The birthplace of Los Angeles and its one-time commercial/social hub, housing dozens of historic buildings and monuments to the founders of LA

The Avila Adobe, part of the LA Plaza Historic District, is one of five historic homes I selected for a “Trail” guide I curated for Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles. Download the entire “Let’s Hit the Trail Kids!” guide for free here.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 3, 1972

As the legend goes: on September 4, 1781 a group of 44 men, women and children from 11 families set out from San Gabriel Mission Arcángel (see post 43) on a nine mile trek to the site that Father Juan Crespi had scouted a decade earlier, while accompanying Gaspar de Portolá on his expedition of the west coast. It was a diverse group. Some 26 had African ancestry; 16 were Native American or mestizos; only two were white, born in Spain or New Spain. They were all recruited from the Sinaloa and Sonora regions at the behest of military governor Felipe de Neve, who had received approval from the Spanish King to establish a secular colony in the area. 

+More about the settlement of LA @ LA Almanac website

The site now known as Los Angeles Plaza Historic District was the commercial and social center of Los Angeles life from about 1815 (when the original pueblo was rebuilt on higher ground, after being washed away by floods) through the end of the 19th century. There are so many vitally important structures and monuments within its bounds, it feels like an open-air museum. 

Here you’ll find the earliest remaining house in Los Angeles (the Avila Adobe, from 1818 – see videos above). The oldest church in Los Angeles, La Placita, dating back to 1814 and rebuilt using the remains of the original. The Merced Theatre (the city’s first) and a spectacular hotel built by the last Mexican governor Pío Pico, both dating from 1870. The oldest firehouse in LA, from 1884. Pelanconi House from the 1850s, the oldest surviving brick house in LA, once used as a winery and now home to La Golondrina Cafe, the first Mexican restaurant in LA. The Garnier Building, part of LA’s original Chinatown, which now poetically houses the Chinese American Museum. And that’s not even counting Olvera Street – which for all of its touristy excess, still feels like nowhere else in Los Angeles. 

As with so many sites connected to LA’s early history, the Plaza remains a contested site. We mustn’t forget that the original pueblo was built near the indigenous Tongva/Kizh village of Yaanga, many of its residents displaced or forced to labor on behalf of the settlers. In 2020, a group of indigenous activists toppled a statue of Junipero Serra on the eastern edge of the Plaza, to protest the historical injustices that he perpetrated against native peoples as architect of the California missions. 

+See the LA Times map of Tongva villages in the LA area

Even though this section of downtown is no longer a major commercial hub, it is still a significant gathering place. When I was there on a perfect Saturday afternoon, families gathered around the gazebo at the center of the plaza. Elderly folks cha-chaed under the trees. El Paseo Inn (one of the oldest bars in LA) was packed as visitors scarfed down fajitas and ginormous margaritas.

The Plaza represents so many things. On its grounds, LA history is wrought in brick and adobe, bronze statues and wooden crosses, the paint of a Siqueiros mural and the shade cast by 150-year-old grapevines growing at the Avila Adobe. Unlike so many historic sites in LA, the Plaza was both crucial for the development of LA, and still an important part of the fabric of this city, 240 years later. 

Recommended Reading

+See a wealth of early photos of the LA Plaza @ Water & Power Associates website

+Overview of the structures at El Pueblo de Los Angeles @ City of LA website