The Italian Hall | museum, community centre / hall

 museum, community centre / hall

622 1/2 North Main Street
Los Angeles, CA
(213) 485-8432

italianhall.org

In 1900, the Los Angeles Italian community numbered approximately 2,000. The Plaza area, present-day Chinatown, the foothills of Elysian Park and the area around the Los Angeles State Historic Park (the “Cornfield”) comprised the city’s “little Italy.” The local Italian language newspaper, L’ Eco della Colonia (which later became L’Italo Americano, also still in existence today,) and religious institutions such as St. Peter’s Italian Church located on North Broadway sustained cultural loyalties.

The Plaza area remained the community’s center, and it was there that between 1907-08, a French woman named Marie Hammel hired the Pozzo Construction Company to build the Italian Hall on the corner of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and North Main Street. After its completion, Ms. Hammel leased the entire upper floor to Frank Arconti, secretary of La Societa Italiana de Mutua Beneficenza to serve as the Society’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 and weekend foot races that commenced at the Italian Hall and concluded in nearby Lincoln Heights.

Pete Pontrelli’s orchestra played at community dances in the Hall. Other Italian tenants of the building included Ettore Paggi, who operated a tavern on the ground floor, and the Arconti Hardware Store. Il Circolo Operaio Italiano (Italian Workers Club) was one of many emerging political groups from the multi-ethnic community that met regularly at the Hall.

In the early 1900s, free speech was illegal 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 1000 people. Often, the gatherings featured multiple speakers, each representing a different ethnic group, 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 1930, a tenant of the Italian Hall commissioned the acclaimed Mexican muralist, Davíd Alfaro Siqueiros to paint an 80’ x 18’ mural entitled, America Tropical, on the south second-story exterior wall of the Hall.

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 present El Pueblo Historical Monument."


Conservation of the América Tropical mural (1932): www.getty.edu/conservation/field_projects/siqueiros/