THE LORE OF GLASSELL PARK

A neighborhood named for a Confederate sympathizer whose brother rode a submarine for the South, whose sister was the grandmother of General Patton, and whose family sold part of their land to become Forest Lawn Cemetery. Glassell Park has always had an interesting relationship with history.

Before the Subdivision

The land that became Glassell Park sat just beyond the northern boundary of the four square leagues originally granted to the Pueblo of Los Angeles in 1781 — the outer edge of the city's founding territory, rolling hills above the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. The Tongva people had moved through these hills for thousands of years. The Spanish named the larger land grant that included this territory Rancho San Rafael, awarded to Corporal Jose Maria Verdugo in 1784. Verdugo Road — one of Glassell Park's main thoroughfares, running along the old trade corridor between the Verdugo Rancho and the pueblo to the south — is a direct trace of that history: the actual path that wagons and cattle followed for generations, now a surface street cutting through the neighborhood at a diagonal that doesn't conform to the grid.

The Verdugos kept the rancho through the Spanish and Mexican periods. After American statehood and the legal restructuring of California's land tenure, the rancho was subdivided through a legal proceeding known as the Great Partition of 1871. On the morning of March 8, 1869, two Los Angeles attorneys — Alfred B. Chapman and Andrew Glassell — purchased Rancho San Rafael at a foreclosure auction at the county courthouse. The Great Partition two years later divided the rancho into 31 sections. Chapman and Glassell retained 5,745 acres — roughly one-sixth of the original grant — and Glassell's portion became, eventually, the neighborhood that bears his name.

The Glassells: A Family of Strange Americana

Andrew Glassell was born in 1827 on a Virginia plantation called Richland — a detail that explains a great deal about the man who named the land he acquired in California. He was the first president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, a prominent real estate attorney, and one of the founders of the city of Orange, California, which he and his brother initially called Richland in honor of the family plantation before a naming conflict forced them to choose something else. (They chose Orange, after Orange County, Virginia, where the Richland plantation stood. The town of Orange, the California county of Orange, and the street in Glassell Park called Andrita — named for Glassell's daughter — are all part of the same family's imprint on Southern California geography.)

Andrew refused to swear loyalty to the Union during the Civil War and lost his law license as a result. He went to work in a sawmill in Santa Cruz until the war ended, then relocated to Los Angeles in 1868 and began accumulating land.

His younger brother William T. Glassell was, before coming to California to co-found Orange alongside Andrew, a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy who had served as an officer on one of the most dangerous and improbable vessels in the Civil War: a semi-submersible torpedo boat called the CSS David. On October 5, 1863, William Glassell piloted the David in a nighttime attack on the USS New Ironsides in Charleston Harbor, detonating a spar torpedo against the Union warship's hull and causing significant damage before being captured. He escaped and returned to the Confederate forces. After the war, he came to California, helped lay out the plots of Orange, and eventually died in Los Angeles. He is buried at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, alongside his brother Andrew, beneath an enormous family obelisk.

The family's connection to American history goes further. Andrew's widowed sister Susan Thornton Glassell came to live with him in Los Angeles. Her son, Colonel George S. Patton, served in the Civil War on the Confederate side and is buried beside the Glassells at Rosedale. Susan's grandson — George S. Patton Jr. — became General George S. Patton, the World War II commander who led the Third Army across France. The man whose name is on a middle school in Glassell Park and in dozens of street names throughout the neighborhood was the great-uncle of one of the most famous American generals in history.

In 1889, the Glassells built a stately Victorian home they called The Ranch House on an elevated site in what is now Glassell Park, with a huge basement containing a shooting gallery and a darkroom, surrounded by citrus orchards and a walnut grove. In 1936, the City of Los Angeles took the house by eminent domain to build Washington Irving Junior High School, paying the family $25,000. The school stands there now. No marker commemorates what was on the site before it.

Five Hundred Thousand Pigeons

Before the subdivision, before the bakery, before the bungalows and the gang injunctions and the natural wine bars, the most notable attraction in Glassell Park was its pigeon farm.

The Los Angeles Pigeon Farm was built on the banks of the Los Angeles River, on the flat alluvial land below the neighborhood's hills, sometime in the late 19th century. At its peak it held approximately 500,000 birds — white pigeons, bred for the table and for the sport of pigeon racing, which was enormously popular in late-Victorian Los Angeles. Film cameras from the early silent era captured what they described as a "fairy snowstorm" when the flocks were released: half a million white birds lifting off the riverbank simultaneously, the sky going white and then clearing as they banked and swirled. The farm became one of Los Angeles's premier tourist attractions, commemorated on postcards and stereoscopic cards sold across the country.

In 1914, heavy rains caused the Los Angeles River to flood catastrophically. The flood destroyed the pigeon farm and reportedly killed or freed about half a million birds. The birds dispersed across the basin. The river flooded twice more in the 1930s, and to prevent further flooding its concrete channelization began in 1938. The pigeons are gone. The river is concrete. The flat riverbank land where the farm stood is now Rio de Los Angeles State Park, the restored wetlands where migratory birds nest in the shallows.

The Breadbasket: Bakeries, Butter, and the Dutch Windmill

Glassell Park developed after 1907, when the Glassell family began subdividing their holdings into residential lots and selling them to working-class families who needed housing close to the river-adjacent industries. The Pacific Electric Railway ran down the median of Eagle Rock Boulevard, connecting the neighborhood to the rest of the city. Craftsman bungalows climbed the hillsides. Modest commercial blocks formed along San Fernando Road and Verdugo Road. The neighborhood that took shape was, by design and by market, a place for people who worked with their hands.

Those industries included baking. Lincoln Heights and Glassell Park together became the breadbasket of Los Angeles — the German-American bakers who had established themselves in the Eastside in the 1870s and '80s had set a tradition of milling and baking that the region's flour deliveries by rail made logistically sensible. By the early 20th century, there were multiple bakeries and related food production facilities clustered around Glassell Park, and there are still bakeries operating on those same streets today.

The most extraordinary of them built the most extraordinary building. Theodore Van de Kamp and his brother-in-law Lawrence Frank had started Van de Kamp's Holland Dutch Bakeries in 1915 with an investment of $200 and a storefront at 236½ Spring Street downtown. Within a decade they had opened their first "Dutch windmill" bakery — a standalone store at Beverly and Western with a working blue windmill on the roof as a trademark — and the chain spread across the West Coast. By 1930, Van de Kamp's needed a proper headquarters and manufacturing facility. They chose Glassell Park, at 2930 Fletcher Drive, and hired New York architect J. Edwin Hopkins to design it.

What Hopkins built was and remains one of the most improbable buildings in Northeast Los Angeles: a full Dutch Renaissance Revival industrial bakery, with a brick façade, white-trimmed windows, steeply pitched cross-gable roofs with crow-stepped parapets, and arched wall dormers drawn directly from 16th-century Dutch farmhouse architecture — the only example of an industrial plant in the Dutch Colonial Revival style in Los Angeles. It sat beside a San Fernando Road rail overpass in a working-class neighborhood of modest bungalows like an apparition from Amsterdam. At its height, Van de Kamp's was baking bread, cakes, and pastries here that went to 320 stores stretching from California to Washington state.

The bakery closed in 1990 when Van de Kamps filed for bankruptcy. The building sat dormant for years while preservationists and community advocates fought to save it. Los Angeles City College eventually converted it into the Van de Kamp Innovation Center — a campus for workforce development and education. The Dutch façade was restored. It now houses LACC programs inside gabled roofs and crow-stepped parapets on Fletcher Drive. The windmill logo is gone. The building remains, designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 569, the most Dutch-looking structure between here and Pasadena.

The Cemetery and the Living

The Glassell family's final act in the neighborhood was to sell 62 acres of their land during the Great Depression to a developer who had recently purchased a small failing cemetery in Glendale and was trying to expand it. That developer was Hubert Eaton. The cemetery was Forest Lawn.

Forest Lawn Memorial Park — the elaborate, theme park-adjacent resting place of Michael Jackson, Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Nat King Cole, Carole Lombard, and hundreds of other Hollywood figures, with its reproductions of Michelangelo sculptures and its grounds divided into named areas including Babyland, Lullabyland, and The Court of Freedom — extends from its Glendale headquarters directly into Glassell Park. The sections with the most ecclesiastical-sounding names — The Great Mausoleum, The Haven of Peace, The Forest Lawn Labyrinth — are on Glassell Park land that Andrew Glassell's descendants sold for Depression-era cash.

This means that Glassell Park contains, within its 2.75 square miles, both a large part of one of the world's most famous cemeteries and some of the most active neighborhood commercial streets in Northeast Los Angeles. The living and the spectacularly dead coexist here in a way that is, when you think about it, characteristic of how Los Angeles manages its relationship with its own past.

Drew Street and the Garden

For decades through the late 20th century, the neighborhood's most troubled address was Drew Street — a name that Andrew Glassell had given to honor his grandson, and that became infamous as the stronghold of the Drew Street clique of the Avenues gang. The Avenues had been operating in Glassell Park since the gang's expansion through Northeast Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s. Drew Street was their densest concentration: a two-block stretch in the hills where the gang operated openly, where the apartment buildings were controlled by gang-affiliated landlords, where the violence was constant enough that residents on nearby streets had learned to live around it.

In 2008, following the killing of a grandfather in front of his two-year-old granddaughter in Cypress Park by a Drew Street gang member, 500 law enforcement officers staged a major raid on Drew Street. The Drew Street house — the central gang stronghold, reportedly containing secret compartments and booby traps — was demolished after the raid. The cleared lot became the Glassell Park Community Garden.

The garden is still there. It is one of the more quietly remarkable spaces in Northeast Los Angeles: a community vegetable plot with raised beds and a chain-link fence and a sign, growing on the ground where the neighborhood's most feared address used to be.

Glassell Land

In early 2013, a local artist installed large white letters spelling "GLASSELL LAND" on the vacant hills above the Glassell Park Recreation Center. The sign was a deliberate reference to "HOLLYWOODLAND" — the original text of the Hollywood Sign, built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a hillside development — which is itself a reference to the American habit of naming landscapes after the people who claimed them. Glassell Land. Named for a Confederate sympathizer who came west after the war, acquired rancho land through a courthouse auction, planted citrus orchards, built a Victorian mansion with a shooting gallery in the basement, founded the city of Orange, and died in 1901 leaving his name on streets, a neighborhood, and eventually a middle school.

The sign came down eventually. The name stayed.

The Neighborhood Now

Glassell Park today is working-class Latino at its core — approximately two-thirds Latino, heavily Mexican and Mexican American, with a significant Filipino community that has been here since the 1980s and constitutes roughly 17 percent of the neighborhood. The commercial streets along San Fernando Road and Verdugo Road carry the flavor of this: taco trucks, carnicerias, tortillerias, the kind of corner stores that know their regular customers by order. The hills above the commercial strip are full of Craftsman bungalows with views down into the river valley, some of them a century old, many of them carefully kept.

The gentrification wave that transformed Highland Park and Eagle Rock has reached Glassell Park more slowly and less completely. The Verdugo Bar — a beloved neighborhood dive with an excellent beer selection and a patio strung with lights — predates the neighborhood's "discovery" and helped define what the neighborhood could be before the investment arrived. Dunsmoor, a wood-fired American restaurant by chef Brian Dunsmoor that opened in the neighborhood to citywide attention, brought a new wave of notice to streets that hadn't been on anyone's dining map before. The Grant has become the kind of bar that people drive across the city to find.

But the bakeries are still there. The Dutch building is still on Fletcher Drive. The Verdugo Road trade corridor is still running the same alignment it has for two centuries. Forest Lawn's gates are still on the neighborhood's northern border. The river is still at the western edge, with the restored wetlands of Rio de Los Angeles State Park where the pigeon farm used to be.

And the Community Garden is still where Drew Street used to be, growing vegetables in soil that carries a complicated memory, the way all soil in this city does if you know what to look for.

Notable figures and landmarks: Jose Maria Verdugo (rancho), Andrew Glassell (neighborhood founder), William T. Glassell (Confederate submarine officer), General George S. Patton (great-nephew of Andrew), the Van de Kamp Bakery Building, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the Los Angeles Pigeon Farm, the Glassell Park Community Garden.