Boyle Heights, California

Boyle Heights constitutes an area on the southeastern edge of Los Angeles within the city's original boundaries. Inspired by the arrival of a railroad in Los Angeles and its transcontinental connection and [Page 70]prompted by potential profit resulting from subdivision, an early Los Angeles resident began efforts to develop a community on the eastside. Subsequently, the rail nexus generated a real estate and population “boom” that established Boyle Heights as a community within, yet somewhat separate from, the city of Los Angeles.

By 1920, its residents included natives from 42 nations, 48 states, and the territory of Hawaii, encompassing an eclectic socioeconomic neighborhood of peddlers, merchants, laborers, professionals, and capitalists. Contradicting experiences in other major U.S. cities with large immigrant populations, in Boyle Heights most residents lived in single-family homes with a negligible number of lodgers, roomers, or boarders. With few exceptions, children did not work and attended local, unsegregated schools whose pupils reflected a mosaic of ethnically and socially diverse backgrounds.

The physical location of Boyle Heights provided defined boundaries, initially and throughout the first several decades of its existence, which contributed to the neighborhood's uniqueness. Dated 1849, Los Angeles City Map No. 1 shows the “Plan de la Ciudad de Los Angeles” and depicts the area east of the Los Angeles River as totally barren, without indication of a single building or area of cultivation. One hundred years later, man-made commercial and residential structures and developments dotted the neighbor-hood's landscape, but its defined boundaries maintained the separateness of Boyle Heights from Los Angeles and surrounding communities.

Beginning late in the 19th century along its northern border, the neighborhood of Lincoln Park evolved; later still, builders constructed Ascot Speedway and the California Zoological Gardens just north of the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. Over time, the eastern boundary of Los Angeles remained unchanged and thus established the limits of the eastward expansion of Boyle Heights. The completion of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF) into Los Angeles in March 1886 established another barrier, as its lines followed the Los Angeles riverbed along the neighborhood's western edge. At the southern city limits of Los Angeles and boundary of Boyle Heights, the Southern Pacific (SP) and the Los Angeles and Salt Lake (LASL) Railroads followed an east-west route while a separate SP line followed a north-south direction. Dividing the two, the AT&SF covered a southeast-northwest trajectory into Whittier and beyond.

At its western and eastern edges, street angles changed markedly but uniformly along the river and Indiana Street, further establishing the neighborhood's boundaries. Also helping to maintain the community's distinct perimeters, the separate communities of Belvedere and the short-lived Shorb precinct developed beyond Indiana Street on the east. Presently, a grid of streets in Boyle Heights retains a noticeable bend at its edges.

Today, as before, the surrounding neighborhoods of downtown on the west, Lincoln Heights on the north, Belvedere on the east, and Vernon on the south serve to maintain a sense of separateness for residents of Boyle Heights. Adjoining the city and Boyle Heights at the southern boundary, the town of Vernon incorporated in 1905. Built on property that had originally belonged to the Lugo family, Vernon abutted the southeastern edge of the original boundaries of Los Angeles. It never became a heavily populated community, but it developed a concentration of industry with various types of manufacturing establishments, differentiating it from adjacent neighborhoods. The paucity of population and its industrialized build up, with lumberyards and packinghouses, more than anything else, contributed to the demarcation of Vernon from the neighboring community of Boyle Heights.

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