Tag Archives: El Aliso

The Golden Globes

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In the Golden Year, Aldous Huxley novelized the experience of being driven over Cahuenga Pass and down into the heart of the San Fernando Valley:

“Below them lay a great tawny plain, chequered with patches of green and dotted with white houses. On its further side, fifteen or twenty miles away, ranges of pinkish mountains fretted the horizon. “Whats this?” Jeremy asked. “The San Fernando Valley,” answered the chauffeur. He pointed his finger into the middle distance. “That’s where Groucho Marx has his place! Yes, sir.”

At the bottom of the hill, the car turned left along a wide road that ran, a ribbon of concrete and suburban buildings, through the plain [Ventura Blvd.]. The chauffeur put on speed; sign succeeded sign with bewildering rapidity — BLOCK LONG HOT DOGS and BUY YOUR DREAM HOME NOW! And behind the signs the mathematically planted rows of apricot and walnut trees flicked past [NoHo, Studio City, Sherman Oaks] — a succession of glimpsed perspectives preceded and followed every time by fan-like approaches and retirements.

Dark green and gold, enormous orange orchards maneuvered, each a mile-square regiment glittering in the sun. Far off, the mountains traced their un-interpretable graph of boom and slump. “Tarzana!” said the chauffeur, startlingly; and there, sure enough, was the name suspended in white letters across the road. Meanwhile the mountains on the northern edge of the Valley were approaching, and, slanting in from the west, another range was looming up to the left. The orange groves gave place for a few miles to fields of alfalfa and dry and dusty grass. then returned again to groves, more luxuriant than ever.“

— Aldous Huxley, After Many A Summer Dies The Swan, 1939

“The Citrus Belt complex of peoples, institutions and relationships has no parallel in rural life in America and nothing quite like it exists elsewhere in California. It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own.”

— Carey McWillians, Southern California: An Island On The Land, 1942.

“For the orange, as Charles Fletcher Lummis pointed out, is not only a fruit but a romance. The orange tree is the living symbol of richness, luxury and elegance. With its rich black-green shade, its evergreen foliage, and its romantic fragrance, it is the millionaire of all the trees in America, the “golden apple’ of the fabled Garden of the Hesperides. The aristocrat of the orchards, it has, by natural affinity, drawn to it the rich and the well-born, creating a unique type of urban-rural aristocracy. There is no crop in the whole range of American agriculture the growing of which confers quite the same status that is associated with ownership of an orange grove…to own an orange grove in Southern California is to live on the real gold coast of American agriculture.”

— Carey McWilliams

The last big grove of Valencia oranges in the Valley is this one, on the campus of Cal Sate University Northridge. Planted in 1940, it was already there when San Fernando State College opened in and around it, in 1952. The town of “Northridge” was originally named “Zelzah.” But in the early 20th century, Valencia orange farmers looking to make fortunes wanted to be on the right kind of land at the right elevation with the right soil, at the northern edge of the Valley. So to lure wealthy East Coast settlers to put in groves, the town changed its name to “Northridge.”

  • Rancho Los Encinos State Park maintains a small but lovely grove of Valencias, the orange that is LA’s pride.

Few other American cities can boast that they are the native soil of a major agricultural crop. Los Angeles is the mother of the Valencia orange, and pioneer immigrant William Wolfskill was the father. A mountain man and fur trapper who settled in Taos in 1821, Wolfskill became a naturalized Mexican citizen, which meant he could own land. He arrived in LA in 1831, along the Santa Fe Trail. He passed through San Gabriel Mission; there he ate at Eulalia’s sumptuous table, talked with the curious Padres, and first laid eyes on an orange grove. These were the first oranges in California, planted in 1804 by the homesick Franciscans. Ten miles later, Wolfskill forded the muddy Rio de Los Angeles. It may have been a flash of vision and entrepreneurial inspiration, but he grasped that the lush river bottom lapping the edge of the sun-drenched adobe pueblo was the Garden of Eden, that here fruit of all kinds could be produced in abundance, and that there might be a world market for it. He settled in LA, and eventually bought Louis Vignes’s famous El Aliso Vineyards, which had been California’s original agribusiness. [Vignes had founded his winery under the shade of the mighty sycamore tree, El Aliso, that for generations sheltered the Tongva rancheria of Yang-na.]

  • Those tracks would come to cover the orchards.

During and after the Yankee conquest, cultivating all kinds of crops, Wolfskill worked to spin the Franciscans’ abandoned orange trees into California gold. He turned the sandy flats east of the Plaza into California’s first commercial agricultural and horticultural laboratory. [Today, the nursery site is covered by Union Station’s sprawl of parking lots, trackbeds and platforms.] Using the Mission stock, selecting and cross-breeding with other, probably Asian strains, he created the perfect orange for Southern California’s foggy coastal valleys and cool, well-watered plains. Wolfskill’s career as an agribusiness tycoon put Southern California at the center of world commerce. As a bottom-line matter, consider that the Southern Pacific Railroad based its decision to come to Los Angeles on the economic potential of horticulture and produce freighting; and when they did, they laid the tracks and parked the depot adjacent to the orchard’s front gate for economy of shipping. [Somewhere in all this, probably when the depot was built, Yang-na’s sacred old El Aliso sycamore came down.] Wolfskill later developed groves south of LA around Santa Ana, laying the foundation for what became Orange County.

“Wolfskill was highly influential in the development of California’s agricultural industry in the 19th century, establishing an expanded viticulture and becoming the largest wine producer in the region. One of the wealthiest men of his time, he expanded his holdings, running sheep and cultivating oranges, lemons and other crops. He is credited with establishing the state’s citrus industry and developing the Valencia orange. It became the most popular juice orange in the United States and was the origin of the name of Valencia, California.”

— Wikipedia article on Wolfskill

“‘Of all the trees,” wrote Charles Fletcher Lummis,”that man has corseted to uniform symmetry and fattened for his use, none is more beautiful and none more grateful than the orange.’ It has certainly been the gold nugget of Southern California. Not only has it attracted fully as many people to California as did the discovery of gold, but since 1903 the annual value of the orange crop has vastly exceeded the value of gold produced. With an average annual income of one thousand dollars an acre, it is not surprising that the orange should be a sacred tree in California.”

— Carey McWilliams, writing of 1942 dollars
The big groves are gone forever, but the mystique of Los Angeles still includes the promise of a backyard juice tree. The struggling screenwriter of myth still has only to throw on his or her bathrobe each morning, and reach out the kitchen window, to squeeze a golden orb of sunny vitamins into a breakfast glass. Whether or not that glass also contains vodka, depends on the screenwriter.

A Depressive’s Tour of Downtown — El Pueblo; Yangna

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[huff, puff] Thanks for keeping up… Looks like our weather is cooperating, with lots of lovely gloom. Okay, here we are coming into the oldest part of LA, El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles, the Town of the Queen of the Angels. The town site has migrated three times, up and down the LA River bank, which used to be near here, a lush, broad, meandering green ribbon. Underneath this blacktop, lie the finest soils and most productive farmland in the world.

We’ll get closer, don’t worry.

It’s tough to imagine today, with prosperous modern civilization all around us, that this plateau was once a sleepy village of tule-thatched domed huts, full of hunters and gatherers, a place called Yangna.

The white church is Our Lady Queen of the Angels, built 1818-24. For years it served the mounted dons and donas, and footsore tired and poor of Los Angeles in the Franciscan tradition. Today that noble service is in the generous hands of the Cathedral, just back there, up Aliso Street…er, the 101.

  • Still through the cloven skies they come, on peaceful wings unfurled; and still their heavenly music floats, o’er all the weary world.

Twin stumps of frontage road straddling the freeway, one called Arcadia and one called Aliso, is what remains of Aliso Street, which was the in-town name of El Camino San Gabriel, aka El Camino Real, the road into (and out of) The Angels. Now Aliso Street is the 101. Since it was chopped down by the railroads, we can’t really follow this road down to the site of the street’s former namesake: El Aliso, the massive sycamore tree that loomed over the road. It lowered over travelers’s horses wading the river at the ford, over the nodding ostrich plumes on the helmets of Cmdr. Stockton’s troops as they rode in, and for centuries, its branches reached out over the little domed huts of the Tongva, the only shade for miles in this (usually) oppressively sunny plateau.

The tall sandstone building is Patsouras Plaza, the h.q. of Metro. They received billions in financing to build subways — and spent it building this skyscraper instead! Metro bigwigs then spent ten years making phone calls from their corner offices, asking city, state and federal officials for more billions to build the actual tracks, now that they could oversee them. The handsome brick block is the Brunswick block, built to house the first modern drug store in LA. Angelenos have been mad for modern drugs ever since!

This parking lot on Arcadia Street was put up when the fabulous Baker Block was razed, to put up this parking lot. See the VVV blog entry on Dona Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker. Its absence, or negative space as the architects call it, lets us View two other equally important buildings, the two handsome white Italianate structures rising on Main Street beyond. These are, left, Pico House, where Jules Herder was the chef (1870); and right, the Merced Theatre, the first professional playhouse in Southern California (1876). Both became: burlesque house/bawdy house, Chinese rooming house, opium den, flophouse, and now empty, closed-off, hollowed-out state monument. But you can see them, now the rest of the city is leveled.

Follow me to the right; we’re heading south, now, toward the new city that the Yankees built. You won’t believe your eyes! We just have to get over there somehow. Ready — GO!

Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!

La Vina Madre at Olvera Street

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The arbor in the courtyard of the Avila Adobe. Francisco Avila himself may have planted the vines in 1818.

The grape vines that clamber over Olvera Street (until 1877, “Calle de las Vinas”, or “Street of the Vines”) are both picturesque and historic. Few celebrate downtown Los Angeles as the spot where California’s wine industry first took root, but it was. The three 150 year-old stocks, one at Pelanconi House (now the fabulous “La Golondrina”) and two in the courtyard of the Avila Adobe, are survivors or “the Old Mission Vine” that was bred bred here in Alta California by the Franciscans, and serve as stock for so much of the world’s great vineyards. Here’s Wikipedia’s version of the story of Monsieur Vignes, known locally as “Don Luis del Aliso,” a Frenchman who was one of LA’s most illustrious early citizens.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1831, Jean-Louis Vignes bought 104 acres (0.42 km2) of land located between the original Pueblo and the banks of the Los Angeles River. He planted a vineyard and started preparing to make wine. He named his property El Aliso after the centuries-old sycamore  tree found near the entrance. The grapes available at the time, of the Mission variety, were brought to Alta California by the Franciscan Brothers at the end of the 18th century. They grew well and yielded large quantities of wine, but Jean-Louis Vignes was not satisfied with the results. Therefore, he decided to import better vines from Bordeaux, Cabernet Franc andSauvignon blanc. The vines transited around Cape Horn. To preserve their roots during the long trip, they were inserted in moss and potato slices. Vignes became the first Californio who grew quality vines, and the first who aged his wines. The common practice at the time was to drink the wine as soon as it was fermented. The exact date of his first vintage is unknown. However, it was probably before 1837, because in 1857 he ran an advertisement claiming that some of his wines were 20 years old.[14] The wood for the barrels came from land Vignes owned in the San Bernardino Mountains.
In 1840, Jean-Louis Vignes made the first recorded shipment of California wine. The Los Angeles market was too small for his production, and he loaded a shipment on the Monsoon, bound for Northern California. By 1842, he made regular shipments to Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco. By 1849, El Aliso, was the most extensive vineyard in California. Vignes owned over 40,000 vines and produced 150,000 bottles, or 1000 barrels, per year.

As a prominent citizen of Los Angeles, Jean-Louis Vignes met and entertained such well known men as General William Tecumseh Sherman, Thomas Larkin, William Heath Davis and Thomas ap Catesby Jones. His wine was drunk all over California and samples were sent to President Tyler in Washington, D.C. and to France.
He was quite successful in agriculture. In 1834, he brought a few orange trees from Mission San Gabriel, and planted the first orange grove in Los Angeles. In 1851, he wrote that his two orange groves produced between 5000 and 6000 oranges per season. He also grew 400 peach trees, as well as apricots, pears, apples, figs, and walnuts. In 1855, Jean-Louis Vignes sold El Aliso to his nephews Pierre Sainsevain and Jean-Louis Sainsevain for $40,000, the largest sum of money ever paid for real estate in California at the time.

— Wikipedia entry on vintner Jean-Louis Vignes

It should be added, that the old sycamore tree “El Aliso” that Vignes took as his corporate brand, was the same landmark “El Aliso”, that ancient sycamore, huge and spreading on the bank of the River, which shaded and fostered the Tongva village of Yangna for centuries. Thus, long after the Indians had been absorbed and displaced in the Pueblo, their venerated home-tree became California’s first industrial trademark brand. Talk about “cultural appropriation.”

Here’s a 2015 Los Angeles Times article on the remarkable genetics of these vines:

https://www.latimes.com/food/drinks/la-fo-0919-pueblo-20150919-story.html