THE LORE OF HIGHLAND PARK

The first suburb. The Arroyo's child. The neighborhood that has been reinvented so many times it has started to look like a pattern.

Before the Grid

The land that became Highland Park belonged first to the Hahamog'na — a band of the Tongva people who settled along the Arroyo Seco from the confluence of the Los Angeles River all the way north through Elysian Valley, Highland Park, South Pasadena, and into the foothills of Altadena and Pasadena. The Arroyo Seco — "dry stream" in Spanish — was not always dry. In the rainy season it ran fast and cold out of the San Gabriel Mountains, carrying water through the canyon that the Hahamog'na understood as sacred and essential. They built their lives around it for thousands of years before the Spanish arrived.

After the founding of Los Angeles in 1781, the Corporal of the Guard at Mission San Gabriel — a man named Jose Maria Verdugo — was granted Rancho San Rafael: 36,403 acres of land that included the present-day neighborhoods of Highland Park, Glendale, and beyond. For generations the rancho was used for sheep and cattle grazing. In 1869, after a long drought crushed the Verdugo family financially, the entire rancho was auctioned off for $3,500 over an unpaid loan. The land passed into the hands of American speculators and developers who immediately began subdividing it for a city they were certain was coming.

They were right. Two railroad lines cut through the center of Highland Park in the 1880s, and the real estate boom followed immediately. In 1895, faced with difficulties accessing water and a need for police services, Highland Park was annexed to the city of Los Angeles — the first true expansion of the city beyond its original boundaries. The first suburb.

The Arroyo: Arts and Crafts in the Canyon

There is a quality of light in the Arroyo Seco that artists noticed from the beginning. The canyon runs north-south, the chaparral-covered hills rising on either side, the sycamore groves and eucalyptus catching the afternoon light in a way that didn't look like the rest of Southern California. At the turn of the 20th century, a movement formed around this landscape — a loose coalition of artists, architects, craftspeople, and intellectuals who came to the Arroyo communities and found in them an alternative to the industrial city sprawling around them. Historians have called it Arroyo Culture. Historian Kevin Starr called it "a collective designation now given to a loosely defined, scattered movement, many of whose protagonists lived, like Charles Fletcher Lummis, along the Arroyo Seco."

Lummis is the central figure. He walked into Los Angeles from Cincinnati in 1884 — literally walked, 143 days on foot, writing dispatches for the Los Angeles Times as he went — and eventually settled on two acres beside the Arroyo Seco in Highland Park, where he spent fifteen years building a house with his own hands. He called it El Alisal: "Place of the Sycamore Trees." The walls are river stone gathered from the Arroyo itself, mortared by Lummis and Isleta Indian laborers he had trained in carpentry. The floors are concrete. The ceilings are exposed timber. There is nothing like it anywhere else in Southern California — a stone house in a city of wood and stucco, built the way a 12th-century monk might have built one, by one obsessive man who wanted his shelter to mean something.

El Alisal was completed around 1910 and immediately became the social center of the Arroyo intellectual world. Lummis held parties he called "noises" — gatherings of artists, writers, anthropologists, musicians, and eccentrics that drew people from across the city and beyond. Theodore Roosevelt visited. Adolph Bandelier, the archaeologist and explorer, was a close friend. Lummis went on to found the Southwest Museum — the first museum in Los Angeles, still standing today at the top of its hill on Museum Drive — and to make wax cylinder recordings of regional Mexican and indigenous songs, preserving music that would otherwise have vanished. He was complicated: a Harvard-educated adventurer with romantic ideas about the Southwest that were, by modern standards, deeply paternalistic toward the Native peoples he professed to champion. But his impact on Highland Park's identity as a place of cultural seriousness is undeniable.

Occidental College moved to Highland Park in 1898, bringing an infusion of academic life that drew visits from presidents and turned the neighborhood into something genuinely rare for early Los Angeles: a place with intellectual ambitions. On Avenue 50, the first collegiate fine arts program in Southern California opened in 1901 under the USC College of Fine Arts — housed in a building designed by the English painter and educator William Lees Judson, who had come to the Arroyo and never left. That building, after a fire in 1911, was rebuilt into what became Judson Studios — a stained glass workshop that has been operating continuously on the same site ever since, now in its fifth generation of family ownership. It is the only institutional example of the Arts and Crafts style in Los Angeles, a National Register of Historic Places landmark, still making windows for churches and civic buildings across the country. Judson Studios, described in 1940 as "a medieval guild secluded from a hectic modern world," functions today in essentially the same way it did a century ago. You can visit.

The Arts and Crafts movement left its most lasting mark on the housing stock. The bungalows of Highland Park — California Craftsman, with their wide front porches, exposed rafter tails, natural wood trim, and river-stone chimneys — are the direct expression of this ethos: handmade, honest materials, design in service of the people who live in the house rather than the people who drive past it. Walking the residential streets north of York or east of Figueroa today, you are walking through the physical legacy of that movement. Many of the houses are more than a century old. Many of their details — the built-in bookshelves, the art glass panels, the sleeping porches — are still intact.

The First Freeway

On December 30, 1940, a ribbon was cut near Glendale and what is now the Arroyo Seco Parkway opened to traffic — the first freeway in the western United States. Six miles of divided highway connecting Highland Park to downtown Los Angeles in minutes. It was a technological triumph and a cultural pivot. The same canyon that had defined Highland Park's character — the Arroyo Seco, with its sycamores and stone and bohemian social world — was now bisected by concrete. The parkway runs directly through it, and you can still see, from the elevated sections, how close the road came to erasing the landscape it was built beside.

The freeway changed everything else too. It made the suburbs of the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys newly accessible, and the residents of Highland Park — the white middle class that had built its Victorian homes and Craftsman bungalows in the canyon — began to leave. White flight accelerated through the 1950s and '60s. Homes and storefronts along Figueroa and York that had been middle-class anchors sat vacant or were subdivided. By the mid-1960s, Highland Park had become a largely Latino neighborhood.

La Comunidad: The Mexican American Heart

Mexican and Central American immigrant families moved into Highland Park in the decades after World War II, drawn by the affordability, the accessibility to downtown jobs, and the community that was already forming. They moved into the bungalows and duplexes, opened panaderías and carnicerias and tortillerías on Figueroa and York, built churches and schools and mutual aid networks that would hold the neighborhood together through some of its hardest years.

Highland Park became one of the most important centers of Mexican American working-class life in Northeast Los Angeles. The culture that took root here was not a transplant — it was grown on these streets, out of specific conditions, out of families who had nowhere else to go and turned that constraint into something lasting. The Día de los Muertos altars. The murals painted on storefront walls along Figueroa. The quinceañera halls. The panaderías that opened at 5am. These weren't decorations — they were infrastructure.

The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and '70s produced some of its most significant art in Highland Park. In the mid-1970s, a cluster of Chicano arts organizations formed on North Figueroa Street within a quarter-square mile of each other: the Mechicano Art Center, the Centro de Arte Público, and Corazón Productions — an artist commune founded when painter Carlos Almaraz and his partner Patricia Parra moved from East LA and rented a house on Aldama Street. Almaraz would become one of the most important Chicano painters of the 20th century. The Centro de Arte Público, where members read from Marx's Manifesto once a week and hung pictures of Chairman Mao and Ho Chi Minh on the walls, produced exhibitions of work by Barbara Carrasco, Judithe Hernández, Leo Limon, John Valadez, Harry Gamboa, and Frank Romero — artists who were simultaneously building the visual language of the Chicano movement and the LA art world. Both buildings have since been designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments.

The murals these artists made — on the walls of Figueroa and York, in the parks and schoolyards of Northeast Los Angeles — are still there. Some are restored. Some are fading. They carry the theological and political weight of the movement that made them: Aztec imagery, portraits of César Chávez, scenes of labor and family and land. The walls of Highland Park have been a canvas for longer than most of the current residents have been alive.

The Avenues

The generation that grew up in Highland Park in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s also inherited the gang culture that had been spreading through Northeast Los Angeles since the 1960s. The Avenues — one of the oldest street gangs in Los Angeles, with roots going back to the 1920s when they formed as a social club for Latino youth protecting themselves from other violent groups — claimed Highland Park as their territory. By the 1980s, the Avenues had more than 800 members spread across Highland Park, Cypress Park, Glassell Park, and Eagle Rock, aligned with the broader Sureño network tied to the Mexican Mafia.

York Boulevard and Figueroa were, for a generation, streets where the fear of stray bullets was real. The LAPD's CRASH unit swept through in 1986 and made 33 arrests. In 1972, the LAPD Northeast Division had briefly arranged a truce between the Avenues and their rivals — one that didn't hold. The violence peaked in the late '80s and early '90s, consuming young men from families who had come to Highland Park because it was supposed to be safer than what they'd left. The neighborhood's reputation during those years became, in the national media, shorthand for danger, the Chicano community's rich cultural and civic history collapsed into a single word — gang — by newsrooms and police departments that found that story easier to tell than the real one.

What those narratives erased was the daily life of a functioning community: the families who stayed, the teachers at Franklin High School who taught gang members alongside everyone else, the activists who organized the Peace in the Northeast March, the artists whose work kept asserting that this neighborhood was more than its worst moments.

The Return of the Creatives

Highland Park has been through its cycle of reinvention before. The Arts and Crafts bohemians came in the 1890s, gave the neighborhood its architectural bones, and eventually moved on. The Latino community came in the 1960s, gave the neighborhood its heart, and is still here — though under enormous economic pressure. The third wave began around the late 1990s and accelerated sharply after 2009.

The Gold Line — now the A Line — opened its Northeast LA extension in 2003, connecting Highland Park to Pasadena to the north and downtown Los Angeles to the south. From the Highland Park station on Figueroa, the ride to Union Station takes about fifteen minutes. That connection mattered. Artists and musicians priced out of Silver Lake and Echo Park began arriving — drawn by the $200-a-month studio spaces on York, the century-old bungalows available at prices that still seemed possible, and the specific character of the neighborhood: the murals, the taquerias, the independent bookstores, the feeling that something genuine was still happening here that hadn't been sanitized yet.

In 2009, a coffee shop called Café de Leche opened on the corner of York Boulevard and Avenue 50. By many accounts, it was the first visible signal of what was coming. York & Ave 50 became what longtime residents call "ground zero for gentrification." Within a few years, the panaderías and mini-markets that had served the Latino community for decades had been replaced by natural wine bars, record stores, vintage shops, and restaurants. The knitted yarn wrapped around street poles was covering up the gang graffiti. By 2013, a writer driving down York could pull over and feel confused — the neighborhood she remembered was still there if you knew where to look, but on the surface, it had been replaced by something that looked like everywhere else that had been "discovered."

The displacement has been real and documented: Latino families and business owners pushed out by rent increases that had nothing to do with any improvement in their lives. And the argument that is hardest to answer is the one that says the neighborhood's Latino community had been asking for investment and safety and resources for decades, and when it finally came, it came in a form that priced them out of their own streets.

The neighborhood today is a palimpsest — the word historians use for a manuscript that has been scraped clean and written over, but where traces of earlier writing still show through. You can see it in a single block of Figueroa: the new wine bar next to the family-owned carnicería, the Craftsman bungalow behind the new stucco apartment building, the mural of an Aztec warrior on the wall of a building whose ground floor now sells $18 cocktails. The traces don't disappear. Highland Park keeps its previous layers even as the new ones accumulate.

The Bones

What makes Highland Park irreplaceable, whatever else changes, is the physical structure it inherited: the Arroyo Seco running cold in the rainy season through a canyon that the city's engineers channelized in the 1930s but couldn't fully tame, the bungalow courts and Craftsman houses on the residential streets, the Victorian row on Homer Street where eight grand 19th-century homes still stand at the end of a cul-de-sac like a secret kept from the 21st century, El Alisal still there beside the Arroyo with Lummis's river stones in its walls, Judson Studios still making stained glass in the building that was first an art school, the murals on the walls of Figueroa and York, the Gold Line stations, the Saturday morning markets, the smell of something frying from somewhere you can't quite locate.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway runs through the middle of all of it — the first freeway, the one that divided the canyon and enabled the exodus and made it possible to live in one place and work in another, which is to say the first freeway is also the metaphor. Every neighborhood in Los Angeles contains within it the story of how the city chose acceleration over rootedness, and how the people who stayed made something from the residue. Highland Park made more from its residue than most.

Notable past and present figures associated with Highland Park include Charles Fletcher Lummis, William Lees Judson, Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero, Leo Limon, John Valadez, Barbara Carrasco, Judithe Hernández, and Harry Gamboa.