Olvera Street, Los Angeles: “A Street of Memory” 1937 Vericolor

Published on July 12, 2017

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“Vericolor production offering touristic view Olvera Street and the old Mexican quarter in Los Angeles, California.”

NEW VERSION with improved video & sound:

Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

Olvera Street is in the oldest part of Downtown Los Angeles, California, and is part of the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument. Many Latinos refer to it as “La Placita Olvera.” Since 1911 it was described as Sonora Town.

Having started as a short lane, Wine Street, it was extended and renamed in honor of Agustín Olvera, a prominent local judge, in 1877. There are 27 historic buildings lining Olvera Street, including the Avila Adobe, the Pelanconi House and the Sepulveda House. In 1930, it was converted to a colorful Mexican marketplace…

Los Angeles was founded in 1781 on a site southeast of Olvera Street near the Los Angeles River by a group of Spanish pobladores (settlers), consisting of 11 families — 44 men, women, and children, accompanied by a contingent of soldiers — who had set out from the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel to establish a secular pueblo along the banks of the Porciúncula River at the Indian village of Yang-na. The initial settlement was dubbed El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles… As the town grew, it eventually built its own parish church, which is today known as the “Old Plaza Church.” Unpredictable flooding forced settlers to move the town to higher ground. The town, complete with a church and rectangular plaza surrounded by house lots and planting fields, was placed in its current location in the early 19th century. Spanish colonial rule lasted until 1820. This period saw the first streets and adobe buildings of the town constructed. The town came under the control of newly independent Mexico in 1821. During this time of Mexican rule, which lasted until 1848, the Plaza area was the heart of Mexican community life in Los Angeles and center of an economy based upon cattle ranching and agriculture.

Hard times

For a time after the Mexican-American War and Gold Rush, the Plaza remained the center of a diverse town. The central street of the Plaza, Vine or Wine Street, was extended and had its name changed by City Council ordinance in 1877 to Olvera Street to honor Augustín Olvera, the first Superior Court Judge of Los Angeles County and long-time Olvera Street resident. In the 1880s, Los Angeles began quick expansion through a massive influx of Anglo and European settlers who arrived via the railroad. The old Plaza area became a forgotten remnant of the city’s roots, and the remaining adobe and brick buildings within the Plaza area fell into disrepair as the civic center of the city shifted to present-day Temple and Main Streets.

A good view of the street during this period is to be found in Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film The Kid, which featured a number of scenes in it, mostly on the west side a few doors north of the Pelanconi House. At the time of the film, years before its makeover by Christine Sterling, it was hardly considered to be a proper street, but rather just a dingy, dirty alley.

Its decline as the center of civic life led to its reclamation by diverse sectors of the city’s poor and disenfranchised. The Plaza served as a gateway for newly arrived immigrants, especially Mexicans and Italians. During the 1920s, the pace of Mexican immigration into the United States increased to about 500,000 per year. California became the prime destination for Mexican immigrants, with Los Angeles receiving the largest number of any city in the Southwest. As a result of this dramatic demographic increase, a resurgence of Mexican culture occurred in Los Angeles. It was within this social and political climate that Christine Sterling began her public campaign to “save” the old Francisco Avila Adobe from demolition and build up Olvera Street as a Disneyland-like center of Mexican romance and tourism.

Sterling’s efforts to rescue the Plaza-Olvera area began in 1926, when she discovered the deteriorated conditions of the area, and in particular the Avila Adobe, the oldest existing home in the city. After raising the issue of the Avila Adobe with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Sterling approached Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times with a plan to restore…

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