Dateline>City of Angels

Angeleno sightseers rejoice! Below you’ll find two more posts on the city’s heritage. The first, Fr. Crespi’s Beautiful Storm Drain, is a brand-new one dedicated to our mighty flood control channel, aka the “Los Angeles River.” The second, At Least You’ll Die Laughing, is another favorite from my former Website that recalls one of L.A.’s first (but now long-gone) movie studios…

This month in 1769 a small but intrepid band of Spanish explorers encamped in the L.A. basin near present-day Elysian Park. Led by Gaspar Portola and accompanied by Padre Juan Crespi, the contingent was charged with surveying the vast California wilderness between Mission San Diego and Monterey Bay. Their long trek met with many discoveries, but few apparently as enchanting as this one. Fr. Crespi’s journal reads:

“[W]e entered a very spacious valley, well grown with cottonwoods and alders, among which ran a beautiful river….which we named Porciuncula.”

Just a few days prior, the group had celebrated the Catholic feast of St. Francis Assisi’s Porciuncula, or “Little Portion,” an Italian chapel consecrated to Mary, Queen of Angels. Following custom, they named the river after the feast. And though he felt the jolts of three earthquakes during his stopover, Crespi effused that the locale offered a pleasant climate and “all the requisites for a large settlement.” Read more

It’s not the safest landmark to visit, but this lonely obelisk recalls a significant milestone in movie-making history. Here in Echo Park, along the 1700-1800 blocks of Glendale Blvd., once stood the five-acre Keystone Pictures Studio of Mack Sennett, silent filmdom’s King of Comedy.

Before the rise of Hollywood, the Echo Park/Silverlake area (then called Edendale) was the epicenter of the fledgling Los Angeles film industry. Focusing his vaudeville experience on the new medium, Sennett founded the studios with backing from Adam Kessel and Charles Bauman in 1912. He then churned out a steady stream of comedy shorts, entertaining movie-goers via the slapstick antics of the Keystone Kops, Fatty Arbuckle, Marie Dressler and eventually that “little tramp” Charlie Chaplin. The studio also launched the legendary careers of Gloria Swanson, Mabel Normand and Ben Turpin. Read more