Lost Hills and Wandering Cemeteries: The History of Land Beneath L.A.
Illustrations by Vera Valentine
“Elemental L.A.” is an exploration of an Angeleno “sense of place” using the four classical elements — air, earth, water, and fire — as guides.
I am standing…in a part of the yard where the ground refuses the insistent demands of order. It swells with the unruly and the tropical. A region of the backyard that asserts the authority of the indigenous, a place where the ground refuses to be manicured. There is a bird's nest, perhaps, and vines with mice, hedges of red-and-yellow hibiscus thrashed by latania.Kate Braverman, "Squandering the Blue"
Dirt
Dig a shaft six feet deep anywhere in Los Angeles County that isn't the side of an arroyo or a mountain crest. Climb in. What do you see? If you've dug in your own backyard, you might see a layer of "human-altered and human-transported soil." Developers relocated whole landscapes in making Los Angeles, dredging up muck from wetland, pushing dirt downslope to terrace a hillside. Or you might see three feet of native soil (more sometimes) and below, older layers in bands of colors and textures.
Surface soil is burrowed by gophers, insects and earthworms. It's alive with nematodes, fungi and mood altering Mycobacterium vaccae actively decomposing organic detritus. Beneath, the pace slows. Not much has changed since the Los Angeles River last emptied into Santa Monica Bay. Dig deeper and your shaft peers into the distant past of a lagoon, a dune-lined shore, a river channel, a debris fan, a meadow. Dirt has a history.
Los Angeles County has nearly 200 soil types depending on location and what manipulation the ground has endured. Soils are grouped into series. San Emigdio is one. Palmview, Grommet, Abaft at the beach and Windfetch above, Azuvina, Buzzpeak are others. Soils touched by development are Dapplegray and Counterfeit.
Urbanized Los Angeles conceals what it stands on. "Sealed soil" underlies the built landscape that covers nearly half the city and nearly as much of the county. There's nowhere for fallen jacaranda blossoms to decompose in "sealed soil" and nothing to sustain its living part. Nowhere for rain to filter into groundwater; nowhere to go except, as the stenciled warnings at storm drains say, "to the ocean."
The 11% of the city that remains "bare soil" is too often salted with lead, cadmium and arsenic, detritus of industrial Los Angeles and the freeway silt lofted into the air, to be laid down on nearby backyards, layer on poisoned layer.
Petroleum
With even more digging, you might strike oil. In some places, it actually oozes from the ground, although as tar or pitch (brea in Spanish). By 1900, a band of oil fields from Brea Canyon in the Puente Hills to Rancho La Brea fueled Los Angeles. The City Oil Field ran from the foot of Chavez Ravine to Hoover Street, where wooden derricks loomed over suburban bungalows. In Long Beach, the derricks rose over Sunnyside Cemetery on the slope of Signal Hill. By 1925, oil was being pumped from wells at Huntington Beach and in Santa Fe Springs, Whittier, Montebello, Torrance and Beverly Hills. Real estate ads sold the dream of owning a house with an oil well in the backyard.
Pump jacks, nodding like giant hobby horses, are still at work in Los Angeles, Inglewood and elsewhere. Magali Sanchez-Hall, who lives in the Latinx and working-class community of Wilmington among working oil wells and a refinery, is used to the coughs, the rashes and the asthma that afflict her neighbors and her own family. "We don't often look at the environment we're in and think the chemicals we're breathing are the cause."
Half-a million Angelenos live within walking distance of an active well. A thousand abandoned ones — some uncapped, some leaking methane and toxic gasses — lie just beneath the soil in neighborhoods from Ladera Heights to Echo Park.
Los Angeles had once been the equivalent of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. Oil is under our skin.
Memory as a Blessing
In a city settled by footloose people, even the dead are forced to wander. The first Catholic, Jewish and Protestant cemeteries of Los Angeles were uprooted and their graves relocated by 1920, mostly beyond the city limits. The dead were segregated after their exile. Catholics, Jews, Serbians, Russian Molokans and Chinese had separate resting places. In a two-square-mile district at the eastern edge of Boyle Heights, among modest houses, carnicerías and auto body shops, there are eleven cemeteries.
Four Jewish cemeteries cluster south of Whittier Boulevard. Home of Peace is the oldest. Agudath Achim and Beth Israel are smaller. Mount Zion is the most forlorn, apparently not owned by anyone. The Jewish Federation of Los Angeles described itself as "as successor in interest" and has payed Mount Zion's taxes. Concerned Jewish organizations have reset Mount Zion's tombstones thrown down by vandals and earthquakes and sealed the broken grave beds of pious Angelenos interred in the accepting soil of East Los Angeles.
Bougainvilleas bloomed redly on Mount Zion's perimeter wall early in 2121, and the entry gate was chained shut. If there was a number to call with inquiries, it's now missing. It's not easy to visit Mount Zion to lay a pebble on a grave, to remember someone whose memory might have been as a blessing.
Former hills
Mapping apps that offer redemption from gridlock send drivers into worse. One of the riskiest shortcuts is Echo Park's Baxter Street, a slope with a 32% grade (more than double what highway standards now allow). Software knows only billiard-table-like topography and directs the impatient accordingly. What comes next needs steady nerves.
As Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez found, "On Baxter, whether you're heading up the steepest incline from Allesandro on the west side of the peak or Lakeshore on the east side, you don't see pavement in front of you through the windshield. You see sky, like you're on a moon shot, blind to what might be coming at you from the other side of the mountain." Not all of Los Angeles was made for the convenience of cars.
Restless Los Angeles hasn't cared much for its hills. Poundcake Hill (topped by the city's first high school and then the county courthouse) was whittled away for the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center. Normal Hill (once the location of a predecessor to UCLA) was lowered to ease traffic congestion and then nearly flattened for the Central Library. Fort Moore Hill (command post for US troops in 1847, later a Protestant cemetery) was cut up for the Hollywood Freeway. During construction, bones of Los Angeles pioneers tumbled into the excavation.
Bunker Hill, once home to a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community, fell to "slum clearance" in the 1960s. Graders planed 30 feet from Bunker Hill and opened up 27 blocks for redevelopment. For a time, the greatly reduced hill was an acropolis of Fortune 500 companies — Mike Davis' menacing "City of Quartz." The companies are gone now, like so much of the hills themselves.
Waste
This isn't going to be pretty. The filth of the city has been dumped in the bed of the Los Angeles River, set on fire, fed to hogs, randomly buried, piped onto farmers' fields and poured into Santa Monica Bay. Today, trash is collected, and about 65% is diverted from landfill burial. Greenwaste is composted. Wastewater is processed. It still goes into Santa Monica Bay, but biosolids are extracted to become soil for growers or to be injected as slurry into a depleted oil formation a mile below Terminal Island.
Mid-century Los Angeles buried a lot of trash. From 1956 until 2013, when it closed, the Puente Hills landfill took in more than 130 million tons of trash, raising a mound 500 feet high. Clean dirt covered each week's accumulation, the boundary of a new layer called a lift. Trucks continue to deliver trash to three landfill sites maintained by the county. There are nearly 20 active landfills and as many as 300 landfills labeled inactive in Los Angeles County. There are probably more, unknown.
Much of the Puente Hills landfill will become a park one day. By then, the buried trash will only be a memory. What lies beneath will last for what will seem like forever.
Further Exploration
Wilmington is just one of several communities in Los Angeles County where the environmental effects of oil extraction and processing are literally life-or-death concerns. Learn more here.
How did Los Angeles lose its downtown hills? KCET's Nathan Masters looked for the missing landscape.
Active, closed, and abandoned landfills are scattered throughout the county. Find out if you live near one at the County Department of Public Works website.
