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• 1 2017-10-30T12:38:33-07:00 "A Delightful Suburb": Boyle Heights in the 19th Century 24 plain 2021-02-24T10:45:37-08:00
  In 1858, an Irish immigrant named Andrew Boyle became the first Anglo to settle east of the Los Angeles River after purchasing a 22-acre tract and vineyard from the Rubio family, one of two Mexican landowning families in the area. In 1865, the Los Angeles City Council sold the remaining public lands in the area at auction, dividing it into 35-acre lots, most of which were sold to investors for between five and ten dollars an acre. Boyle expanded his holdings to some 385 acres, and other plots were purchased by prominent investors, including Isaias Hellman, a Bavarian Jewish banker, John Downey, who later served as Governor of California, and William A. Workman, Boyle’s son-in-law.
  
  Because of its limited access to downtown and lack of water supply, most of these plots remained undeveloped and unoccupied until the 1870s, when, anticipating the growth that would follow the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, landowners began pushing for municipal improvements in the area that would enhance their investments. Workman, who inherited his father-in-law’s holdings after Boyle’s death, played a leading role in these efforts, demanding that the City Council develop a sustainable water supply in the area, and running for City Council himself when they rejected his proposal. By the end of the decade, the City Council authorized the first bridge across the river at Macy Street (later Brooklyn Avenue) and the area’s first water pipelines and sewers, which were followed by its first horse-car transit lines and street pavings. These crucial infrastructure developments enabled landowners and to subdivide their acreages into smaller holdings and sell them to individuals and real estate speculators.
  
  Workman's efforts were supported by another landowner in the area, George Cummings, who was married to Maria del Sacramento Lopez, daughter of Francisco Lopez, one of the area's prominent landowner. In 1889, Cummings hired architect W. R. Norton to design a fine new hotel on his property adjacent to the new streetcar lines on First Street, an area known as the Cummings Block. The Queen Anne style building, known as the Boyle Hotel, featured decorative brickwork, cast iron columns, and a corner turret with an open balcony and quickly became a hub of social and political activity in the neighborhood. To learn more about the Boyle Hotel and its 2007 designation as a Historic-Cultural Monument, visit the Los Angeles Conservancy. 
  
  Marketed as an upscale development with picturesque views, beautiful parks, and a convenient location, Boyle Heights was home to approximately 2,000 residents by 1890, most of whom were affluent, white Protestants who lived on large estates in the western-most portion of the neighborhood. In an 1889 article, the Los Angeles Times described it as a "delightful suburb" where the "choicest residence sites are located," citing its "magnificent" views and "climate that cannot be improved upon." Alongside sketches of their large estates and "princely mansions," the article included profiles of the "men who pioneered and built it up," including William H. Workman, George Cummings, Samuel Rees, R.B. Young, and W. H. Perry, noting that "it is not at all surprising that a section so favorably situated...should have attracted wealth and culture." And, describing the improvements and street work underway - including on North Soto Street which, the author predicted, "will be by odds the finest drive as well as the finest residence portion in the city" - owed to the initiative of its upstanding citizens, the Times declared that "the Heights" was destined to become "the Nob Hill of the City of Angels."¹
  
• 1 2021-03-03T10:41:43-08:00 From Elite Suburb to Immigrant Enclave 15 plain 2021-04-30T10:54:36-07:00 Between the 1880s and the 1920s, Boyle Heights underwent a rapid demographic transformation, as its mostly white, affluent residents subdivided their estates into smaller parcels and sold them off at more affordable prices. By the 1920s, it had become an “immigrant enclave” where multiple diasporic communities converged, the area called home by thousands of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, as well as large populations of residents of Mexican, Japanese, Armenian/Turkish, Italian, Russian, and African American descent.
  
  The explanation most frequently offered for this rapid demographic shift is one of exclusion and discrimination. As the city of Los Angeles grew in the first two decades of the twentieth century, real estate developers began including restrictive racial covenants in mortgages and title contracts that prohibited the buyer from selling or renting their property to anyone who was not, in the language of the contracts, “of the Caucasian race.”² Because such segregationist practices did not prevail in Boyle Heights, as the story goes, it became one of just a handful of neighborhoods where non-white Angelenos could live. Owed to the ambiguities of Jewish racial designation, the covenants were not always applied to Jews. However, it is likely that, for them and other historically-marginalized communities, even the potential for discrimination may have been enough to discourage them to look for housing in other neighborhoods where the covenants applied.
  
  Such explanations, however, obscure other important realities that also factored in the transformation of the neighborhood. For one thing, many of the communities who settled in Boyle Heights in the 1910s and 1920s had deeper roots in the area that extended back to the 19th century. Workers of Mexican descent, some of whom were employed on the estates of the wealthy residents of “the white bluffs,” settled along the edges of the neighborhood closest to downtown, as did traqueros (railroad workers) in the low-lying flats near the rail lines. As the number of rail yards, metal works, packing houses, and brick yards in the flats grew—facilitated by new zoning and land use policies enacted by the City Council—Boyle Heights’ proximity to jobs enticed an increasing number of working-class families to settle there, including a significant number of Russian Molokans, a dissident Spiritualist Christian sect, who had by the 1910s established a vibrant community in the flats known as “Russia Town.”
  
  While Boyle Heights held clear residential significance for working-class families in the late nineteenth century, the neighborhood also offered unique possibilities for residents who were both middle-class and non-white. Take, for example, Harriet Owens-Bynum and her family, who moved to Boyle Heights from Texas in 1887, where she and her husband Green Owens owned a 160-acre ranch outside of Austin. Along with her son, John Wesley Coleman, a graduate of Tilleston College, and his wife Lydia and four children, they purchased a tract at 2916-2918 New Jersey Street near Evergreen cemetery by the eastern boundary of the city. Entrepreneurialism seems to have run in the family: Mr. Owens opened his own livery company and, after working for a time as a driver and then a Pullman Porter, John Wesley Coleman and his wife opened a downtown café, followed by a small hotel. Coleman then started his own Employment Agency, claiming later to have placed some 60,000 Black folks in jobs across the Pacific Coast. But it was Mrs. Owens-Bynum who came to be recognized for her “business savvy”: recognizing that Black families had trouble getting a “square deal” from local real estate agents, she worked with the owner of the surrounding tract to purchase and resell lots in the area to some sixty-five Black families, and placed dozens of others in rental properties, including a development she owned with her son called Coleman Flats. Recognized as community leaders working for the betterment of African Americans in the city, the Owens-Bynum family ascribed to many of the same notions of bourgeois respectability, propriety, and Christian virtue as the white families in the neighborhood, helping to attract Black residents with similar values and aspirations.³
  
  The same aspirations–for homeownership, community-building, and a place to call home–drove Eastern European Jewish immigrants to settle in Boyle Heights as well, many relocating from the Temple Street area and other parts of downtown. Historian Wendy Elliot-Scheinberg identified a handful of Jewish families who settled in the area in the 1890s—including Mendel Horwitz, a Russian-born tailor; German-born Max Kahn, who owned a dry-goods business; and Morris Lofsky, a peddler from Poland—and noted that a decade later, real estate developers Louis Lewin and Charles Jacoby founded the Pioneer Lot Association to sell lots for homes in the neighborhood, presumably to Jewish buyers.⁴ A 1940 neighborhood study, by contrast, credited the growth of the Jewish population there to “a real estate man named Heinemann” who travelled to New York and other eastern cities promoting homes for sale in the area, citing an “older resident” who claimed Heinemann’s promotion was so successful that one could ask any Jew on a westbound train where they were heading and they would answer, “Boyle Heights, California.”⁵
  
  While some of them lamented these demographic changes, elite white property owners in the neighborhood also played a role in the neighborhood’s transformation, particularly William H. Workman. Aiming to improve their own access to downtown and increase the value of their holdings, property owners led by Workman lobbied the local City Council to build and then refurbish a series of bridges over the Los Angeles River at Brooklyn Avenue, 1st street, 4th street, and 6th street–bridges that were rebuilt as concrete viaducts in the 1920s and remain in use today. Workman also served as Mayor of Los Angeles from 1886 to 1888 and helped to persuade the city’s streetcar operators to extend their lines to the neighborhood, the first electric car line at east 1st street completed in 1899. Such transit options gave the neighborhood easier access to jobs and businesses downtown, in turn encouraging property owners and real estate speculators to further subdivide their holdings, and a flurry of new developments and tracts emerged. By the 1920s, would-be residents could purchase large lots in “the hills” for between $1000 to $1500 and cheaper lots in “the flats” for as little as $600. Rents too were affordable, ranging from $35 to $40 per month to under $10, and over 80 percent of all residences were single-family homes.⁶
  
  With easy commuter access to jobs and affordable rent prices, Boyle Heights quickly became an appealing place to live for wage earners and professionals alike. The prevalence of restrictive racial covenants in other parts of the city only enhanced that appeal, drawing migrants from elsewhere in the city, the United States, and all over the world to make their homes in the neighborhood.