Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Mission San Gabriel is the Mother of Los Angeles, and its cemeterio is one of America’s most iconic and historic cemeteries.
Memento mori is the message, and the purpose, of this cemetery. This ain’t Forest Lawn!
The Pueblo of LA was founded (1781) out of El Mision, where the pobladores gathered after long treks up from Mexico. Supplies, services, and soldiers from the mission guard kept the infant settlement going, as did the Franciscan fathers who often had to make the 10 mile trek in a careta, sometimes toting a bell as well, to offer mass. (This would have been in one of the willow-post and tule-thatch versions of Our Lady Queen of the Angels — the fine adobe La Placita wasn’t built until 1818, giving the Angelenos a real church — officially, an “assistencia” of the Mission — of their own.)
The old burial grounds of La Placita, now gracefully restored to the California Floristic Province.
Though La Placita had its own burial grounds, the grand Mission remained the center of Southern California civilization for generations. Many scions of the local families were born there, offspring of the Spanish soldiers, and many chose to be buried there, too. Headstone-hunting here, one expects to spot Angeleno names. But it is overwhelming to see stone after stone, a lithic “Who’s Who” of the Californios.
Refugio Martinez de Temple
Olivas; some Verdugoes
Yorba, more Verdugoes, Asufina, Lopez, and a couple of Nietoes in back.
The bell tower collapsed in an earthquake in 1812. It makes a picturesque burial chapel. The bench honors Eulalia Perez de Guillen, long-serving mayordomo — housekeeper — at the Mission. The Mission’s resources were rich, its visitors were international, and Eulalia set a legendary table. If California Cuisine has a mother, it is Eulalia. RIP.
This place held — holds — sacred power for the Californios, and for us modern Californians, their heirs upon the land that holds their bones. Say a prayer this All Hallow E’en for the Indian-Spanish-Mexican-African-Anglo-Americans of San Gabriel, whose cultural encounter, em-bodied here, was the dynamic force that built this state. Requiescat in pace.
The pipers of the LAPD tuning up before the funeral of Albert Torres. Torres was a career Park Ranger who died Friday at age 67. He suffered a heart attack while inspecting for sparks in the San Fernando Valley during the awful Saddleridge Fire. The View was profoundly moved to hear of Ranger Torres’s great love of California’s wild lands, his commitment to educating the public, and his long devotion to service. It was a privilege for me to hear his colleagues rehearsing his final honors, Amazing Grace echoing across the glen.
The Valley Village View began posting around Halloween, three years ago. The first entry took the theme “Days of The Dead” and explored LA’s early pioneer cemeteries and memorials. This year the View indulges morbid curiosity by visiting the patriotic-themed Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills. Nobody gets out of this post alive.
“The first Forest Lawn, in Glendale, was founded in 1906 by…Dr. Hubert Eaton, a firm believer in a joyous life after death. He believed that most cemeteries were “unsightly, depressing stoneyards,” and pledged to create one that would reflect his optimistic beliefs and be “As Unlike Other Cemeteries As Sunshine Is Unlike Darkness.” He envisioned Forest Lawn to be “A Great Park Devoid Of Misshapen Monuments And Other Signs Of Earthly Death, But Filled With Towering Trees, Sweeping Lawns, Splashing Fountains, Beautiful Statuary, Cheerful Flowers, Noble Memorial Architecture With Interiors Full Of Light And Color, And Redolent Of The World’s Best History And Romances.”
— Wikipedia’s blurb on Forest Lawn’s history
“Last Chance for Hollywood Regency”
Opened in 1952, this was the second branch of what became, thereby, the world’s first branded funeral parlor chain. “One call does it all” goes the slogan, the ultimate in key-pad convenience for the booked-up bereaved. Flowers, mortuary, casket, crematory, grassy knoll, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, all on-site, you takes yo’ pick. The idea was genius.
The chic aesthetic revolution of flat headstones was birthed by cost-cutting: one man riding one power-mower could finish a whole section in a day.
It occurs to the visitor that, founded where it was, and when it was, and decorated the way it is, and contiguous with the LA Equestrian Center and the bridle paths of Griffith Park as it happens to be, Forest Lawn is best explained as LA’s Hollywood Regency boneyard.
The Loved Ones lie on a sloping terrace of the Hollywood Hills, just east of the Cahuenga Pass, overlooking the LA River (“overlooking” meaning you won’t see it). The land for the memorial park — it’s NOT a cemetery — was once a rich pasturage of the Rancho Providencia. In 1911 “Uncle Carl” Laemmle bought it as a movie ranch for Universal Pictures, the genesis of what would become Universal City. Just across the River in Burbank is the Warner Bros. Studio, and the Walt Disney Studio. It’s next door to Mt. Sinai, the Jewish cemetery. So, location, location location.
The Court of Liberty mosaic
The branch opened at the height of a very hot war in Korea, and a very Cold War against Stalin, whose death that year rattled everybody.The Democrats were finally out; but the Russians had the bomb; America’s government and its civic religion both got hot-wired by anti-Communists like Joseph McCarthy, and, er, Dr. Hubert Eaton. Because just then, millions of people from the East, of all social classes and all religious denominations, flooded into Southern California to re-invent their lives, and then drop dead. Forest Lawn gave these socially displaced cadavers a traditional American churchyard-and civic-square setting out here on “the Coast.” The Founder understood that since nobody in California has Mayflower ancestors, that means everybody does, or can seem to have had.
Charles Ball, sculptor
You Know Who
That kind of casually elitist, or democratic, socially slippy sleight-of-hand is the soul of Hollywood Regency. Forest Lawn is pure fudge, where anybody from anywhere can stake a claim — for eternity — to America’s storied heroes and civic ideals, portrayed in Venetian glass mosaics.
Mommy, why is Henry Clay scowling at me?
Many commentators have rolled their eyes at Forest Lawn’s kitschy and helium-filled platitudes conflating God and Freedom, inscribed on exhibits and plaques and statues everywhere. These appear from a distance to have sacred and important messages, but if one actually turns aside from mourning, or headstone-hunting, to engage with the installations, some pack a sentimental wallop, but some seem mere blurbs. Click-bait for Patient Reader: Puzzle out the following inscriptions.
The top panel makes no sense
(Pssst…he’s actually buried in Philadelphia)
So the theme is not American history, per se, but American historicity. Its appeal would seem to be to folks who love the mythos of America, but don’t actually know, or care to know, too much about it. Thus it has been safely popular with the socially-insecure movie colony, and of course it is in Hollywood’s own backyard, highly visible and accessible, especially for the horsey set of the Valley. But as the Industry’s Baby Boom generation passes, so, probably, will Forest Lawn’s cachet. I suspect most young Hollywood types will gasp at the mosaic of Lincoln Freeing the Slaves, and opt instead for the ash-sprinkling off Mt. Kilimanjaro.
The Marshall Family plot
“Sit on it”
“Tennis in the morning, poker in the evening, racing in the afternoon.” That’s Hollywood Regency, baby.
That doesn’t mean the cemetery isn’t popular. The huge number of Korean, Chinese, Armenian and Persian-language gravestones around the Court of Liberty suggests that a plot in Forest Lawn has become a node of successful assimilation for striving immigrants, and a haven for religious dissenters and refugees from some of the world’s most oppressive regimes. Seeing them does get one thinking hard about the meanings of American freedom. The people buried here, after all, have voted with their corpses. May they rest in peace in the land of green hills and golden sunshine. We’re lucky to be here, all of us, every one.
Click below for a fascinatingly bizarre website honoring “The Founder,” written up by Charles Disney (a cousin of Walt).
It doesn’t spell the thrill of first-nighting, but an October hike by Pacoima Creek offers a paint-box of California fall colors. We do have seasons here, and they can be dramatic, but like most Easterners, I had to learn to appreciate these dry but diverse and teeming landscapes. It took me years to see “all that brown” as surging with life-forms that are perfectly fit for their eco-system (Alluvial Fan Foothill Chaparral, I think, classifies this habitat.)
Today the valley floor is streaked with rust-red buckwheat, slowly ripening to burnished orange-brown. The hills are brown and tan and olive and sage. The bunch grasses glow green-gold against the gray dust, and the broom is tipped with yellow and puffing out white. The huge papery leaves of the sycamores are just beginning to blaze yellow. Enjoy the View!
“A woman preaching is like a dog walking upon its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
— Dr. Samuel Johnson
Above: Holograms demonstrate the innovative stagecraft that made Sister’s preaching famous, or notorious.
Everyone called Aimee Sister
In 1918, the famous evangelist unpacked her megaphone in Los Angeles and never left. She had such success here with Pentecostal revivals that, by 1924 she had built a revolutionary 5,000-seat megaphone-shaped (and radio broadcast-friendly) auditorium on the rim of Echo Park. It was the very beginning of the Golden Age of Radio, and her ministry would play a huge part in bringing listeners to the new medium; people actually bought radios to hear her evangel.
Already since 1922, while the massive Temple was a-building, Aimee had been living on the site in a swank early-Hollywood Regency Parsonage. She had architect E.F. Leicht (Culver Hotel, Pasadena Playhouse) finish her Parsonage first so that she and her manager-mother Minnie could have the home comforts while they built up their Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Aimee was as visionary and dreamy and involved, and as fussy and publicity-minded, about her private living space as her friends the movie stars were: she made sure her boudoir had THE view of the glistening fountain plashing in Echo Park Lake. As with the Temple, the house is “megaphone shaped” — the front makes a long graceful bow, a trope of “Regency” style.
The Byzantine dome, with paint made from crushed abalone shells.
Mrs. MacPherson took a lot of heat during her lifetime, and afterwards, for hypocrisy: that is, for preaching while personally “going Hollywood.” Much of the criticism can be chalked up to old-fashioned sexism; how dare this attractive woman, incidentally funny, vivacious, warm, sophisticated, and draped head-to-toe in clingy bias-cut-satin-sequin robes, proclaim the Gospel of Christ? She must be a harlot. Aimee didn’t have 5,000 seats, but the one she had was a honey. (Honi soit qui mal y pense, says the View.)
Aimee was a charismatic woman who acted like a woman during the 1930s, and that was threatening as well as titillating. But Aimee was no grifter and no hypocrite. The Foursquare Church fed hundreds of thousands of meals to Forgotten Men and Women, three times a day, all through the Depression, no questions asked. She preached a middle-of-the-road Methodist gospel, only love and joy and forgiveness, no brimstone. And she ministered equally to all races, although she was finally forced by the City to minister to the Black and Mexican (i.e., Communist) sinners in areas away from the white sinners in Echo Park. Aimee always had bands playing, and choirs singing. There were blankets available during the wet California winters. Few Americans during the Depression — in Hollywood, in the Church, or in government — organized ANYTHING remotely close to this scale, to actually help and encourage starving persons.
The Parsonage allows a self-guided tour, with many interesting exhibits. Aimee’s private personality and her enthusiastic public spirit are admirably presented. The Church is to be commended for preserving this important site for Los Angeles history.
The motto: res non verba, deeds not words.
Though they’ve lost their radio empire, the Foursquare Church is going strong at the restored Angelus Temple, with weekly services in the whole Pentecost of languages that make up the modern-day Metropolis of the Queen of the Angels.
The Valley Village View 