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THE LORE OF CYPRESS PARK

The first community on the Arroyo. The valley where Los Angeles was named. The neighborhood that lives between rivers and has always known how to survive a flood.

The Place Where Los Angeles Was Named

On August 2, 1769, the Portolà Expedition — the first recorded European journey overland through California — crossed the Arroyo Seco and camped in the valley at its confluence with the Los Angeles River. Father Juan Crespí, the expedition's diarist, wrote more than a thousand words about what he saw that day. It was the feast of Our Lady of the Angels of Porciuncula. He called the valley "a very lush, green valley." He described "a very full flowing, wide river," native grapevines and wild roses and sage in rich soils, grizzly bears, antelope, quail, and steelhead trout. The place seemed to him to define abundance. He named the river and the valley for the feast day: El Río y Valle de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de la Porciúncula.

That name — shortened almost immediately — became Los Angeles.

The Tongva people had been living along that confluence for thousands of years before Crespí arrived. It was Tongva territory: the Hahamog'na band, who settled the Arroyo Seco corridor from the river mouth to the foothills, had made this valley their home in a way that the expedition's diarist couldn't fully see in a single night's camp. The flat alluvial land where Cypress Park now sits — the valley floor between the two rivers — was among the most fertile and productive terrain in the basin: well-watered, sheltered by hills on all sides, close to everything that mattered.

After the Spanish founded the Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1781, the land became part of Rancho San Rafael, granted to Jose Maria Verdugo. After the American conquest and the slow collapse of the rancho system, the southern tip of the rancho passed through several hands — including Jessie D. Hunter, a captain in the Mormon Battalion during the Mexican-American War who had established the first kiln-fired brickyard in Los Angeles, took up farming, and died leaving land ripe for subdivision.

In 1882, the Hunter Tract was subdivided, and Cypress Park became the first of the Arroyo Seco communities to come into existence — three years before Highland Park, nine years before Eagle Rock. The oldest. The first.

The Valley Between Rivers

Cypress Park's geography is its most defining characteristic. It sits in a bowl — the alluvial floodplain created over millennia by the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco flowing together at the neighborhood's southern edge. Elysian Park rises to the southwest. Mount Washington climbs to the northeast. Elysian Hills press in from the north. The neighborhood's distinctive boot shape on the map — toe pointing north toward Mount Washington, boot body running along the river flats — is the direct product of the topography. The hills give it walls. The rivers give it floor. The 110 freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway — the first freeway in the western United States, opened in 1940 — cuts along the eastern edge, connecting Cypress Park to Pasadena to the north and downtown to the south in minutes.

This is less than 2.5 miles from downtown Los Angeles. On a clear day you can see the skyline from the hills above the neighborhood. And yet Cypress Park has always felt removed from the city's center of gravity — sheltered by its geography, bounded by its rivers, quieter than its proximity to downtown would suggest.

The housing stock reflects the neighborhood's origins as a working-class community built to house the laborers of the river-adjacent industries: railroads, foundries, brick kilns, the enormous Southern Pacific Taylor Yard that occupied the riverbank from 1911 until the mid-1980s. Craftsman bungalows from the 1910s and '20s. Small Victorian cottages. Mediterranean-style apartments from the 1930s. A few grander homes on the hills above. The architecture of people who worked with their hands and needed a house close to where they worked.

Taylor Yard and the River

For most of the 20th century, the western edge of Cypress Park was defined by Taylor Yard — a 247-acre Southern Pacific Railroad freight classification yard along the Los Angeles River that was one of the largest rail operations in Southern California. Established in 1911 on the site of J. Hartley Taylor's feed mill and hog farm, the yard grew through the mid-century into a central node of the freight network serving the entire Los Angeles region, a maze of rail lines and switching operations that divided the neighborhood from its own riverfront.

The yard closed in the mid-1980s, and the land sat brownfield for years — contaminated by a century of industrial use, too large and too expensive to develop easily, too close to the river to ignore. The cleanup and transformation took decades. A portion became Rio de Los Angeles State Park, opened on the riverbank in the 2000s: 40 acres of restored wetlands, native plants, soccer fields, a playground, and river access — one of only two California state recreation areas in Los Angeles County, and one of the city's most park-poor neighborhoods suddenly had something extraordinary at its edge.

The river itself, once entirely concrete-channeled, has been gradually softened here. The Glendale Narrows section just north of Cypress Park is one of the few stretches of the Los Angeles River where the concrete bottom was never poured — where the river still runs on a soft bed in the wet season, where birds nest in the shallows, where you can see something of what Father Crespí saw in 1769 if you know how to look for it.

La Comunidad: The Mexican American Foundation

Cypress Park became a majority Latino neighborhood through the same postwar transition that transformed most of Northeast Los Angeles: white flight after World War II, Mexican and Central American families moving in for affordability and proximity to the river-adjacent industrial jobs, the gradual deepening of roots into something permanent and irreplaceable.

The community that formed in Cypress Park through the 1960s, '70s, and '80s was working-class, deeply Mexican American, built on the same networks of mutual support and cultural continuity that defined barrio life across the Eastside. The Spanish-language storefront churches on Cypress Avenue. The taquerías and panaderías on San Fernando Road. The families who had been there for two and three generations, who knew the neighborhood the way you know a place you've never had reason to leave.

The Avenues gang — one of the oldest street gangs in Los Angeles, with territory spanning Highland Park, Cypress Park, Glassell Park, and Eagle Rock — maintained a presence here through the late 20th century. In September 1995, a three-year-old girl named Stephanie Kuhen was killed in Cypress Park when Avenues members opened fire on a car that had made a wrong turn onto a dead-end street. The murder generated national media attention and led to significant crackdowns on the gang in the region. The street where it happened had been nicknamed "Avenida Asesinos" — Street of Killers — by the gang members who controlled it. That night became a marker in the neighborhood's history, a before-and-after in the story of what Cypress Park was and what it was trying not to be.

Cafe NELA and the Punk Underground

In 2013, a former high school history teacher named Dave Travis took over a failing Mexican bar on Cypress Avenue — a place called New Tops Club, with rancheras on the jukebox and men in cowboy hats — and turned it into Cafe NELA. The name stood for Northeast Los Angeles. The programming was punk, hardcore, jazz, experimental, blues, metal — anything abrasive enough or interesting enough that it didn't have a home anywhere else in the neighborhood. Travis had been in the punk and hardcore scene since the 1980s and had a video archive of shows going back decades. He knew what the scene was and who it served.

What he built in six years was described by its regulars as "our CBGB" — the neighborhood's dive bar and underground music venue, the place where Latino youth from Cypress Park and Highland Park and Eagle Rock could see local bands play music that the newer bars and galleries of the gentrifying Eastside weren't interested in hosting. In communities across the Eastside, the punk scene had been dominated by mostly Latino youth since the late 1970s. It was a scene born out of the same economic margin that produced the barrio — faster, louder, less patient. Cafe NELA gave it a room.

Over nearly 1,100 shows in six years, the venue became a community institution — not just a music venue but a gathering place, a place where you could escape whatever was happening at home, a place where the neighborhood recognized itself in the noise. When Cafe NELA announced it was closing in 2019 — the space transitioning to what would become Permanent Records Roadhouse — the grief was genuine. "Cafe NELA is like one big family for the scene," said Jane Alvarado, a Cypress Park native and punk musician. "A lot of people came to shows there to escape whatever stuff they were dealing with at home."

Permanent Records Roadhouse opened in the same space on Cypress Avenue: bar, record store, and live venue in one, keeping the music alive in a different register. It inherited the spirit if not the rawness of what came before. The checkered floor, the red booths, the outdoor patio, the punk and garage and krautrock and soul on the shelves. It is now one of the most beloved venues in Northeast Los Angeles, drawing people from across the city and beyond. Cafe NELA was where the neighborhood held on. Permanent Records is what held next.

The Nickel Mansion and the Oldest Brick

At the corner of Isabel Street and Thorpe Avenue stands one of the most unexpected buildings in Northeast Los Angeles: the Nickel-Leong Mansion, a large Antebellum-style Greek Revival structure built in 1905 for a restaurateur named Max Nickel and later owned by the Leong family of Chinatown. It was designed by John C. Austin, the same architect who helped design Los Angeles City Hall, the Griffith Observatory, and the Arroyo Seco Bank Building. In a neighborhood of modest Craftsman bungalows and flat-roofed apartments, it rises like an apparition from another landscape entirely — white columns, wide porch, grand proportions — and sits quietly on the corner as if waiting for someone to notice it.

It is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 849.

The neighborhood also contains the Richard Henry Dana Branch Library — a former branch of the Los Angeles Public Library that is No. 47 on the National Register of Historic Places. Cypress Park accumulates this way: history layered so quietly that people who have lived there for decades may not know what is standing next to them.

The Neighborhood Now

Cypress Park today sits at the same inflection point as the rest of NELA — the natural wine bars and specialty roasters and relocated artists have arrived, gentrification is real, displacement of longtime Latino residents is real, and the community is navigating the same impossible tension between investment and erasure that defines this moment across all of Northeast Los Angeles.

Barra Santos, a Portuguese wine bar on Cypress Avenue, is Michelin Guide listed. Loquat Coffee, a few blocks away, roasts some of the finest coffee in the city. Loreto, near the river, draws diners from across Los Angeles for wood-fired Cal-Mex cooking on a romantic patio. These are genuinely excellent. And the carnicerías and the corner markets and the families who have been here since before anyone called this neighborhood "emerging" are also genuinely still here, if under pressure.

What Cypress Park has that most of its neighbors don't is the river. The confluence of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco — the place where Father Crespí camped on August 2, 1769, and wrote the first recorded words about this city — is at the neighborhood's southern tip. On certain days, particularly in winter when the water is high and the light is right, you can stand on the bank of the river and feel something of what was here before any of it: the lushness, the water, the birds, the hills on every side. Cypress Park keeps that connection to the ground of Los Angeles — to the literal ground — more honestly than almost any other neighborhood in the city.

The first community on the Arroyo. Still the first.

Notable figures and landmarks: Tongva Hahamog'na people, Gaspar de Portolà Expedition (1769), Jessie D. Hunter (founder), the Nickel-Leong Mansion, Rio de Los Angeles State Park, Cafe NELA, Permanent Records Roadhouse.

THE LORE OF LINCOLN HEIGHTS

The original East L.A. The Ellis Island of Los Angeles. The neighborhood that has held every wave of the city's immigrant history and is still holding.

Before the Suburb

The Tongva village of Yaangna — the largest known Tongva settlement in the Los Angeles Basin, located near what is now the Plaza area of downtown — was the primary settlement of the people who had lived along the Los Angeles River for thousands of years. Smaller satellite communities occupied the bluffs and river terraces throughout the basin. One such community sat on the high ground that would become Lincoln Heights, overlooking the river from the east.

Archaeological records identify Downey Park, at Albion and Avenue 17 in Lincoln Heights, as the site of another Tongva village — called Yaangna by some sources, though the overlap of names suggests the fluidity of Tongva settlement patterns rather than a single fixed location. The bluffs east of the river were good ground: elevated above the flood line, with views in every direction, close to the water but not in it.

The Spanish mission system, American conquest, and the redrawing of the land into American property patterns eliminated those settlements — formally and permanently. By the 1860s, the land east of the river had passed into the hands of Anglo-American speculators who saw the bluffs above the city as the obvious direction for the city's first expansion.

The First Suburb: Dr. Griffin's Homesteads for All

The man credited with founding Lincoln Heights was Dr. John Strother Griffin — an Army surgeon who had arrived in Los Angeles in 1847 alongside General Stephen Kearny to witness the American conquest of the Pueblo. Griffin's first sight of Los Angeles, according to his 1898 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, "whetted his desire to settle down after his adventurous army life and enjoy the sweets of California contentment." He purchased 2,000 acres east of downtown. His cattle "wore paths where Downey Avenue and Main Street now run, and his sheep browsed all over East Los Angeles and up on the hills beyond."

Working with his nephew Hancock M. Johnston, Griffin divided the pastures beside the river into uniform residential lots and began advertising them to the working and middle classes of a growing city. "Splendid Homesteads for All!" the advertisements read. In 1873, the subdivision was formalized. Lincoln Heights — then called simply East Los Angeles — became the first suburb of the city of Los Angeles. The first. Before Highland Park, before Eagle Rock, before Silver Lake. Before any of it.

Within a decade, the Los Angeles Conservancy would describe it as "the Ellis Island of Los Angeles" — a place where successive waves of immigrants arrived, settled, built lives, and eventually moved on to make room for the next wave. Anglo and Irish and English in the early years. Germans in the 1890s, many of whom worked as bakers — a fact still visible in the neighborhood's baking industry legacy. Yugoslavians and Italians in the early 1900s, when the area around Lincoln Park became a Little Sicily, complete with winemaking cellars in the basements of the small homes that lined the streets.

The neighborhood was known as East Los Angeles until 1917, when residents — led in part by Ethel Percy Andrus, the principal of Abraham Lincoln High School and the first female high school principal in the state of California — voted to rename it Lincoln Heights, after the school, in tribute to Abraham Lincoln. (Andrus later founded both the National Retired Teachers Association and the American Association of Retired Persons. She started the AARP. She lived in Lincoln Heights when she was becoming whoever she was going to be.) Eastlake Park, the neighborhood's crown jewel, was renamed Lincoln Park at the same time.

Eastlake Park: The Jewel of the City's Parks

Before it was Lincoln Park, it was Eastlake Park — and before it was Eastlake Park, it was a barren hill on the eastern edge of a small city that had no parks at all.

The park was developed in the late 1880s and early 1890s on land donated to the city, and it grew quickly into something extraordinary. Connected to downtown by two streetcar lines, it drew enormous crowds from across the city. A boathouse was built over the lake. A bandshell was added. By 1903, the park had become the crown jewel of the Los Angeles park system. "Sitting on the grassy banks of Eastlake and gazing about," a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that year, "it seems almost incredible that less than fourteen years ago this was a barren hill, with but one shrub on the fifty-six acres." On Sundays, up to 12,000 people came to the park for open-air concerts.

Then things got stranger. The Los Angeles Ostrich Farm opened at the park's edge in 1906. The Los Angeles Alligator Farm opened next door in 1907. These exotic menageries provided animal talent for the film studios that were establishing themselves in the neighborhood, and they became tourist attractions in their own right. In 1915, William Selig — the founder of Selig Polyscope Company, one of the pioneering film studios that had operated in Edendale and along the Eastside — opened the Selig Zoo on Mission Road across from the park, with a magnificent entrance designed by Italian sculptor Carlo Romanelli: massive stone arches flanked by imposing statues of lions and elephants. The zoo was ambitious beyond its means. Selig planned it as a full amusement park with carousels, a wave pool, a hotel, a theater. Only one carousel was ever built. Selig Polyscope went insolvent in 1918 as World War I cut its European revenues and the industry shifted to feature films it couldn't afford to make. The zoo changed hands repeatedly — Luna Park Zoo, California Zoological Gardens, Lincoln Amusement Park — and staggered through the Depression before finally closing around 1940. The stone entrance arches stood until the 1960s. The carousel, designated a Historic-Cultural Monument, burned in 1976. Decades later, a local historian found the weathered stone lions and elephants in a kind of circus graveyard somewhere in the Inland Empire.

The boathouse, built in 1912 and slated for demolition in the late 1960s, was saved by a community campaign led by actress Margo Albert and trade union activist Frank S. López. In 1970, they converted it into Plaza de la Raza — a cultural arts and education center for the predominantly Latino community of the Eastside. The timing was charged: the Chicano civil rights movement was in full force, the East LA Blowouts of 1968 had transformed the political landscape, and the community needed a place that was explicitly theirs. Plaza de la Raza became that place. It remains there today, in the old boathouse at the edge of Lincoln Park's lake, offering arts education and cultural programming to tens of thousands of people a year.

The Industrial Neighborhood: Beer, Bricks, and the Brewing District

Lincoln Heights was the industrial heart of early Los Angeles in a way that few Angelenos today recognize. The river and the rail lines running along its east bank made the neighborhood the first industrial corridor of the city — foundries, brick kilns, tile factories, printing plants, and eventually breweries.

The Los Angeles Brewing Company established itself at 1920 North Main Street in 1894, eventually building a 150-foot concrete smokestack that became a neighborhood landmark. The brewery operated through Prohibition — technically, by producing "near beer" and other non-alcoholic products — and exploded into full production the moment Prohibition ended in 1933. The Los Angeles Times reported that on the first day of legal beer sales, lines of trucks stretched for blocks from the North Main Street plant, loaded by 500 extra workers who labored through the night. The same building that is today the Brewery Art Colony — the largest live-and-work artists' colony in the world, 16 acres of converted warehouses and industrial lofts and a 1903 Edison Electric Steam Plant chimney — was once the brewery that slaked the thirst of an entire city.

The Lincoln Heights Jail, built in 1927 and designed in an Art Deco style by John Austin (who also designed City Hall, the Griffith Observatory, and the Nickel-Leong Mansion in Cypress Park), was built to hold 600 people. At its peak it held nearly 3,000. Among its residents at various points: Al Capone, who spent a night there for tax evasion, and most of the Chicanos arrested during the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. The boiler room of the jail was used as the filming location for the basement scenes in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, a year before the building was decommissioned. It is considered, by those who consider such things, the most haunted jail in Los Angeles.

Director Frank Capra — born Francesco Rosario Capra in Sicily, raised from age six in the immigrant tenements of Lincoln Heights — grew up on South 18th Avenue. He went on to make It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It's a Wonderful Life. The immigrant neighborhood that formed him gave him his material: the ordinary person resisting unjust power, the community that holds together against the odds. That is Lincoln Heights.

The Blowouts: Where the Chicano Movement Became Urban

By the 1960s, Lincoln Heights had become a majority Mexican American neighborhood — the children and grandchildren of the same working-class families who had been coming to the Eastside since the 1920s, alongside newer arrivals from Mexico and Central America. Lincoln High School, established as a grammar school and converted to a high school in 1913, had grown into the educational center of the community — the school that defined, for generations of Lincoln Heights families, what education meant and what it could offer.

What it was actually offering, by the late 1960s, was considerably less than it should have been. The schools of the Mexican barrio — Lincoln, Roosevelt, Garfield, Belmont, Wilson — were overcrowded, underfunded, staffed by teachers who were overworked and undertrained, and shaped by a curriculum that systematically erased Mexican American history and culture. Students were forbidden from speaking Spanish. They were steered toward vocational training rather than college. The message, delivered through every institutional interaction, was that their ambitions had a ceiling.

Sal Castro, a social studies teacher at Lincoln High, decided not to accept the ceiling. He had been attending Chicano Youth Leadership Conferences and organizing with his students, helping them understand their own history and their own power. On March 1, 1968, thousands of students at Lincoln High and six other Eastside schools walked out of their classrooms. The East L.A. Blowouts — the largest high school student protest in American history, and what historian Rudy Acuña called "the first major mass protest against racism undertaken by Mexican Americans in the history of the United States" — had begun.

The students' demands included bilingual and bicultural education, curriculum that acknowledged Mexican American history, the firing of racist teachers, desegregation, and greater diversity in school staffing. They carried signs: "School Not Prison." "We Demand Schools That Teach." "Viva La Raza." The Los Angeles Board of Education agreed publicly to their demands, then failed to implement any of them. Sal Castro and twelve other organizers — the East L.A. 13 — were indicted on felony conspiracy charges and faced a combined 66 years in prison. Castro was fired from his teaching job. The charges were eventually thrown out. He was reinstated. He continued teaching at Lincoln High for years afterward.

What the Blowouts did was transform the political identity of the Mexican American community in Los Angeles and across the Southwest — demonstrating that Chicanos would organize, mobilize, and refuse to accept institutional racism in silence. It was Lincoln Heights, and Lincoln High specifically, at the center of the moment that made the Chicano Movement urban.

The Murals of Broadway

North Broadway — the long commercial corridor that connects Lincoln Heights to Chinatown to the south and extends north through the neighborhood — has been a canvas for community expression since the Chicano movement began asserting that public walls belonged to the people who looked at them.

The most celebrated mural on Broadway is Chicano Time Trip, painted in 1977 by Los Dos Streetscapers — Wayne Healy and David Botello — on the wall of what was then the East West Bank building at Broadway and Daly. It is a sweeping chronological narrative of Mexican and Mexican American history: pre-Columbian civilization, colonization, revolution, immigration, and the barrio present. It is one of the great public murals of Los Angeles, and it has been restored multiple times by the artists who made it, asserting with each restoration that this history will not be painted over.

The murals of Lincoln Heights are not decorative. They are documentary. They are the community telling itself what it came from, who it is, and why it matters. Every block of North Broadway carries this conversation, in paint and tile and the names of businesses that have been here for decades.

The Brewery and the Layers

The Brewery Art Colony, at 2100 North Main Street, is the largest live-and-work artist colony in the world. Sixteen acres. Twenty-one former warehouses and industrial buildings, including the old Edison Steam Plant chimney that has been standing since 1903. More than 300 lofts and studios. The biannual Brewery Art Walk opens them all twice a year to the public — painters and sculptors and photographers and installation artists and experimental musicians, studio doors propped open, work on every wall, the industrial enormity of the space pressing in from every direction.

The Brewery is what Lincoln Heights did with its industrial ruins when the industry left. It is also, uncomplicatedly, a feature of the gentrification that has been gradually transforming the neighborhood since artists first moved into the converted lofts in the 1980s. This is not a simple story. The same affordability that drew artists drew their displacement of working-class Latino families who could no longer afford the rents those artists helped drive up. The Brewery is wonderful and its relationship to the neighborhood it occupies is complicated, in the same way that most good things in a city under constant economic pressure are wonderful and complicated.

The Neighborhood Now: The Ellis Island Keeps Its Doors Open

Lincoln Heights today is approximately two-thirds Latino and one-fifth Asian — the Vietnamese community that has been arriving since the 1980s is now the newest established layer, visible in the Kwan Ying Vietnamese Buddhist Temple on Broadway, in the pho restaurants and nail salons and grocery stores that line the commercial streets alongside the Mexican panaderías and the Chinese supermarkets that have been there since the neighborhood's Chinatown-adjacent years.

This is what the Ellis Island of Los Angeles looks like in the 21st century: not a metaphor but a living practice, the ongoing project of making room for whoever arrives next while trying to hold onto who was here before them. Longtime residents and neighborhood activists have been fighting displacement through organizing, neighborhood council work, and political pressure. The Chicano Time Trip mural is still on the wall on Broadway. Plaza de la Raza is still in the boathouse at Lincoln Park. Lanza Brothers Market, a neighborhood institution since 1926, is still selling sandwiches.

The Victorian homes on Manitou Avenue, Griffin Avenue, and Parkside Avenue — some built in the 1890s, still standing, preserved by the Historical Preservation Overlay Zone that covers part of the neighborhood — are among the oldest surviving domestic structures in the city. Dr. Griffin's "Splendid Homesteads for All" — the uniform lots he laid out beside the river in 1873 — are still there, occupied by people he could not have imagined, used for purposes he couldn't have predicted, still anchoring a neighborhood that has become and become again more times than any other in Los Angeles.

The first suburb. Still opening its doors.

Notable past and present figures: Tongva people, Dr. John Strother Griffin (founder), Frank Capra, Sal Castro, Ethel Percy Andrus (AARP founder), Al Capone (briefly), Los Dos Streetscapers (Wayne Healy and David Botello), Margo Albert, Frank S. López.