Blog: The Big Parade -- AM, Day 1

I joined the Big Parade at 10:30 in the morning Saturday at the Chinatown station of the Metro Gold Line.  

 We walked through edges of what had been the old train yard – this is where the video game L.A. Noire begins with an abandoned vehicle, and it is where the police corner Alan Ladd's character in “This Gun for Hire.”  (1942).   Some of the commercial buildings that surrounded the train yard still exist, including Nick’s Café at 1300 North Spring Street.     

 The area now comprises the Los Angeles State Historic Park.  On the north side, the Flat Iron building is the second oldest industrial building standing and dates from 1890.  The Capitol Milling Company building from 1883 stands next to the elevated Metro tracks.    

The first urban design for the pueblo of Los Angeles, which was drawn by Governor de Neve (His statute is in the plaza in front of Olvera Street) in 1769, designates the area popularly known as "the Cornfields"  as the “suertes” – individual agricultural parcels allotted to the pobladores.   The first settlers walked eleven miles from the San Gabriel Mission, after their long trip from Mexico, and the first thing they did was to build the “toma” at about where the Broadway Bridge crosses near the Fremont monument, which allowed Los Angeles River water to flow through an irrigation ditch called the zanja.    The zanja water irrigated the suertes, which helped provision colonial Spain.  The Americans enclosed the zanja to reduce evaporation and extended it throughout the city.

The original zanja became “zanja madre.”

The settlers who arrived from Mexico encountered the people now called the Tongva, who showed them how to build temporary willow-framed structures so they could live through the first rainy season.   The Tongva had lived in the Los Angeles basin and the San Fernando Valley for at least 10,000 years.  They were a hunting and gathering people before the Spanish forcibly missionized them.  

We walked through the old residential neighborhood of Solano Canyon into Elysian Park, near the reservoir DWP is turning into an underground tank, down a dirt path and a staircase, and along a pedestrian path where a few people sat with children and beer and apparently nothing else and along the 110, which was once the Arroyo Seco Parkway.   The website calls this walk “gritty.”   Yes.  It is.

We emerged at the Confluence Park plaza and fountain, which is a concrete area.   No water ran in the fountain.    We crossed the Figueroa Bridge.

Joe Linton (“Down by the Los Angeles River”) talked about the river, some reasons for why government encased it in a concrete coffin beginning in 1932, and hopes for restoration of the river and its riparian environment.

Fr. Juan Crespi accompanied the Portola Expedition that explored the area for Spain in 1769.    In his journal, he remarked on the wild roses, alders and cottonwoods and saw from the tree trunks in the mouth of the Arroyo Seco that the river must regularly flood.     Governor de Neve adopted Crespi’s recommendation that the pueblo begin at that spot.