I love to read around the people I'm researching, who become characters in the great play of life. Sometimes you read a book and it brings a place and time alive again too. This is a wonderful excerpt from a wonderful writer, Sheila Weller. Her mother's brother owned the famous Ciro's restaurant which was something of a home to the Rat Pack when they weren't in Vegas... Christine
Page 84 and 85
"There was still an unfinished quality to the place. The whole Los Angles basin, from San Bernadino to Santa Monica, had, two centuries earlier, been a swamp-pocked plain where antelope and wild cattle grazed on patchy grass amid alder, willow, and sycamore; where cacti, manzanita, and buckthorn spouted, giving the ground a scrubby aspect. Into this abyss, several leather-jacketed Spaniards - members of a company led by Captain Don Caspar de Portola (the Spanish Governor of the Californias) and a gray - robed Franciscan friar named Juan Crespi had stumbled in August 1769. They encountered stocky aboriginals who "began to howl like wolves as they drew near to us," their diary reads, but they eventually agreed to barter. They explored and christened their new friends the Gabrieleno Indians.
"Priests, soldiers, and colonists made their way up from Mexico over the next fifty years. The city passed from Spanish to Mexican rule in 1822, and the 1841 Pre-emption Act allowed settlers to homestead for $1.25 an acre. After a trio of events - the Gold Rush of 1848, the cession of California to the United States that same year, and statehood in 1850, Hollywood and West Los Angeles attracted migrants who, over the next thirty years, built citrus orchards on acreage that would later become Melrose, Fairfax, and Fountain Avenues and miles of Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Sunset Boulevards.
"Danish sailor Christian Duen homesteaded 160 acres that squared Santa Monica, Normandie, Melrose, and Western. Kentucky miner John Bower worked a plot between Franklin and Sunset. A 1870's roster of Hollywood fruit farmers includes "a German cripple, a French sailor, a Basque sheep raiser, a Mexican war veteran, a Prussian Calvary officer." Eventually this ragtag lot would disappear, to be replaced by a civic culture so bland, it would lead H.L. Mencken to dismiss L.A. as "Double Dubuque." Yet something of this haphazard diversity lingered, making for a class system that upturned eastern caste rules. The Irish, scorned in Boston, became L.A.'s elite; the Mulhollands and the Dohenys were the young city's Astors and Rockefellers. In Los Angeles, Jews didn't try to "pass." People WANTED to be Jews; many who weren't born Jews later converted.'"
C 2003 Sheila Weller St Martins Press
