect given his assertion that a Cooper’s existed in the 500 block of South Main Street. I had researched photos, maps, phonebooks, directories, DBS records, etc., to conclude and counter-assert that no such shop existed on that block, nor nearby.

Lo and behold, Jacqueline and Keith Evans have uncovered evidence from two separate sources of a Cooper’s at 517 South Main Street. Not only that, but despite my only recently stumbling upon this via their website, they revealed this data all the way back in March! And nobody told me? Jacquie Evans could have at least shot me an email (a triumphant ha! added to boot). After all, for the last five years and change, the closing comment in my initial Cooper post has read:

Point being, the Evanses’ discovery is the first major building block in retelling the Cooper story, and I am happy to report it here.

That said, the Evanses’ new website doesn’t just report on the 517 South Main unearthing; it proceeds to take my entire body of research to task in a point-by-point refutation. And their claims, theses, and postulates? Good grief. I should leave it be, but that’s not how I’m wired.

*********

I assume you’re up to speed (having read all my work on the subject!), but to recap:

There are two separate but connected stories: one is that John Rechy — pioneering chronicler of LGBTQ+ life since his breakthrough autobiographical novel, 1963’s City of Night — was present at a late-1950s riot on South Main Street. The story goes that a group of gay doughnut shop patrons beat back the harassing LAPD by pelting them with trash and rocking police cars, leading to a massive police response that cordoned off Main Street till morning.

The second story involves the Cooper Donut chain more broadly, including Nancy Valverde—the trailblazing Chicana cross-dressing lesbian whose legal acumen dismantled long-standing homophobic laws.

Because I’ve poked holes in these narratives, the Evans clan has whipped up a ten-point refutation of my work in a new section of their website called THE EVIDENCE.

We’ll begin with a brief investigation into 517 South Main Street (#3 on their list) and then we’ll take a look at the rest of….THE EVIDENCE.

********

#3 on the Evanses’ List — THE LOCATION ARGUMENT (←this is a link, click it)

As mentioned, the discovery of a Cooper Donuts at 517 is major news. Rechy has stated that the doughnut donnybrook didn’t happen at a Cooper’s, but, whatever: a CDN at 517 at least jibes with one of his accounts, in which the fracas happened “between Harold’s and the Waldorf” and while 517 is definitely not between Harold’s and the Waldorf, it is, at least… close? Anyway, let’s look at the site.

As we now know, 517 appears as a Cooper Donuts in this 1962 guide:

And as well here:

Naturally, we now have to know all we can about 517, and any further when/where/how that might emerge.

517 is an address in the Kalisher Block, 513-519 South Main Street. Louisa Kalisher— recent widow of prosperous Prussian-born dry-goods merchant Wolf Kalisher—hired architect Abram Edelman to design this two story brick commercial block in 1889.

Jack’s BBQ occupied 517 until at least 1956. By 1960/61 (per the Frommer guide and People v. Shepherd) it had become a Cooper’s. By the time the 1963 directories were published, it had morphed into Angelo’s Pizzeria.

Frustratingly, no Cooper Do-nuts at 517 appears in the directories during the precise window of the Shepherd arrest or the Frommer mention:

It isn’t as if CDN went out of their way to avoid directories; here are their yellow page listings from August 1959 and August 1962:

What else can I say about the Kalisher Block, possible/probable home of a Cooper Donuts? It had its second story removed in the spring of 1959, and the building was demolished for a parking lot in late 1967.

Again, this is an excellent find, and kudos to Jacquie and Keith Evans for locating it. With enough of these building blocks, perhaps we can eventually erect a mighty edifice of proof regarding the purported riot.

But now it’s time we move on to the rest of —

********

“THE EVIDENCE”

First things first, Rechy at the Riot:

#1 on the Evanses’ list — THE SOURCING QUESTION (←this is a link, click it)

From the outset, I had noted it was curious that Rechy failed to include a seminal, late-1950s gay riot in his seminal book about late-1950s gay life; instead, he waited forty-five years to tell the tale. The Evanses’ retort? That “the absence of an event in a novel is not evidence that the event didn’t occur.” Look, I understand the principle of non-falsifiability. I can’t “prove” it didn’t happen. I am simply pointing out that it is passing strange that the man who made a career of chronicling gay Los Angeles never mentioned the “super-important-uprising-that-predated-Stonewall”—not in that book, not in any subsequent book, not to a journalist, not anywhere—for half a century.

What also truly irked me is the ubiquitous false claim that “the Rechy-riot is obviously true because he immediately wrote about it in his 1963 book!” argument. This falsehood has achieved the status of urban legend—and is naturally, therefore, part of the Rechy wiki page. It is of course a feature of the City of Night wiki page:

And if you doubt that I am in fact the only person to have ever read the book, click here.

The Evanses go on to say that “oral testimony of lived events is a recognized and methodologically sound form of historical evidence. The timing of its disclosure does not determine its validity.” To which I say, no, the timing is strikingly suspect, but more to the point: while oral histories are not without value, they sit at the very bottom of the historian’s evidentiary ladder—well below physical artifacts, contemporary documents, and even written memoirs. I have far too much to say on the limitations of oral history to pack it all into this post, so I’ll make my argument here.

#2 on the Evanses’ list—THE CONSISTENCY ARGUMENT:

I noted previously that Rechy’s account was plagued by inconsistencies. I never claimed this disproved a riot; I simply noted it as “grist for the mill” (especially given that the first time he told the story, forty-five years after the fact, was during the same period he was making up fake reviews of his own books). The Evanses counter that because the riot was “traumatic,” we should expect the details to shift. To support this, they cite a 2023 Philosophy of Science article. It’s a textbook example of “standpoint epistemology”—a methodology I won’t dismantle on this page, though you can gauge my critique of the article here.

Then, they invoke Alessandro Portelli. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while! For the uninitiated, Portelli—a literature professor, emphatically not a historian—is the patron saint of the “my truth” school of historiography, a man who mistook his own inability to fact-check for a profound literary insight. He took the basic human propensity for misremembering, rebranded it as “subversive memory,” and invited us to marvel at the depth of the deception. It’s an elegant grift: if the archive contradicts your subject, simply declare the archive a tool of oppression and the error a masterpiece of folklore. It is creative, certainly, but it is not history; it is a curated collection of comforting fictions for the terminally sentimental.

The Evanses go on to contend:

This is a bold claim, considering Rechy’s own “consistency” is nonexistent. Rechy’s primary accounts of the event include, for example: Rechy and four others were hauled out of the shop (2019); Rechy and two other men are detained (2005); Rechy and one other man (“Chuck”) are the focus (2019, 2021); or four men are involved, and Rechy wasn’t even one of them (2006).

If you’ve never read Rechy’s actual quadruply-told-tale, here you go:

#4 on the Evanses List — THE NEWSPAPER ARGUMENT

I have oft asserted that had there been a riot—men pelting police with trash, rioters rocking black-and-whites, and the blockading of Main Street until dawn—it would have left a mark on the historical record. For reasons known only to history, this gay uprising went unmentioned in ONE magazine (whose offices were blocks away on Hill Street) and appears in zero oral histories for forty-five years. But setting that aside, I maintain that a riot of that scale would have been in the papers. I’ve combed the Times, the Herald-Express, the Examiner, and the Mirror-News, as well as local papers, including the weeks spent reviewing unpublished issues on microfilm. Nothing.

The Evanses counter that this massive event—witnessed by hundreds just a stone’s throw from the major newsrooms—was ignored because LAPD Chief William Parker enforced a “media blackout.” They claim there exists “specific documented action restricting press access,” arguing that because reporters were denied access to after-the-fact arrest ledgers, they would have been incapable of knowing a riot occurred. The Evanses’ proof is in the form of two articles documenting how the City Council, over Parker’s objection, eventually forced him to restore the freedom of the press.

Pardon the testiness, but, that’s all horseshit, all of it. The Evanses apparently assume you’ll never dig up the original articles but of course I have them (and a dozen others on precisely this subject, since there’s a heavy Chavez Ravine angle) and I can state emphatically and without fear of contradiction that their narrative is the literal opposite of the truth.

The facts: In the spring of 1959 there was a huge kerfuffle surrounding the chaotic evictions of the Arechiga family in Chavez Ravine (read about them here). A beat reporter for City News Service trawled through past police records to find prior arrests and thus smear the family’s character. An angry Chief Parker, siding with the Arechigas (yes you read that right, Parker went to bat for the Arechiga family) temporarily suspended the press’s access to historical arrest records until the City Council could formalize a policy. Bear in mind, there was no legal requirement that the LAPD hand over past arrest records to the press; it was merely a tradition of professional courtesy that had, in Parker’s view, gotten out of hand, since — despite these being public records — there was a confidential nature to old arrest records, now being willfully misused. Past arrest records could be used to blackmail people and Parker was worried that innocent people might be adversely affected (remember, a simple arrest record contains no indication about whether there was a conviction).

So Parker said “hey, City Council, come up with an actual policy, and we’ll follow that.” And then that’s what happened. And the best part is, Parker was very much IN FAVOR OF letting newsmen have access to records; he just said there should be some sort of policy so it wasn’t abused by bad actors. At first, Council refused to draft an ordinance, allowing media access; Parker made a personal appearance before the lawmakers to urge that the press be given access to arrest records. So, the Evanses characterize Parker’s sixteen-year tenure as a “media blackout” based on a short window of bureaucratic policy-making. (I shouldn’t have to remind you that having old booking ledgers is not what being a newsman is about, which I will touch on here.)

In short, the Evanses’ “villain,” Parker, was actually against the restriction. The primary figures pushing to keep arrest records private (and therefore “the bad guys”) were progressive Latino Democrat Edward R. Roybal—who feared records would be used to ruin rehabilitated ex-convicts—and the ACLU. Yes, the same ACLU that stood as the institutional defender of gay rights at the time; they opposed the measure, arguing media access infringed upon an individual’s right to privacy.

But for the sake of the argument, let’s just say the riot happened exactly during that window in 1959 when the restriction was in place (which again, wasn’t Parker’s idea, but was made necessary temporary policy because of criticism from a beleaguered Mexican family). Even if we indulge the Evanses and pretend the riot occurred during that window it wouldn’t have mattered. Reporters don’t need access to archived booking ledgers to report on a riot that shuts down Main Street. In 1959, Main Street was teeming with life, and every bar in the vicinity was crawling with grizzled reporters (the Hearst papers were a few blocks south and the Chandler HQ a few blocks north) angling for a scoop. Are we to believe a riot of this magnitude happened, yet not a single reporter—or a single wire service—heard the sirens?

Now, you and I, from our world-weary tower atop 2026, don’t blink an eye when a major street is shut down for a basketball riot or a street takeover. In 1959, this would have been the biggest news of the year—dwarfing the Chavez Ravine evictions, the Jack Whalen murder, or the death of Bunker Hill. Other instances of civil disobedience seen in the streets of Los Angeles (e.g., the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, the 1923 longshoreman demonstrations, the 1913 IWW riot in the Plaza) had consumed reams of newsprint. Somehow, though, a riot in the literal ground zero of Los Angeles (it’s called Main Street for a reason) evaporated like morning mist. That dog don’t hunt.

Also, the Evanses claim newspapers didn’t report on gay arrests anyway, because they only covered homosexuality through “abstract social commentary,” which is quite possibly the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever read (click here for a reality check).

Finally, as for their claim that Nancy Valverde read about the Main Street pastry pandemonium in the paper the next morning? I recall no such Valverde statement. To my knowledge, she only mentioned a “Cooper uprising” once—sixty years after the fact, while in hospice at age 87, and only after being pressured to “recall,” specifically, that she’d heard about something second hand. (Which raises the question, if there does exist documentation of her saying she read about it in a newspaper, why did she change her story?)

#5 on the Evanses List — THE RECHY RETRACTION ARGUMENT

I was also saying that the brouhaha about Cooper Donuts was ironic, in that the mighty oak of tattoos and t-shirts grows from the Cooper riot acorn — but though Rechy initially claimed the riot happened at a CDN, but then retracted that, and said it didn’t happen at a Cooper’s. The Evanses manage this contradiction by claiming that when Rechy was told no Cooper’s existed between Harold’s and the Waldorf—which, of course, it didn’t—he merely “adjusted his account accordingly” because he was “pressured into doubt.” Now, call me old-fashioned, but when I tell the story of my life, I don’t change my story (“adjust my account”) just because someone pokes holes in it.

#6 on the Evanses List — THE CHARACTER ARGUMENT

And here we shift gears, leaving the purported riot behind, and move into Evans family territory.

The Evanses take issue with “my” argument that Jack Evans was “simply a capitalist who took everyone’s money” and that he ran Cooper Donuts as just a place that “takes everyone’s money” despite my never having said that. What I did say, in this article, in reaction to repeatedly being told Evans was a trailblazing trans ally who went out of his way to serve the gender-nonconforming, was: “I believe Jack Evans didn’t turn away customers if they had money. That doesn’t make him an ally, that makes him a capitalist.”

I stand by that. The Evanses predictably misunderstood me. To them—and to the average Angeleno—”capitalist” is a slur, the foulest epithet in the urban lexicon. I consider it the ultimate compliment. It means Evans believed in the creation of value and the freedom of enterprise, imbued with a builder’s spirit that favored merit and innovation over some state-dependent malaise. But I’ll never expect normies to grasp that.

You pearl-clutch at the label, but let’s talk about Jack Chester Evans. He had a business model—the bedrock of capitalism. His model was the engine that directed his capital and resources. It required the allocation of risk and the stewardship of money to provide a small luxury—donuts and coffee—at modest prices in underserved neighborhoods that corporate entities habitually bypassed. Operating in an economically depressed area demands operational excellence, consistency, and volume; you don’t survive on price-gouging, you survive on efficiency. More than that, Evans was a local entrepreneur building social capital; he became a familiar face and a source of order. He maintained his independence, treated his employees like community members, and kept his gaze fixed on building a sustainable, profitable reality rather than chasing government subsidies. In short, Jack Evans was a credit to the capitalist order.

Evans did not get into the business of serving the disenfranchised with the intent of turning away his customers—that would be bad business, and that is why I said he was a capitalist. Was he a “trailblazing trans ally”? Who knows? I’m sure he was kind to his children and nice to dogs. But the family insists on canonizing him as a LGBTQIA2S+ saint, relying on testimonials that amount to little more than “he gave me a job” or “the donuts were yummy.”

A testimonial that “he hired people in need” is fine, but as someone who spent significant time in the Union Rescue Mission archives, I can tell you that “people in need” back in the day were overwhelmingly white male alcoholic veterans in early recovery, not trans POC. One patron of the early-60s downtown gay scene noted (in an anonymous online comment) that Cooper’s didn’t turn people away, but that falls under basic commerce, not the old debunked chestnut of “you’d be arrested because of MC5022.” Furthermore, relying on anonymous online comment sections is the verbum ex nihilo school of historiography—the “trust me, bro” method of citation.

They even suggest there is “proof” that to Jack Evans, inclusion outweighed the profit motive—

— and yet, curiously, they couldn’t manage to provide a photo of that page in the archive, or even a transcription of the sentence that apparently reads “we must dismantle systemic power structures to center intersectional voices, ensuring radical inclusion and equity for every marginalized, diverse lived experience” or whatever.

#7 on the Evanses List — ADMINISTRATIVE ERRORS ON THE CITY MOTION

In this post, I dismantled the motion penned by Tony Hoover—bolstered by his impassioned pleas, convinced the City Council to make Second and Main “Cooper Donut/Nancy Valverde Square.” Click here to read a breakdown of the hallucinations contained in Hoover’s motion, and here for the speech he delivered to Council.

Hoover’s narrative is replete with ahistorical hokum, which Council swallowed hook, line, and sinker. The Evanses, though, reframe this travesty as “an administrative error” and “a bureaucratic error” and state “the ordinance reference error is a citation mistake in a government document,” a spin so nauseatingly disingenuous it caused me to syntax-error-stare until my eyes shriveled into sun-dried grapes of intellectual frustration.

Oh, and they write —

#8 on the Evanses List — THE VALVERDE LEGAL TIMELINE

Half of Hoover’s motion deals with Nancy Valverde; naturally, I dissected that, which has in turn irked the Evanses. Because everyone since the dawn of time has uncritically accepted the greater Nancy Valverde story, I poked a few holes in it, their response being “wait just a damn minute, you’re conflating two different things!“

Except, no. Anthony Hoover — a City official acting in an official capacity — conflated those two things. And since I certainly never conflated them, the Evanses must be talking about Hoover, or some other bungler..oh, wait—no, look at that! They are talking about me:

Let me be clear: not to blow my own horn, but literally everyone conflated the two events until I came along, the first and only person to untangle this mess. My jumping off point came via the Community Impact Statement from the Downtown LA Neighborhood Council, and the subsequent motion before Council—which read:

The idea that Valverde got a lawyer and reversed her harassment comes from Gay L.A. (which the Evanses cite in “Sources,” as “the authoritative scholarly history of LGBTQ life in Los Angeles”) in which Valverde herself provides the date as 1959, via a November 2004 interview of her by Lillian Faderman.

Yet, the Evanses assert that in 1951 she “discovered” a 1950 ruling that ended her harassment. This is historical nonsense: that ruling was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times (and in every other newspaper) in 1950. (Think of it this way: imagine a guy named Bob Smith who claimed in 1937 that the Hindenburg exploded, but no one believed him. A year later, in 1938, he “fearlessly uncovers” a widely circulated news report proving the Hindenburg exploded, and suddenly, everyone believes him. It’s that dumb.) The timeline only makes even a modicum of sense if we accept the 1959 date—perhaps in nine years people simply forgot the landmark ruling—but even then, it’s a stretch. The notion that she “provided her lawyer with that information” is equally absurd, as even the world’s most incompetent attorney would be aware of basic, publicized case law.

So, instead of lazily claiming “Lydia Marsak is wrong to conflate the two,” the Evanses should simply admit the truth: in the face of the unbearably sloppy “research” produced by Tony Hoover, Lydia Marsak is the first person to treat the Valverde tale as a story worthy of actual study and the first researcher to decouple the two conflated narratives. (And I’m still not sure why you’re calling me Lydia; is this an attempt to deadname me?)

#9 on the Evanses List — THE UNDERLYING LOGICAL PROBLEM

This brings us to the “absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” bit—though they’re misusing Sagan to blur argumentum ad ignorantiam with a quote from geologist Thomas Shepherd, who was expressing that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. It’s a cute phrase with a grain of truth, as historians don’t work with random samples; we work with sources produced by specific institutions, conventions, and scribal habits. That makes silence interpretable. The “argument from silence” is only a fallacy if you skip the step of asking whether the evidence should be there in the first place.

But the Evanses argue that the evidence is there because it isn’t, claiming the record-keepers were corrupt. They insist we know why the records are missing: the LAPD destroyed their records from the late 1950s! They purged them! To which I say, so what? There isn’t a police force in the nation that retains records that old. Be advised, there is zero reason for LAPD to have its records from back then. I sure as hell wish they did, because I could solve a thousand other mysteries that plague me. But LAPD doesn’t have their records, and I’ll tell you why (click here). Oh, and on a related note, here’s a fun fact they’ll never tell you: Chief Parker, during the time of the supposed riot (when he was busy arguing for media access into arrest records, see #4 above) spoke out against the destruction of records:

Then the Evanses repeat the whole “Chief Parker restricted access to criminal records” which, again, I debunked above.

And that’s it. Well, except the final section, which consists of statements so irrefutable that I’ve decided to refute them anyway.

#10 on the Evanses’ list — WHAT NO ARGUMENT HAS SUCCESSFULLY CHALLENGED (don’t forget this is a clickable link)

This is just a list of … stuff. Six statements which are more or less true—some more than others—but which they label “The Solid Ground.” Briefly:

1. Cooper Donuts was a real business and it started in 1952. Fine, no-one doubts that.
2. There was a Cooper Donuts at 517 South Main. Yes! And this is the exciting news I came here to repeat! (Though the Evanses write that Cooper’s was “next to Harold’s and the Waldorf, precisely where Rechy has always located the event.” To be strictly factual, Rechy only mentioned Harold’s and the Waldorf in one of his repeated tellings, and he did not indicate it was “next to” them, but between them … but now I’m just splitting hairs.)
3. LAPD harrassment of LGBT people was systematic. That may be, but Los Angeles was nothing special in this regard. It was a routine enforcement of the social order that existed in 1950s America—a post-WWII period, particularly following the 1947 federal “Red Scare” and the subsequent moral panic regarding subversives (including the “Lavender Scare” figures like Sumner Welles, Nils Skavang, and Charles Thayer), that saw a massive push across all American cities to cleanse urban centers of “deviants”. Specifically, the Evanses assert “under Chief Parker, LGBTQ arrests increased 86.5% over the prior decade. This is established by multiple historians,” etc. Except: nope. Notice they don’t provide a citation, despite writing at the top of the page “A number of specific arguments have been raised against the Cooper Do-nuts story. This page addresses them directly — with citations.” Shockingly, the 86.5% number is bullshit. Don’t believe me? Click here.
4. Cooper Donuts was a “place of genuine welcome.” Ok, cool.
5. John Rechy still says something happened on Main Street. Ok, and? Yep, Rechy hasn’t retracted the story and never will, which surprises precisely no-one.
6. There’s a Cooper Donuts/Nancy Valverde Square at Second and Main. Yes, we know. That’s all fine and good, but the Evanses mysteriously add “The City’s Historic Cultural Monument process requires independent research and review” (click here). This is true — I’ve worked on a few, and HCM noms require a formal application, field surveys, evaluation by the Office of Historic Resources, and consideration by the Cultural Heritage Commission, and recommendation by the Planning and Land Use Management Committee. But the Evanses adding this statement is pretty funny, as the naming of the square had absolutely nothing to do with the Historic Cultural Monument process. Square Naming triggers zero reviews by Office of Historic Resources, or the Cultural Heritage Commission, or, to be accurate, anyone — there is no oversight panel, no historic evaluation, no nothing. All you need is a narrative and one councilmember to sponsor the thing, and it’s done. Let me be clear: when they assert the process “requires independent research and review” I’d reply yeah I effing wish, because Cooper Donuts/Nancy Valverde Square entailed zero independent research and precisely zero review.

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Ok, and that, I hope, will be my final words on Cooper Donuts.

One last thing, again,

…who the hell is Lydia Marsak?

Hey all! My pal Lisa Napoli published a nifty piece in LA Local this week, called “The four corners: How I watched downtown LA rise, fall and reinvent itself” (my apologies to Lisa for changing it to “Third and Figueroa” in my much-shortened blogpost title!) and if you haven’t seen it, check it out:

The four corners: How I watched downtown LA rise, fall and reinvent itself

The four corners of Third and Figueroa are a pretty neglected part of the world (most tourists, and even residents, rarely venture west of Hope Street, save for the Bonaventure to the south, and the Broad-connected metro stop to the north) so it’s neat to see the four major buildings covered. Those being, of course, the Sheraton Grande, The Park, the Bunker Hill Apartments, and the World Trade Center (a recent post one the WTC, here). Each of these projects gets their own entry in Marsak’s Guide, of course:

And since we’re on the subject of Third and Figueroa, I can’t help myself but provide some then n’ nows featuring some lesser-seen images of Bunker Hill:

It’s 1973. You wake up and as you blink through the smog, what do you see? Vietnam slogging on, Johnson’s “Great Society” in complete collapse, and various countercultural crusades have dismantled the social scaffolding that once provided you with clear roles and status. What do you do? Succumb to enervation and aimlessness in a fractured, filthy present, lurching toward a sterile, alienating future?

No! You go backward. The only bulwark against modern alienation is its wholesale rejection. Next thing you know, your local pizza parlor has player pianos and Tiffany lamps; Tiny Tim is tiptoeing through the tulips; The Sting has suffused the landscape with Joplin ragtime; and your cultural touchstones are The Waltons, Paper Moon, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Go outside, and girls are less go-go than they are Gunne Sax.

You think back on Bunker Hill as it existed just ten years ago. It wasn’t a bleak and blighted hellscape, yet; it was more Railway Children than it was Omega Man. As the reverie overtakes you, you realize what you truly miss: Angels Flight. The City scooped it up in 1969 and promised its return in “a couple of years.” It’s been four years now—how much longer will you have to wait?

But then, you get wind it IS back. Angels Flight! Reborn! Atop the new downtown Hyatt Regency! You conjure images of flocked wallpaper, Gibson Girl waitresses, and charmingly amateurish murals of Meredith P. Snyder shaking hands with Teddy Roosevelt.

But then you actually get there and it’s just covered in mirrors, reflecting not just your own weary face, but the inherent narcissism and cocaine use for which 1970s Los Angeles is so rightfully known.

Oh well.

ANGEL’S FLIGHT

Here, then, for you viewing pleasure, are some shots no-one has ever seen, of Los Angeles’ brand new revolving restaurant/cocktail lounge Angel’s Flight, in November 1973.

RECORD SCRATCH! Not long after this post went live, I got a message on my Instagram from Adsausage (presumably the esteemed Mr. Englender himself) hipping me to this link: https://www.adsausage.com/southern-california-in-print-paris-match#broadway-plaza and hooooooo boy!

Angel’s Flight revolving — in color!

Some scans of its menu (mailed to me out of the blue by the incomparable Chris Nichols):

Angel’s Flight spun and spun all through the 1970s and into the 80s. When and why did Angels Flight disappear? Tough to be certain. You could still spin into the New Year of 1988:

But the last known mention of the place was just a couple months later, in a Jack Smith column about how restaurants had become so annoyingly loud:

Maybe Nann Miller convinced them, because there are no further mentions of Angel’s Flight—and neither are there subsequent references to there being a revolving room atop the Broadway Plaza.

THE BROADWAY PLAZA

At this point you say, wait, what, so, Angels Flight bar and restaurant was in something called the Broadway Plaza? Which had a Hyatt Regency? And it was at Seventh and Flower? What the heck are you talking about?

In 1966, Broadway-Hale and Ogden Development began work on the Broadway Plaza, a massive project bounded by Seventh, Eighth, Flower, and Hope Streets. It is formally announced in February 1969: 500 room hotel, 32-story office tower, wrapping around a two-level shopping mall. All designed by Charles Luckman, head of Ogden Development.

On November 16th, 1973 the Philharmonic Affiliates held a “Promenade Party” to benefit the Philharmonic.

They sold 9500 tickets at $10 a pop and the event was the affair of the season:

The next day, November 17th, Mayor Tom Bradley was on hand for the official ribbon cutting:

Fast forward fifty-some years, and the mall has been blown out and opened to the elements, after the whole thing was remade as The Bloc (sorry, THE BLOC).

THE SPACE TODAY

At this point you are, undoubtedly, asking so what’s up there now? Does it still revolve? Can I get an Angels Flight Delight cocktail while spinning around in a circle? The answer is no, though the space has retained its amazing view. It is now the fitness center of the Sheraton Grand.

ANGEL’S FLIGHT RESTAURANT AND LOUNGE — THE REBOOT

Angels Flight was again reborn…in 1993. The Hotel Inter-Continental (Marsak’s Guide, p. 51) opened in December of that year, and included nods to Old Bunker Hill (naming the meeting rooms Bradbury, Crocker, Widney, etc.) up to and including a restaurant called Angel’s Flight:

Angel’s Flight Restaurant & Lounge opened January 1993 (read a review here), but did not survive long — Steve Harvey noted in August 1994 it had shut down “a few months ago.” In mentioning the late Angel’s Flight at the Broadway Plaza, and the demise of the Angel’s Flight at the Inter-Continental, but conversely noting the actual Angels Flight funicular was being returned to Bunker Hill, Harvey quipped:

ANGELS FLIGHT — THE CLOTHING LINE

As long as I’ve got you here, and we’re talking about “the other Angels Flight” and “another other Angels Flight” how about we cover one more:

And you’re like yeahhhhh…I’ve been in thrift stores and seen terrifying polyester outfits with this tag? What’s the deal with that?

Well, Tobias Kotzin (b. 1897) was a Jewish kid from, of all places, Covington, Kentucky (just over the Ohio River from Cincinnati). After wartime service as a corporal in the tank corps, in 1920 he lit out for Los Angeles seeking employment in the garment trade. He began the A-1 Manufacturing Co. on East Pico, became president of the Menswear Manufacturers of Los Angeles, and married into the prosperous Finkelhor family of Beverly Hills.

Kotzin, aged 78, dies in March 1976. Very soon thereafter, his company gets…weird. I know it was the 1970s and all, but even by 1970s standards, his apparel becomes downright prurient. And the name of the particularly salacious clothing line? Angels Flight, of course.

Why Angels Flight? Maybe there’s something suggestive in the trolley “rising up” … in any event, the first ads for Angels Flight clothing begin to appear in November 1976. Their raison d’être: Angels Flight trousers assist you in exhibiting your penis to random girls. Yes, that sentence is as accurate as it is disturbing.

Advertisments for Angels Flight clothing peter out (see what I did there) through 1985 and finally disappear altogether.

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Angel’s Flight — the revolving lounge, the posh restaurant, the manhood-shaping trouser — are gone, though we have had their namesake, Angels Flight, returned, of course. Remember, as well, that while we have lost our revolving Angels Flight restaurant, we still have the national treasure that is the Bonavista Lounge, the greatest revolving cocktail bar on planet earth, if not the greatest single interior space on said planet (St. Peter’s Basilica and Trinity College Library pale in comparison, yeah, I said what I said).

Our mission now is to remember the wild 1970s interior that was once the Broadway Plaza, and never forget the revolving wonder of what was once…Angel’s Flight.

I’ve been hearing for ten years that Loyola Marymount University was at work on a Chavez Ravine archive project, and last Thursday, the internet lit up with this press release. Lo and behold, it had been released to the public, and you may see it for yourself by clicking here.

It is a fascinating collection — 222 documents in total — containing some incredible material. I encourage you to wade through all of it and discover its many facets yourself, but just for fun, I’m going to share a dozen of my favorites. (And, because I found LMU’s metadata a trifle thin, and cannot help but nitpick where there is nitpicking to be done, I shall do that as well.)

I realize my penchant for precision may border on pedantic nitpickery. I understand that this is a new project and that there are kinks to iron out—for instance, when images clearly captured in the late 1940s are dated to the spring of 1905:

Beyond those occasional quirks, I am mystified by LMU’s omission of basic data. One wonders whether they possessed location information and opted to withhold it, or if it simply slipped through the cracks. But I’m not here to disparage the work — it’s outrageously important to share these rare images, and we not only delight in them, but, I intend to put them to good use:

The history of Chavez Ravine is, on numerous fronts, fiercely contested, up to and including the size of its population. The prevailing statistic cites CR contained 300 families, but —

Fact is, nobody knows how many people lived in Chavez Ravine, because nobody has actually counted. Though there has yet to be a rigorous house-by-house count, it is my professional estimation that the total stood at approximately 275 families—totaling around 1,100 individuals—a calculation based on structure counts, square footage, and average occupancy. We will not have a definitive answer until every residence is mapped against the 1950 census. I have already begun this project in Scrivener, mapping every available facade image to its corresponding address, attaching every resident, etc.

Another element of this being, while I love the idea of keeping the memories of these displaced families alive — I am primarily an architectural historian, and it’s long past time for a systematic survey of interbellum working-class vernacular residential typologies in Chavez Ravine! The tales of topographic adaptation, material salvage, growth patterns, and communal spaces endemic to this particular landscape of autoconstrucción interplay with incremental architecture as it applies to traditional massing vs. organic construction integrating structure into a verdant terrain! Sorry, I get excited.

So that’s what I’m working on. In the meantime, I will always deconstruct the mainstream narrative when I see fit. No surprises, but LMU’s “historical background” concerning the subject is not without its issues—beyond simple flubs like the date of the famous 1950 letter or the persistent myth regarding Aurora Vargas (who was never a resident of the house from which she was removed and, in fact, lived ten miles away at the time). Suffice it to say I’ll just say it has issues (rather than pick it apart as I did to John Laslett) and leave it at that.

Ultimately, this project is a monumental achievement. I offer my heartfelt congratulations and gratitude to the team behind it. I, and the rest of the community, look forward to the continued expansion of this collection.

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If you’re interested in Chavez Ravine, and haven’t read my other work on the subject, see here:

The Truth About Chavez Ravine, Pt. I

Chavez Ravine, Pt. II: What is Chavez Ravine?

Chavez Ravine, Pt. III: Calm Before the Storm

Chavez Ravine, Pt. IV: The Rise and Fall of Elysian Park Heights

Chavez Ravine, Pt. V: Here Come the Dodgers

Chavez Ravine, Pt. VI: The Arechiga Family

Chavez Ravine, Pt. VII: What Have We Learned

Channel 5 Flubs Chavez Ravine

Deflating More Chavez Ravine Nonsense

Disneyland Gets the Chavez Ravine Treatment

Chavez Ravine in John Laslett’s “Shameful Victory”

Checking In on the Bunk

The remains of Old Bunker Hill are few and far between. Yes, we have Bunker Hill captured in still images, and in cinema, but actual archaeological residua is scant. We have a house, of course, but attempts to analyze the greater Hill’s physical, material culture is generally limited to, for example, a retaining wall or two, and a couple pieces of wood. And a doorknob. So any time we rediscover an original remnant of Bunker Hill, it’s news! And I’ve got news!

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I was recently digging into the history of the First German Methodist Church, at 449 South Olive Street, on the southern edge of Bunker Hill. My need to document the church stemmed, in part, from regret it hadn’t been included in my book Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. The book featured the Olive Street synagogue on the northern end of the hill, but not the Olive Street Methodist church at the southern tip—omitted, but not disincluded for lack of trying, because if there’s one thing you learn about producing books like these, it’s that you can’t include everything. (You can try, but the editors will excise most of it, and then gently remind you that there are few buyers for 50-pound 1,000-page books.)

First German Methodist had been demolished in 1988, and I began to look into the status of the congregation. Had they survived? Maybe moved on and into new digs? Turns out they had, but what I didn’t expect is that they took a part of Old Bunker Hill with them!

This, then, is the story of some incredible, beautiful survivors from Bunker Hill.

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THE GERMANS

Before we get to German Methodists in particular, let’s talk about Germans in general. The German contribution to the first century of Los Angeles—roughly from the 1840s through the 1940s—was foundational to the city’s transition from a dusty outpost to a global metropolis, proving absolutely essential to the economic, cultural, and political architecture of early Angeleno life. One hears a lot about, for example, our Spanish founders, and the ever-important French, and the primarily Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish Midwestern migrants of the boom years, but because of their propensity for assimilation (made more pressing due to anti-German sentiment in and around the wars) and intermarriage, the Germans rarely get examined. Traditional German sites like Alpine Village have faded away. When Germans do get mentioned as they relate to Los Angeles, it’s usually the interbellum-era intellectual class (e.g., this/this/this/this) who were largely irreligious, Jewish, or both; less so those of the earlier variety, whom we’ll examine here.

Germans had the numbers; in 1900, among the foreign-born population in Los Angeles, the Germans ranked first (those born in England ranking second). Their social institutions—including the Turnverein (athletic clubs) and various German-language newspapers like the Süd-Californische Post—wielded civic and political influence. Los Angeles was the winemaking capital of California largely due to Charles and Henry Kohler and their partner, John Frohling. The Maier and Zobelein Brewery, later known as the Los Angeles Brewing Company, became one of the largest industrial operations in the city, providing stable labor and significant tax revenue that funded early urban expansion. Anaheim was a massive German undertaking, back when it was still part of Los Angeles County. Germans were instrumental in banking (Hellman), mercantile trades (Newmark), manufacturing (Entenmann), and on and on.

And architecture? People think Romanesque Revival originated with that Franco-English guy Richardson, but it was in fact the product of Germans importing their Rundbogenstil (Round-Arch Style). Without the German tradition of Heimatstil—and its focus on woodcraft, exposed joinery, and natural materials—we would have neither the bungalow nor Craftsman home. Furthermore, we wouldn’t have Modernism. And no, I’m not merely talking about Gropius and Mies, Neutra and Schindler, Wachsmann and Pfisterer; I’m talking about the German-trained engineers who conceived the early American daylight factories, and whose structural calculus built them—the true progenitors of Modernism.

America’s educational system, agricultural mastery, and advances during the Industrial Revolution? Largely German. The German national consciousness brought to America a deep-seated cultural and philosophical tradition defined by the concepts of Kultur, Bildung, and Ordnung. This consciousness provided a structural backbone to the American experiment, grounding it in a heritage of disciplined intellect, vocational mastery, and high civic engagement. (And in case you’re wondering, no, I personally have no German ancestry, so I’m not trying to toot my own ethnic horn.)

Now, with all that in mind, for our purposes today, let’s not forget Los Angeles’s German churches. These include the German-language St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, at 12th and Los Angeles Street; German Baptist at 8th and Maple; German Lutheran at 8th and Flower; Trinity Evangelical German Lutheran at 18th and Cherry; the German Evangelical Association at 618 South Olive St. (later the location of Clifton’s Pacific Seas); and the German Evangelical Church under the Synod of North America, AKA the Friedensgemeinde, on San Julian Street near 7th, among others.

And then, of course, there was First German Methodist.

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FIRST GERMAN METHODIST

When you think of the Germans and their religion, what comes to mind is Western Christendom’s famous fracture between Lutheranism and Catholicism. Methodism in Germany was a later, less influential arrival, arriving in the 19th century through missionary efforts; it remained a “free church” movement, never gaining the deep institutional and historical ties that Lutheranism and Catholicism possess.

Methodism emerged from the eighteenth-century Anglican revival led by John Wesley. It emphasizes personal holiness, social concern, and an experiential relationship with God. Once a reformist movement within the Church of England, it evolved into a distinct Protestant denomination centered on methodical discipline, conversion, and global evangelism. I am far from a religious scholar, so I turned to one, asking about the difference between the Methodists and Lutherans. She wrote: ‘In essence, Lutheranism is a theology of the Cross—focused on the objective reality of what Christ has done for the sinner—while Methodism is a theology of Holiness—focused on how that grace manifests in the observable, sanctified life of the believer.’ Turning to another scholar for perspective on Catholicism, he noted, and here I am greatly paraphrasing: ‘Catholicism is an institutional and sacramental system that emphasizes the Church as the necessary vessel for salvation, whereas Methodism is a pietistic and revivalist movement that emphasizes the individual’s practical experience of holiness and the active application of faith in the world.’

Now that we have defined our terms, we turn our tale to Dr. Johann Carl Zahn. Born near Halle an der Saale in 1822, he became a doctor in Saxony, and in 1848 emigrated to Australia. In Melbourne, in 1869, he met and married an English girl, an Anglican Church missionary named Frances Sharp. They moved to San Francisco in 1871 and come 1873 headed south for Los Angeles. While Los Angeles had the Turnverein Germania (the German gymnastics club) and the Teutonia Singing and Social Club, there were no German churches. Zahn built a house on Spring Street, between Fourth and Fifth, which included a congregation hall, and on July 5, 1874, he founded an independent German Protestant congregation.

There had been Englishmen practicing Methodism in Los Angeles since 1853. The Annual Conference of Methodists had been established in California immediately after statehood, and a Southern California Conference followed in 1875. That set the stage for the arrival of Gottlieb Bollinger.

Gottllieb Heinrich Bollinger had been born in Hattenhofen in 1829, emigrated to America, where he gained experience among the German Methodists of Cincinnati before being transferred to California in 1865. He founded many congregations and built churches and parsonages throughout the Sacramento area. Upon his arrival in Los Angeles in 1875, Bollinger was placed in charge of the Southern California Conference of Methodists, but his first move was to pay a visit to Dr. Johann Zahn. Zahn already operated the aforementioned German Protestant church—of which more than half the congregants were Methodist—which he then handed over to Bollinger. (Zahn and family went on to build a house on Bunker Hill, of course.)

In November 1876, Bollinger organized the congregation as the German Congregation of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the Southern California Conference. For its first three years, the German congregation met within the structure of the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, built in 1868 on Fort Street (now Broadway) between Third and Fourth. In the fall of 1879, the German Methodists completed their own church on Fourth Street, between Fort and Hill streets.

With the church established, Bollinger was transferred in 1883. He was followed by a number of successors, and the church continued to grow. Eventually, several more German Methodist congregations were founded—in Hollywood, Pasadena, Anaheim, and San Pedro—to the point that these congregations split from the American Methodist conferences to form the California Deutsche Konferenz in 1890.

The downtown German Methodist congregation on Fourth Street flourished and prospered; within the church, countless baptisms and marriages were performed. Eventually, it became time for the building to expand. One of the congregants, William Knickrehm—who had been married in the church—was a building contractor well-established in the house-moving and house-raising business. In March 1897, Knickrehm did the work of raising the one-story building and constructing a ground floor underneath, where stairs, assembly rooms, and offices were placed. A pipe organ was added to the church as well.

Above, the home of First German Methodist after the 1897 addition, but before it gets hauled off…

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THE ARRIVAL ON BUNKER HILL

In 1901, the congregation sold the Fourth Street property seen above (for $23,000, having paid $750 for it in 1878) and purchased a lot on Olive, north of Fifth Street. William Knickrehm was again in charge of moving the church, but this time he hauled it a block and a half east on Fourth and a block south on Olive, plopping it down in its new Bunker Hill digs.

At 451 South Olive St. —

A quick aside—the church builds a hospital on the neighboring lot:

Dr. Zahn died in 1901, bequeathing $16,000 to the church. The congregation decided to build a hospital, so they purchased the house next door and welcomed nurses sent by the German Methodist Deaconess Motherhouse in Cincinnati. However, the church had grander plans: soon, a new hospital was under construction, which opened as the German Deaconess Hospital on February 8, 1904.

The church soon realized that running a hospital wasn’t in their business plan, and it was leased to the Clara Barton Hospital, who had outgrown their location at Hope & Pico.

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THE NEW CHURCH ON BUNKER HILL

In 1908, the church took on a new pastor. His name was Jakob H. Durhbahn—an American by birth, but one whose father had come from Schleswig-Holstein. The congregation had swelled, they had money in the bank, and it was time either to move from the now-too-tiny church on the southern tip of Bunker Hill or to demolish it and build anew. Durhbahn, the board, the congregation, and the superintendent decided on the latter. Thus:

In February 1910, the Times published this rendering of the new church, with Albert Raymond Walker as the architect. For a German church, it is a rather English design—more an Edwardian interpretation of mid-19th-century Gothic Revival than pure Gothic Revival itself, if there can be such a thing. It appears to have roots in the enormously influential 1847 Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina, which was itself based on York Minster. In the spring of 1910, however, Walker partnered with John Terrell Vawter, and by June, they had reconfigured the design:

The style remained Late English Gothic, though with considerably less glass, likely due to financial considerations. The cornerstone was laid August 14, 1910, and the church was dedicated July 11, 1911.

When finished, it looked like this:

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THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH, 1911-1988

Its greatest flowering was during the 1920s. During the pastoral leadership of Rudolph Zurbuchen, between 1919 and 1933, the church had more than 250 members and many friends.

In the mid-1980s, average attendance was about 75 people at Sunday services, but the sanctuary would be packed to the gills during the Advent and Christmas seasons for traditional Christvespern, as well as for confirmation and cantata services. The mixed choir, men’s choir, and handbell choir helped draw in people, as did the monthly ‘Organ Concert at Noon.’ The church also produced a weekly half-hour radio program on AM KTYM and maintained a weekly column, ‘Word for a Sunday,’ in the German-language newspaper, the California Staatszeitung.

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A NEW CHURCH

It’s 1988, and downtown is in a serious period of doldrums. This was before the loft-conversion boom, so there were few actual residents. New commercial towers were sprouting up, especially on Bunker Hill. It was time for the German Methodist congregation to find a new home, so they sold the property to Maguire-Thomas Partners in May. MTP pulled the demolition permit that November and razed the church—after which lots 2 and 3, block 107 of the Beaudry Tract, became part of the greater footprint of the Gas Company Tower:

But before the wholesale wrecking began, the First German Methodist Church of Los Angeles took stuff. They wisely removed some important parts of their historic building and placed them into storage, awaiting the time they could build anew. These materials remained in storage for about a decade, while the congretation (who meanwhile held services in borrowed quarters at St. Barnabas Episcopal in Eagle Rock) looked for a suitable forever home. At last they found a spot of land in Glendale, hired Fields-Devereaux to build a new house of worship, and in August 1997 opened their doors:

And now, ladies and gentlemen, you may remember I mentioned the German Methodists grabbed a couple things on their way out the door…I may have undersold that a bit. Are you ready? Deep breath:

That’s right, they brought their giant stained glass church windows!

The window opposite Christ, in the chapel, is this beauty:

But wait! We’re not done! Let’s say you stay after service for a fellowship meal that’s held here—

And that’s not all! Other material brought from Bunker Hill:

And that is the story of how the German Methodists brought the greatest and most important remnants from Bunker Hill to Glendale!

You may be wondering how I managed to get all the wonderful images that accompany this post. Earlier this year I called up the church, and after determining the windows were in fact there, I made arrangements to go photograph them. This I did, of course, by going to a Sunday service, and watching Rev. Kurt Poland in action at the pulpit:

Pastor Kurt delivered a marvelous sermon, and it was a lovely service in general—beyond simply being surrounded by all that stained glass! I asked Pastor Kurt if he would be so kind as to allow me to poke around in the church archives, and he was gracious enough to say yes.

Remarkably, I happened to visit on the very day the congregation decided to change its name. Church name changes are routine, and First German Methodist is no exception; however, this was the day they elected to once and for all remove German from their name:

Naturally, it saddens me when the last vestiges of Teutonic influence disappear from the landscape; such reflects the sad state of our Zeitgeist. Still, whatever they need to do to help spread the gospel can’t be all bad.

So! Instead of spending your Sunday morning doomscrolling over avocado toast, go enrich your soul at International Community UMC. Tomorrow’s Pentecost Worship Service begins at 10:30am! Music, scripture, prayer, and seeing all that glass in person is the cherry on the top. You get wise! You get to church! — click here.

The World Trade Center! Important! Incredible! And…doomed? Well, no, but…sort of?

You know about the World Trade Center because you have undoubtedly been there to marvel at its wonders, but if you haven’t, you’ve at least seen it in the book Bunker Hill, Los Angeles…

…and in the book Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill…

…but should you not be familiar with the wonders of the World Trade Center, let me bring you, quickly, up to speed:

Once upon a time, the Bunker Hill redevelopment area superblock bounded by Third, Fig, Fourth & Flower was slated as site of “The Bunker Hill Center” retail mall, and then the “Los Angeles International Financial Center,” and wound up as The World Trade Center, for reasons I won’t go into here, but you can read all about it in this Instagram post. (While we’re on the subject of Instagram, I would suggest you go to amazing bonaventurehotel fan page, specifically their three recent WTC-related posts here, here, and here.)

Anyway, the World Trade Center opens in January 1975. It is a development by Edward K. Rice, who was chairman of the board of Conrad Associates, the Van Nuys architectural firm who designed the $30-million complex. Rice was an absolute titan when it came to concrete innovation, at least on par with Whittlesey.

Point being, the World Trade Center exists. It is one of the strangest, most wonderful, and sublime spaces in Los Angeles. For now. Check it out:

Ok, maybe you’re not wowed by Late-Modern Sculpturist glass skin towers. Fine. Let’s go inside then:

It’s an absolutely transcendent space, one of the great intact 1970s lobbies. I know, people my age might scoff at the prospect that 1970s architecture is cool, but the kids (can we still call Millennials kids?) love the stuff. The WTC lobby is within spitting distance (or, in this case, pedway distance) of 1970s interiors found in the Bonaventure Hotel and Bank of America (née Security Pacific), truly some of the best in the world. But this one has Tony Sheets:

This is a five-foot-high, 1000-foot-long poured-in-place concrete mural about the development of mercantile trade, called The History of World Commerce. This is Sheets’ masterpiece. In 2019, back when Jamison was going to build a residential tower on the site, an assessment was made of the building: it stated that because the artwork wasn’t fifty years old, and the artist was still alive, it wasn’t eligible to be considered for…anything. Of course, now the artwork is fifty years old, and Tony Sheets is deceased. But someone may read the report and descriptions of History of World Commerce featuring lines like “it does not articulate a particular, unique concept of design that would lead it to express an aesthetic ideal or high artistic value” which is embarrassingly stupid. In fact, the report goes on to say that post-redevelopment Bunker Hill is not a significant or distinguishable entity, and its components lack individual distinction. Which resets the bar for embarrassingly stupid.

Flash forward to today. 2019’s residential tower is dead, but the City (despite Los Angeles leading the nation in numeric population loss) says we need housing! So, they’re turning it into a public housing project: 512 subsidized units to the tune of $104million ($203,000 a unit). The effort, according to Mayor Bass, is to “continue decreasing homelessness,” but this sort of project has been difficult, because “city regulations stood in the way.” As subsidized housing projects go — 512 units — this one is massive. Consider: Pueblo del Rio was 400 units, but across 18 acres; Rancho San Pedro was 285 units, across 13 acres; William Mead was 449 units, 15 acres; Estrada Courts, 214 units, 10 acres; Avalon Gardens, 164 units, 15 acres; Hacienda Village, 184 units, 18 acres; Imperial Courts, 498 units, across 36 acres; there’s another half-dozen examples but you get the idea. Consider the densest projects: Jordan Downs, with 700 units on 50 acres, therefore provided each unit 3,111 square feet of land, and it had to be torn down in part because it was too dense. The WTC project makes Jordan Downs look like freakin’ Alpine County.

So, removal of amenity spaces, without those pesky regulations…makes one wonder. Now, it seems that the Sheets mural will remain:

Now that brings us to today. They’re ramping up to begin Phase One, which is 241 units, located wholly in the area seen in the image immediately above. (What about the other 271 units? Because DBS clearly says it’s 512 units, but, this only mentions 241, which would mean the cost per unit —and remember, they’re not buying the building! — is not $203,000 as mentioned above, but $435,000…what, we can’t buy ’em a house?)

I worry that completion of the 241 units, access to the lobby will be limited, as will access to the pedways (and the pedways are both historic and awesome).

Of course, the Powers That Be have stated that this project will have “no significant impact on the human environment.” Which again redefines “embarrassingly stupid,” but it’s a statement straight outta Sacramento, so what else do you expect. Plus, they have a big fat 96-page report called a FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact) and since my tax dollars paid for it, who would I be to disagree with…me?

Anyway:

Comments received on or before May 13 (basically tomorrow) “will be considered” even though the works is a done deal. Yep, that’s the one thing you can do: tell Elizabeth Brown, Loan Administrator, California Housing Finance Agency — eabrown@calhfa.ca.gov — that the mural and pedways should stay open and accessible. Now, Elizabeth Brown might be the nicest person in the world, but I doubt very much a Sacramento loan administrator for CalFHA will have much say in how the people of Los Angeles might enjoy a shared cultural resource. But it’s literally the only crumb they’ve tossed us, so, you never know! Get emailing!

Well that’s ↑ over, of course, but I’ll keep you abreast of developments!

Come on out Thursday the 23rd, 7pm, to hear me go on about our lost 19th century built environment, the world of Arnold Hylen, and what it took to republish his masterpiece, Los Angeles Before the Freeways.