The Italian Presence in Early Los Angeles

Eusebio Chino

While Los Angeles is seldom the city that comes to mind when we think of Italian immigration to the United States, the Italian presence in the American West can actually be traced to the 17th century. Individuals such as Tyrolean Father Eusebio Chino played an instrumental role in the settlement of California through the mission system and demonstrated that Baja California was a peninsula, not an island as it was popularly believed. Explorations by Father Giovanni Crespi in the 1700s led to the European world’s discovery of the San Francisco Bay.  Crespi, who said the first Catholic Mass in Southern California, participated in the Portola Expedition, which led to the establishment of Los Angeles as a pueblo, or town, and colonial outpost of Spain.  He is also responsible for the naming of the Los Angeles River, El Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula. Permanent Italian settlement in Los Angeles began in 1827, after Spanish rule ended and California became part of Mexico. The city’s first Italian resident was Sardinian native Giovanni Leandri, who, upon arriving in Los Angeles, opened a store and built and adobe home on Calle de los Negros (present-day North Los Angeles Street.) Leandri married a Californio woman, Maria Francesca Uribe, and purchased Rancho Los Coyotes, a 48,000 acre ranch in what is today Buena Park. He played a vital role in the development of the agricultural industry in early Los Angeles

Map of Los Angeles-area ranchos including Rancho Los Coyotes

Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1822 and California became part of the Mexican Republic. Because of the cultural similarities between Italians and Mexicans, Italians were welcomed in the pueblo, and did not face the discrimination that characterized their experience elsewhere in the country. They intermarried frequently with Mexicans and French and many became prominent merchants and civic leaders. Father Blas Raho, pastor of the Plaza Church in 1857, and Frank Sabichi, President of the Los Angeles City Council in 1874, best exemplify how the hospitable social climate of Los Angeles allowed its Italian residents to achieve upward mobility.
The area around Olvera and North Main Streets comprised the core of the city’s earliest Italian enclave, and in the late 1800s, Italians owned or managed one-third of present El Pueblo Historical Monument (see www.elpueblo.lacity.org).   By 1869, Los Angeles had established itself as California’s wine center, producing four million gallons of wine annually. Until 1877, Olvera Street was known as Calle de la Vignas, or Vine Street, because of the prevalence of wine making in the area. In the Plaza neighborhood alone, there were five Italian-owned wineries.

An early Los Angeles map illustrating the original name of Olvera Street as “Calle de las Vignas.

Upon his arrival in 1853, Antonio Pelanconi associated himself with vintner Giuseppe Gazzo, who owned a winery on Calle de las Vignas. Pelanconi, who would become one of the pueblo’s most prominent Italian residents, purchased Gazzo’s winery (later to be known as the Pelanconi House) and lived there with his wife Isabel Ramirez and their four children.  Today, the Pelanconi House, built circa 1855, is the oldest extant brick building in Los Angeles and a popular Olvera Street restaurant. Other buildings testifying to the Italian presence on Olvera Street also remain.  The Old Winery, Italian-operated for nearly one-hundred years, is now El Paseo Restaurant and a municipal art gallery.

The Demateis Winery, once located between Alameda and Olvera Streets

-  The Avila Adobe, the oldest house in Los Angeles and a city-operated museum, was once a boarding house and restaurant called Hotel Italia Unita, operated by Secondo Guasti and Rosa Morelli. In 1883, Guasti founded the Italian Vineyard Company in Rancho Cucamonga, which at 5,000 acres, was the world’s largest vineyard at the time and the employer of tens of thousands of Italian and Mexican immigrants.
By the turn of the century, Little Italy had expanded to present-day Chinatown, with the largest concentration of Italians living along North Broadway (formerly Buenavista Street), North Spring (formerly San Fernando Street), on streets such as Castelar (now Hill Street) and Alpine, and in the foothills of Elysian Park. The area around the City Market and the neighborhood referred to by locals as “Dogtown,” also contained significant numbers of Italians, including Frank Capra, who sold newspapers as a child on North Main Street.  Drawn by the fishing industry, San Pedro was home to a large Italian population, hailing largely from the islands of Ischia and Sicily.

Italian fishermen mending their nets in San Pedro

The community possessed various social, cultural, religious and professional organizations, including La Società Italiana di Mutua Beneficenza, (Italian Mutual Benefit Society), which, founded in 1877, provided assistance to its members and their families in times of illness, disability or in the event of a member’s death.  The group met regularly on Olvera Street. Following Italy’s struggle for independence (1848-60), a second group formed, La Società Unione e Fratellanza Garibaldina, named for Guiseppe Garibaldi, Italy’s revolutionary hero. It offered medical care to sick and disabled members and charity to the needy. The two groups merged in 1916 to form La Società Garibaldina Di Mutua Beneficenza, an organization that exists to this day, and continues to serve the social and philanthropic needs of the community.
The Creation of a Community Center In 1900, La Colonia Italiana, as the Italian community was referred to, numbered approximately 2,000 and comprised roughly 1/10th of the city’s population. The community’s myriad of newspapers, including L’Italo Americano (in publication today) and ethnic churches, such as St. Peter’s Italian Catholic Church on North Broadway and Mary Star of the Sea in San Pedro helped sustain cultural loyalties.

A 1917 footrace that began at the Italian Hall and concluded in nearby Lincoln Heights

The Plaza area, where the earliest Italians settled, remained an important community center.  It was there that between 1907 and 1908, a French woman named Marie Hammel hired the Pozzo Construction Company to build the Italian Hall on the corner of present-day Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and North Main Street.  After its completion, Hammel leased the entire upper floor to Frank Arconti, secretary of La Societa Italiana de Mutua Beneficenza to serve as the group’s headquarters. The Italian Hall was a popular site for weddings, banquets, and other social and cultural events such as the vendemmia, or fall wine harvest. Pete Pontrelli, likened to the Italian Tommy Dorsey, played at dances in the Hall while charitable organizations frequently utilized the Hall as a site for fundraising activities. Other Italian tenants of the building included Ettore Paggi, who operated the city’s largest and most elegant saloon on the ground floor, and the Arconti Hardware Store. Il Circolo Operaio Italiano (Italian Workers Club) was one of many emerging political groups that met regularly at the Italian Hall.

Il Circolo Operaio Italiano, one of the groups that met regularly in the Italian Hall

In the early 1900s, free speech was restricted in Los Angeles, being permitted only on a speaker’s rostrum placed in the Plaza.  In the years that followed, the Italian Hall hosted internationally-known figures such as Emma Goldman and the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores-Magón  who organized rallies at the Hall that drew up to 800 people. Often, the gatherings featured multiple speakers of various ethnic groups, who addressed the audience in their native language. One such rally was disrupted by the Los Angeles Police Department’s notorious “Red Squad” and resulted in bloodshed. In 1932, a tenant of the Italian Hall commissioned the acclaimed Mexican muralist, Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros to paint an 18’ x 82’ mural entitled, America Tropical, on the south second-story exterior wall of the Hall.  Whitewashed because of imagery deemed controversial, the City of Los Angeles and the Getty Conservation Institute are currently preserving the mural and creating an interpretive center dedicated to Siqueiros, his life and work.

The Flores Magon Brothers

In the 1930s, the Italian community, now numbering 30,000, outgrew the building, and ceased to use the Hall as a community center. However, Italians remained tenants of the Hall and an integral part of the Plaza area. Little Italy continued to expand into Lincoln Heights, which, along with San Pedro, comprised the largest Italian enclaves in the city.  Other pockets of Italians could be found in Eagle Rock, the San Gabriel Valley and Los Feliz.

The War Years
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, 600,000 non-citizen Italians nationwide were branded “enemy aliens,” required to register at their local post offices and carry identity cards. Italians residing in prohibited zones of Los Angeles and other parts of California received evacuation notices. Enemy aliens were subject to an 8PM to 6AM curfew, searches of their residences and businesses, confiscation of property including boats, cameras, flashlights and radios, and were barred from travel outside of a five-mile radius of their home. Aliens deemed “dangerous” were arrested; some were sent to internment camps. The wartime violation of Italian civil liberties is referred to as Una Storia Segreta, which in Italians means, “the secret history.”

Alien registration in Los Angeles, 1942

While often best known for their contributions to Hollywood, the influence of Italians reached far beyond the silver screen. Italians can be credited for the growth of California as an agricultural state and the introduction of broccoli, artichokes and

Rodia’s Watts Towers

bell peppers to the American diet. The financial prowess of banker Joseph Sartori fueled Los Angeles’ economic development.  Numerous Los Angeles landmarks, including the Biltmore Hotel and the Watts Towers are linked to Italians.  Between 1921 to 1954, Italian immigrant Sabato “Simon” Rodia built seventeen interconnected towers, the tallest of which stands over 99 feet tall, in Watts, a South Los Angeles Community. Possessing no formal architectural training, working alone, Rodia constructed his folk-art masterpiece out of recycled objects including porcelain tile, bed frames, bottles, Malibu pottery and sea shells. Mother Frances Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants and first United States Citizen to be canonized a saint, established orphanages and schools in Los Angeles and provided child care and medical services to the city’s poor. John Fante, the quintessential Los Angeles writer and inspiration to the Beat Generation, found inspiration for many of his famous works including Ask the Dusk while living in Bunker Hill. Until his death in 1996, world-famous author and artist Leo Politi could be found steps away from the Italian Hall, painting the children of Los Angeles as he had done for more than half a century. Councilman John Ferraro’s (1924-2001) thirty-five-year tenure on the Los Angeles City Council is the longest of any member.

The Museum facility

The Museum Project
In 1990, the Italian community mobilized to preserve the Italian Hall and develop the facility into a museum.
After raising more than a million dollars through grants from the State of California, the City of Los Angeles, the Getty Foundation and through generous donations from the Italian community, the Italian Hall was painstakingly renovated and returned to its original splendor.
Today, the community waits eagerly for the opening of the Italian American Museum.