Los Angeles California — Retro Vintage History

What's with the 44? That is how many people founded Los Angeles. On September 4, 1781, forty-four settlers the Spanish called los pobladores, “the townspeople,” finished a journey of more than a thousand miles from the Mexican provinces of Sonora and Sinaloa and laid out an adobe farming village on the river. They were one of the most diverse founding parties in early America: of the 44, most were of African, Native, and mixed ancestry, and only two were of fully European descent. The second-largest city in the United States started as a village of forty-four — and their families are still here.

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The pobladores did not arrive on empty land. The Tongva people had lived in the basin for centuries, and the village of Yaanga stood near the chosen site; the pueblo was laid out on ground that was already home. Under the Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, the eleven founding families built their town beside the Porciúncula — the Los Angeles River — raising crops to supply the nearby presidios and missions, and drawing water through an open ditch, the Zanja Madre, that served the town for a century. A flood washed the first riverside settlement away around 1815, and the town was rebuilt a little higher, at the Old Plaza that anchors El Pueblo to this day.

The city's oldest nickname is older than the United States' hold on California. The pueblo's full name was El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles — the Town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels — given for a Marian feast day kept by the Franciscans, who had named the river for it twelve years before the settlers arrived. Over two centuries the town outgrew the long Spanish name, but the “Angels” stayed. Los Angeles has been the City of Angels since 1781, and everything that came later simply borrowed it.

The village grew through the eras. Mexican independence reached Alta California in 1821, opening the rancho years, when cattle hides moved through the port and land was measured in leagues rather than lots. Los Angeles was incorporated as an American city on April 4, 1850, the year California joined the Union, with a population of about sixteen hundred. Cattle gave way to vineyards — the city was California's first wine region — then to citrus, then to oil, and the pueblo spread across a coastal plain ringed by the Santa Monica, San Gabriel, and Santa Ana mountains.

The founding block survived all of it. El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument still holds the Old Plaza, the Plaza Church that Angelenos call La Placita, and the Avila Adobe of 1818 — the oldest standing house in the city. Olvera Street, the lane beside it, was a service alley headed for demolition until a preservation campaign reopened it in 1930 as a Mexican marketplace; it has been one ever since. A short walk away, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, and Olvera Street sit within a few blocks of one another, which is about as honest a summary of the city as any map can give.

What grew around that block is a city built on arrival. Waves of newcomers — from Mexico, from China and Japan, from the American South and Midwest, from Korea, Armenia, Central America and beyond — each added a quarter of the map and a shelf of the pantry — a french dip downtown, taco trucks and birria after midnight, ramen in Little Tokyo, Korean barbecue west of it. The result is a metropolis measured in neighborhoods rather than a downtown: Boyle Heights and Highland Park on the east side, Leimert Park to the south, San Pedro at the harbor, Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks over the hill in the Valley. Mountains stand on three sides and the Pacific on the fourth, palms line the boulevards, and a river runs through the middle of it that most people forget is there. Angelenos navigate all of it by freeway, and they put a definite article in front of every one — the 405, the 110, the 10 — a habit no other American city shares. In late spring the coast disappears under a grey overcast they call June gloom, and it burns off by afternoon.

What's with Anna May Wong? One of those arrival stories produced a film pioneer. She was born in Los Angeles in 1905, the daughter of a laundryman on North Figueroa Street, and grew up between her family's business and the city's old Chinatown. She talked her way onto film sets as a teenager and by the mid-1920s was the first Chinese American movie star — then spent a career pushing against the narrow parts the studios offered her, leaving for London and Berlin in 1928 to find better ones and returning as an international name. In 1951 she became the first Asian American to lead a United States television series. In 2022 the United States Mint honored her on a quarter in the American Women Quarters Program, the first Asian American to appear on U.S. currency.

Our Los Angeles retro logo carries California's grizzly bear and lone star — the emblem of the old California Republic — set over “1850,” the year of statehood. Rendered black-and-white with the worn look of a vintage crate label or a roadside sign, it is rugged and authentic rather than glossy. The bear and star bridge the city's two stories: the adobe pueblo on the river and the state it helped build, a fitting mark for heritage worn rather than hung on a wall.

Today Los Angeles is a city of millions, but its oldest streets still trace four square leagues laid out around a plaza in 1781. Our Los Angeles designs gather that founding story — the City of Angels, the 1781 pueblo, and Los Pobladores — and pair it with vintage Southern California styling: sunshine, palms, mountains meeting the coast. From a 1781 adobe pueblo to the City of Angels — wear a little of Los Angeles's real beginning, not its billboard.

Los Angeles, California — Travel Guide

Visiting Los Angeles Today

Beyond the freeways and the postcards, the oldest part of Los Angeles is small, walkable, and free — the founding pueblo is still standing at the center of the city, a few blocks from City Hall. Around it the metropolis spreads across a coastal plain from the mountains to the Pacific, best met one neighborhood at a time rather than all at once.

El Pueblo, the Plaza & the Founding Block

For visitors looking for things to do in Los Angeles, California:

• Walk El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument — the Old Plaza, the Plaza Church, and the founding block of the city.
• Step inside the Avila Adobe of 1818, the oldest standing house in Los Angeles, on Olvera Street.
• Browse Olvera Street itself, the Mexican marketplace reopened in 1930 beside the Plaza.
• Find the Los Pobladores plaque near the Plaza, which names all forty-four founding settlers.
• Cross into Little Tokyo and Chinatown, both within a short walk of the founding block.
• Follow the Los Angeles River — the Porciúncula — along the restored stretches north of downtown.
• Ride to the top of Angels Flight, the narrow-gauge funicular that has climbed Bunker Hill since 1901.
• Drive or hike into the Santa Monica Mountains for the mountains-meet-coast view the city is built around.
• Spend an afternoon on the beaches and bluffs of the Pacific coastline at the city's western edge.
• (If you have time…) the Bradbury Building's 1893 atrium of open ironwork and daylight, two blocks from the Plaza and free to step into from the lobby.

Why People Visit Los Angeles

Travelers come for the climate, the coast, and the culture, but the quietest surprise is the history: a two-hundred-and-forty-year-old pueblo tucked into the middle of a modern metropolis. History and everyday life sit side by side here in a way few American cities can match, and the founding block asks nothing but a walk.

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Kindred Cities

Welcome, friends from Nagoya (ようこそ) and Busan (환영합니다), from Bordeaux (bienvenue), and from Los Angeles's many other sister cities across Germany, Italy and Canada.

Los Angeles gathers the world, and its oldest friendships show it. Nagoya, a sister since 1959, was among the very first such ties any American city made — fitting for the city of Little Tokyo; Busan answers from Korea, mirror to the largest Koreatown outside Korea itself. Bordeaux and Berlin add wine and film; Ischia and Vancouver round out a roster as varied as LA's own neighbourhoods.

Nagoya has been Los Angeles's sister since 1959 — one of the first sister-city bonds in the country, born of the postwar push to turn former enemies into friends.

Come from any of them and Los Angeles already speaks your language: a Little Tokyo and a Koreatown, a Thai Town and a dozen more, where half the planet's cooking, cinema and music meet under the same forgiving sun. Come and visit us soon.

When you plan the trip, Discover Los Angeles — the city's official tourism bureau — is the place to start.

Where you’re from. Where you love. Where you explored. Where you belong.

For deeper reading on the Los Angeles, California history described here — the Tongva “Yaanga” village, the 1781 founding of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles under Governor Felipe de Neve, Los Pobladores and their multiethnic heritage, the City of Angels name, the Zanja Madre and the rebuilding at the Old Plaza, the Avila Adobe and the 1930 reopening of Olvera Street, the Mexican and American eras, and the actor Anna May Wong — it may be useful to consult (1) the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, (2) the Los Angeles Public Library California and local-history collections, (3) the California State Library and the California Historical Society, (4) the Los Angeles City Archives and Records Management Division, and (5) the Los Angeles City Historical Society. For travel and visitor information, it may be useful to contact (1) the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, (2) Visit California, and (3) the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.