The City of the Queen of the Angels was founded on September 4, 1781 (as a “Pueblo”). Gov. Felipe de Neve selected the site himself. It was directly adjacent to the Tongva rancheria of Yangna, along the Rio de la Porciuncula (which thereby became the Rio de Los Angeles). A major landmark in that sandy stretch of bottomland was El Aliso, the huge and ancient sycamore tree on the bank. The tree was the center of Yangna, and its shade and shelter. (Roughly, where Union Station’s Restaurant stands today.)

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The Pobladores were skilled farmers, recruited from Sonora and Sinaloa in Mexico, and they walked here with their families and animals — first to San Gabriel Mission, which was the staging area, and administrative and supply base, for the settlement of the farm town. When all the emigrant parties had assembled on the morning of the 4th, the full party marched to the Yangna site, received their lots and farming tools, and a small civil ceremony was observed. Any family who stayed and farmed for four years would, and did, receive the deeds to their town lot and their arable fields. (Thus September, 1785, would mark the unofficial start of the game of “LA Wheel Estate.”)

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The plan had a central Plaza, and a guard house, a spot for the eventual Placita church, and about a dozen house lots, each of which was assigned an irrigated strip of field along the river, and a non-irrigated strip for pasture or dry farming. By the Spanish code, municipal lands surrounded the town for one square league, and the streets were to be set on a diagonal to the cardinal compass points — for reasons that we would call today “passive solar” and “windscaping.” (Would that the modern city had kept the Downtown plan; it diminishes the “heat island” effect. Set on the Spanish Axis, LA’s carbon footprint would have been greatly reduced, forever, for free. Ah well. We also shouldn’t have axed the Red Cars.)

The city and citizenry had to be moved (twice) to higher plateaus as the River proved unruly; the Queen of the Angels finally settled in place only in 1818, and by 1824 the new adobe Plaza Church, Nuestra Senora La Reina De Los Angeles was dedicated. Of course, it was the Tongva of Yangna who performed most of the labor of building the adobe pueblo, and its last siting pretty much did in the old village of Yangna. El Aliso was all that was left along the River; Aliso Street took its shade to ford the River. The old sycamore tree became the brand name and logo of the El Aliso Winery, California’s very first international trademark (1842).

Most of the Tongva had been received at the Mission as Gabrielenos, but a few stayed around the new village and participated in the “secular economy”, which was the whole reason for the town’s founding. These Indian Angelenos dug the vegetable beds and tended the vines and piled the adobe bricks, learning these trades and taking some kind of goods in exchange, certainly clothing. It wasn’t forced labor, exactly, though it surely was exploitation. Anyway by the time the third Plaza was laid out and the zanjas were graded, Yangna had ceased to exist. The non-Mission Indians did continue to live right down by the River where they always had — but now those huts were “slums”, and the Indians were assimilated into the Spanish-speaking, floating urban proletariat of the Angelenos.

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To honor the great and beautiful city that has grown out of the dusty pueblo, the View presents photos of the metropolis, garbed in but a few of her diverse raiments.

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