Boyle Heights (Los Angeles, California)

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In 1876, the Southern Pacific Railroad came to the small town of Los Angeles (pop. est. 10,000). This event began a wave of speculation in Los Angeles real estate in anticipation of people and business coming to Los Angeles via the new railroad. A large area east of the Los Angeles River, that had been a ranch owned by a man named Andrew Boyle, was subdivided into tracts intended for sell as residential property to well-to-do families that, it was strongly believed by real estate speculators, were going to come in and settle in Los Angeles. The area was named Boyle Heights after the original American landowner. However, due to a variety of reasons, including the economic boom-bust cycles in the United States during that era and the easy availability of prime residential real estate elsewhere, Boyle Heights did not prove to be as attractive to potential residents as real estate developers and speculators had hoped.

With the construction of the sprawling Pacific Electric Interurban Rail System by Real Estate magnate Henry Huntington in the early 1900's and the development and popularization of the automobile soon after that, Boyle Heights quickly declined as a desirable residential area, despite it's proximity to the Los Angeles Central Business District. Other communities, such as Pasadena, Glendale, the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys, and West Los Angeles proved much more attractive to new Los Angeles area residents that kept coming to the region in endless numbers from other parts of the country in the coming decades.

By the early 1900s, Boyle Heights was relegated to a residential area for people excluded from living in other parts of the Los Angeles Area due to restrictive housing covenants and other reasons. Boyle Heights became a place of residence in Los Angeles for immigrant Jews, white Eastern Europeans and non-whites -- Japanese, Mexicans, Blacks; and clusters of Irish, etc.

The most prominent immigrant group in Boyle Heights during those years were Jews from Eastern Europe. By the 1930's, it has been estimated that 70,000 Jews, mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe, comprised 70% of the people living in Boyle Heights and represented the largest Jewish community in the western half of the United States. The Jewish influence from those years can still be found in Boyle Heights, mostly in the Shuls built during the 1920's that remain standing although no longer used for their original purpose.

Another large group was Russian Protestants (Molokans and Jumpers) fleeing from the Caucasus (1905-1912) who settled near the LA train station then moved east of the LA River to establish a ghetto known as "The Flats" that would later be redeveloped by the Federal Government during the 1940's into The Aliso Village - Pico Gardens Housing Project.


It must be mentioned that the public high school for Boyle Heights, Theodore Roosevelt High School, had an integrated, multi-ethnic student population with a very high academic achievement standard, from the time of it's establishment in the 1920's through the 1950's; which was noteworthy during an era of enforced racial segregation in public education in much of the United States.

In the years following World War II, with the Southern California economy entering its long term post-war boom, new opportunities opened and restrictions against minorities were gradually ended in the City of Los Angeles as well as the rest of Southern California as a whole. During the 1950's and 1960's, the Jews, Japanese and African Americans left Boyle Heights for other communities in the city and region.

In the 1960's and 1970's, Boyle Heights became overwelmingly Mexican and Mexican-American. It is now almost 100% Latino, consisting of Mexican immigrants with spanish being the primary language of the community.

www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/pase/bhproject/
www.lalc.k12.ca.us/access/change/histbh/
www.janm.org/exhibits/bh/
www.molokane.org/molokan/History/Boyle_Heights/