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.
All branches of LAPL are closed, indefinitely, of course. For just such emergencies I always keep one or two interesting-looking tomes on a handy shelf. Today I plucked a book I bought about a year ago, for two bucks, in the bargain cart of the Gift Shop at Mission San Fernando. I had no idea what it was but I liked the cover fabric. I just put it in a paper bag and didn’t look at it until now. It turns out to be about St. Junipero Serra, the apostle of the Californias, and his roots in his home island-province of Mallorca. San Fernando’s Mission library was/is famous; could “binning” it have been a mistake? Or did the Mission librarian just get stuck with all 950 copies cluttering up their shelves?
Patient Reader, I share with you, via the Viral Library, the thrill of first looking through Ingold’s “The House In Mallorca,” when, for the magnificence of the edition, I “felt like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez [really Balboa] when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
‘to men of goodwill everywhere’
Free bonus literature!
My God. A real book.
FOR FURTHER READING ON THE SERAPHIC FATHER-PRESIDENT:
76 were planted, less than 50 remain. Most that are left seem in good shape, and are in good fruit.
“Why be contented with one olive tree, When you could have a whole olive grove? Why be content with a grove, when you could have THE WORLD –??”
Wright and Forrest, “The Olive Tree” from KISMET
Around 1890, new Yankee cities were being carved out of the old Rancho ex-Mission San Fernando, and the smart money was clustered around the Southern Pacific right-of-way at the top of the Valley. The new rail cities became San Fernando and Chatsworth, and Sylmar and Pacoima. The big crop was olives; and many farmer-developers apparently made fortunes by pruning twigs off the old MIssion olive trees, rooting the cuttings, and re-planting the clones. In only a few years, the area had two or three of the biggest olive orchards History Has Ever Known.
The Franciscans’ Mission olives were planted for chrism, necessary for their rites. Olive, along with the Canary Island and Washingtonia palms, were introduced here for ritual purposes. And the sacred olives’ numerous progeny were eventually cured, branded, freighted down to LA in cans, then put on ships at the port of San Pedro. From there, they conquered the globe and Made Millions.
“In 1893, a group of Illinois businessmen purchased acres from the trustees of the Maclay Ranch east of the railroad tracks on San Fernando Road just south of Roxford Street and in 1894 began planting olives trees on up to 1,700 acres Experts were brought from France to supervise the work. Calling themselves the Los Angeles Olive Growers Association (in 1898 C.O. (Paul) Milltimore was the president and George L. Arnold the secretary), they built a packing plant and sold olives under the Tyler Olives label, later changing to the Sylmar Packing label. Sylmar’s olives became noted throughout the state for sweetness and purity. Chinese pickers were hired to harvest the crops, and up to 800 U.S. gallons (3,000 L) of olive oil a day were produced. The pickling plant was located on the corner of Roxford Street and San Fernando Road. By March 1898 about 200,000 trees had been planted,[15][19] and by 1906 the property had become the largest olive grove in the world. The first groves were planted with Mission, Nevadillo Blanco and Manzanillo olives.[15] Some Sevillano and Ascolano varieties were planted for extra-large fruit…
As far as I knew, and I’ve stomped all over the area, the Mission groves, and the commercial groves, had all been subdivided and developed. How great my joy, then, to find these while I was walking from the Orange Line Station at Chatsworth, seeking out the trailhead to the Old Stagecoach Road. These gifts of the Greeks line the last 1/2 mile of the quiet, horsey backstreet that, I now realize, is really the first “in-town” block of Chatsworth, the flat block after the Devil’s Slide, along the route of the ol’ Butterfield Stage.
I have no other information about Farmer Gray, but I do know, that the Butterfield family got into olive ranching in the Valley in a big way. Maybe Gray was an associate, or a tenant of theirs, or maybe his venture inspired the family to go in big on olives. At any rate, these tree were rooted over a hundred years ago, and are genetically identical — in fact, the living branches and cells of — the trees that the Franciscans and their Indian neophytes pruned and tended with their Own Hands. Pretty darn cool..especially to walk home under, after a hike to the the top of the Pass.
San Gabriel was founded in 1771 to reduce (sic) and evangelize the large populations of Tongva peoples scattered in numerous rancherias across what is today the LA Basin. Remember in particular Yangna, the big rancheria under El Aliso, the sycamore in the bed of the LA River, which became the eventual site of LA; most of Yangna’s Tongva were moved to San Gabriel.
Recall the founding myth of the settlement: how the wandering friars were set upon by a Tongva war-band, then in desperation, they laid out the image of the Virgin, which, beguiled and pacified the Indians enough to accept baptism. Painting-as-inspiration thus features in the mythos of the place, which gives these Stations of the Cross a deeper resonance.
Reliable information on these images is as scarce as facts about San Fernando’s rich interiors. The received story is that a remarkable prodigy at San Fernando, Juan, presumably one of the boys trained in the arts of painting there, executed these, as a kind of guild masterpiece, in the 1820s or 1830s. Then somebody, possibly Andres Pico, who moved his family into the Convento after secularization, took the stations to La Placita Church downtown, where they were displayed for a time, then (after 1850? When the Yankees came in, in 1847?), they were hidden in the attic and only discovered in 1892, at which point they went on to be exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Then they disappeared again, and suddenly reappear at Mission San Gabriel sometime in the mid-twentieth century, where they are hanging on the wall to this day, almost invisible in the sickly green Victorian light that surreally pervades the church.
The whole Tongva prodigy story has been called into question, and it seems very reasonable at least to suppose that more than one artistic hand is responsible for the sequence. A conjectural possibility for the provenance of these paintings is New Mexico. San Gabriel is, in fact, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, a valuable trade route to the Spanish settlements and missions there. Or a native artist or group of artists in what is now Southern Arizona, Tumacacori and Tubac, could have visited California, once or many times, then later gone home and done the artwork, and later still, presented them to San Gabriel. But there’s no evidence for that, either, and it is at least AS plausible that they came from San Fernando, where we know there was an intensive artistic program, and there were plenty of Tongva neophytes there who would have been very familiar with the sister mission just beyond the Verdugo Hills, where their relatives might be. San Fernando also had a more than adequate economic basis for producing fine decoration.
The features of some of the figures do appear to be Spanish, and other figures appear to be Native American. The Moorish style of the some of the buildings strongly resembles the unmistakably Moorish facade of Mission San Gabriel itself. People have read subversive intent in portraying both the cruel figures, and the sympathetic figures, as either Spanish or Indian. This approach scans the whole sequence for political meanings that may not even be there. But these are by far the most fascinating works of art in any California mission.
[Recall, Patient Reader, that the Franciscans introduced this form of worship for Holy Week observance into the greater church, as they also introduced the Nativity creche. Ritually enacting the Stations of the Cross carries much devotional import in the Franciscan evangel.]
The Governor’s Room, most comfortable room in Alta California
The “new” version of the Grape Harvest
Today the City of Los Angeles honors Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The weekend around Oct. 12 has traditionally been (somewhat weakly) observed as Columbus Day. The lack of interest in Columbus in the state comes despite the fact that California has a direct foundational line to the Spanish Crown of Castile of Queen Isabella, Alta California being the northernmost frontier province of the Vice-Regency (oh that word) of New Spain, which was, of course, founded by Columbus. The change in observance invites citizens, once a year, to engage with our native cultures, past and present. This can only deepen our historical understandings of Contact.
The first hoodie: the practical grey woolen robe of the Franciscan.
By the Laws of the Indies, California’s land belonged to the Indians. The Boston People, or the “Norte Americanos” who came here in the 1830s when the place was Mexico, derided the Mexicans for all the undeveloped land. Undeveloped, that is, except around the Missions. The Yankee writers’ self-serving condemnations of the Mexicans’ laziness failed to consider the chief political problem of Alta California — the Californios’ own racist tensions over the fact that the Indians were legally the masters of the domain, with the Franciscans in the place of regency. All the white people, whether from Spain or Mexico, or Boston, were until 1835, officially, in second place. And the Indians were vanishing, dwindling from epidemic disease and cultural disruption. The Mission was a demographic catastrophe for the Indians. But they died building the place.
The corredor of the Convento – Alta California’s shady, bustling lobby
The largest adobe complex in California
Adobes, bricks, tiles, oak timbers, lime whitewash, and wrought iron were all Indian work
The blood of Christ
Aguardiente still
Hollowed oak log is the bunghole for the crushing vat
Already in 1795, Father Lasuen started contemplating the architectural project of his massive adobe-only mission complex to be built at at San Fernando Rey de Espana. Securing new funds, via the College of San Fernando in Mexico City, Lasuen ordered up an immigration of artisans and craftspeople into California, who would teach the Indians to design and decorate churches according to the principles of Vitruvius and the highest symbolic teachings of Catholic art. These artists did an amazing job training Indian laborers, artisans, tile-makers, craftspeople and fine decorative artists, who brought their own vibrant traditions and perspectives to the process, especially the Chumash — whose rock paintings are Southern California’s most artistically developed. San Fernando became particularly well-known for its interior decorations (especially the Spanish dadoes, or wainscot painting), for its choir, for its fully-equipped smithy that turned out iron grille-work, for the tannery for saddlery and equipage, and of course, for the arts of the vine. Every inch of the place was shaped by native hands.
These are Chumash designs
Older paints displayed, not explained
BUT: the restoration history of San Fernando is strange, and fraught with bizarre ellipses. After so much intensive preservation effort by the Landmarks Club led by Charles Fletcher Lummis in the 1890s, this was followed on by more extensive renovations in the 1920s, coinciding with John Harrington’s efforts to interview the last Tataviam speakers and learn about California vernacular building techniques. Restoration culminated in a huge WPA project in 1938 that uncovered the mind-blowing original decorations inside the Convento, hidden under years of whitewash.
This tiny image of a 1938 watercolor, the original of which is sitting in a vault at the Smithsonian, is apparently all that is left, or available, of one of the most famous depictions of native life at San Fernando: the Deer Hunt. This door would be the inside of the door pictured in the center, above. The room with the staircase was once a prep kitchen and meat dressing room. There is nothing but whitewash on the lintel today. Why?
WPA artists were brought in, gorgeous watercolors were made, they performed pigmentation analysis and all the rest, and then the paintings were apparently just — covered up again. In the late 1960s, new decorations — better ones! — seem to have been painted by a local art professor, in the manner but not the image of the originals.
WPA sketch of Native American decoration in the Spanish version of early 19th c. Neoclassical. San Fernando Regency Style –?
Then the 1971 earthquake severely damaged the whole complex. In the 1980s it was all re-done again, apparently according to excellent scholarship. But it’s weird that the famous scenes, like the Grape Harvest, were repainted with different figures; so also the floral motifs and the scallop shell doorways. It is all lovely, but you’d never learn why the originals were deemed inauthentic, or objectionable to the Church, if that’s the reason they were covered up. Anyway, native art is sitting right there, somewhere, under all the other, beautiful, paint by modern white experts. Maybe someday we’ll be able to engage with the native work again. Still, it inspired this beautiful work.
The View sharpens its critique because the museum part of San Fernando, which is entirely run by the parish and is accountable to nobody except the Archbishop downtown, and Rome, is a sad joke, and a shameful violation of anthropology. There is only one room in the huge Convento given over to artifacts of Native American history, and almost nothing is properly curated. The most dismaying exhibit is the most prominent: high on the wall, there is what appears to be, at first glance, the God Tobet, an avatar of Chinigchinich. Then you look closer and your heart falls: it is a cigar-store Indian. ‘Nuff said. San Fernando Rey, go back to school.
NEXT IN PART 5 OF THE THEATRE OF CONVERSION: THE SAN GABRIEL STATIONS OF THE CROSS
The Valley Village View 