By Many Other Names
This is a piece I wrote for the first issue of Beyond Sunset. To read the full issue, buy it here. Please, go buy it. I made it. I’m proud of it.
Where the hell is Tropico, California?
Should you be driving in Los Angeles along San Fernando Road, where the east edge of Atwater Village meets the city of Glendale, the navigation service in your car may tell you you’re in an area called Tropico. Looking around, however, you’d see little befitting that enchanting name: a Vons, a Costco, a Party City. Just to the east, on Los Feliz Boulevard, the historic Tam O’Shanter restaurant looks festive enough, but not in any particularly tropical way. Elsewhere, you could find a post office and motel bearing the name, but generally speaking, the city and spirit of Tropico are lost to all but state historians — and the occasional GPS.
The city did exist, though, for almost seven years. Originally a cluster of agricultural operations around what is now the Glendale train station, the area became famous for its strawberries, dubbed Tropico Beauties. Tropico rode that sweet strawberry success all the way to cityhood in 1911, only for its citizens to tire eventually of the city’s struggle to provide basic utilities. With a swift “hey, maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea” vote in 1918, its cityhood ended, and Tropico was absorbed into the city of Glendale.¹
The W.R.C. Richardson residence as it looked in 1873. The home stood on the Santa Eulalia Ranch, which would later become Tropico, Atwater Village and parts of southern Glendale. Credit: Los Angeles Public Library Photo Archive
This first issue of Beyond Sunset is about fresh starts, and while striking out on its own ended up being an ill-fated venture for Tropico, it has to be said: It tried, as many others in L.A. have. The story of Tropico plays out not unlike those of every Pam, Beth, and Sherry who hopped on a bus, arrived in this sun-soaked city, and attempted to rename themselves something glitzy and exotic-sounding in hopes of becoming famous.
Some achieved that success. But for every Marilyn, there are a hundred Norma Jeans who ended up answering phones for the company that opted not to make them stars. They lived out a life here in Southern California that was not unhappy, exactly, but nonetheless something other than what they once expected for themselves.
Yes, I am comparing the fate of these almost-weres to that of Tropico, which at one point dreamed of becoming the southland’s next\ boomtown but instead became just another part of Glendale. It’s not necessarily a sad story. This part of the world affords its residents multiple chances to reinvent themselves — fresh starts on top of fresh starts. Indeed, many of the area’s most famous residents have sustained careers not just because they managed to reinvent themselves but because their reputation for reinvention is now the thing for which they’re celebrated.
Beverly Hills began as a Spanish land grant called Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, or “ranch of the gathering waters.” Over time, it was supposed to become the city of Santa Maria, which, as you may have noticed, never ended up happening. The site subsequently became a single large patch of lima beans (arguably the least glamorous of legumes), and over time, that patch was supposed to become the city of Morocco, which, as you may have noticed, also never ended up happening.² Only in 1906 did the area get its current name — taken from a neighborhood in Beverly, Massachusetts, of all places — and improbably, that is the identity that seems to have stuck. Thus, a former lima bean plot eventually became the most famous zip code in the United States.
Take a drive across Los Angeles, and whether you realize it or not, you’re touring neighborhoods that have reinvented themselves again and again, to the point that we could not possibly assume that how we know them now is the same as what they’ll be in another hundred years. Boyle Heights was once El Paredón Blanco, or “white bluff.” North Hollywood was previously both Lankershim (after a German-born landowner and rancher) and Toluca (of uncertain origin, possibly Paiute or the Mexican city of Toluca).³ And Los Angeles’s Chinatown district is in actuality Chinatown 2.0, the first having been displaced by the construction of Union Station. But even then, that only gets at part of the history, because the current district includes lands that were previously known as Little Italy and Sonoratown.⁴ Though neither got to relocate the way Chinatown did, traces of their Italian and Mexican legacies still linger, because Los Angeles often cannot completely escape its own past, dramatic makeovers be damned.
In fact, one of the most dramatic reinventions ever to happen to an L.A. neighborhood — the forced transformation of the Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine into what is now Dodger Stadium — left a notorious legacy in its wake. The story is harrowing enough to deserve its own piece, and in fact many essays have been written about how Chavez Ravine was redlined into non-existence so that Angelenos could enjoy a ball game.
This article, however, aims to focus on some of the more mysterious vanishings to befall L.A. neighborhoods. Take, for example, Edendale, a name you might encounter here or there without realizing how important it was to local history. Edendale, in its day, encompassed land that we now recognize as part of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Downtown, and Echo Park, and it was the setting for some pivotal moments in the silent days of the moviemaking industry. Edendale was, in effect, a Hollywood before Hollywood became shorthand for the movie business. It was also a setting for the modern gay rights movement, as it was the homebase to pioneering activist and Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay.⁵ However, as time passed, the moviemakers left, Los Angeles dismantled the train system along which Edendale was once a prime destination, and, finally, the Glendale Freeway cleaved the area in two, leaving the leftovers to be eaten by the surrounding communities. The area was atomized — unwillingly, but nonetheless so successfully that you wouldn’t even recognize it as a contained location anymore. Only a ghost of Edendale remains today, lingering in a few scattered place names, including another post office.⁶
In a sense, Silver Lake twice triumphed where Edendale failed. In addition to occupying much of the land that was once Edendale, it also successfully overtook the area’s original name: Ivanhoe. The name was allegedly a reference to Scottish author Walter Scott’s novel of the same name, chosen by a Scottish immigrant who thought the area’s rolling hills resembled his homeland.⁷ Again, Ivanhoe persists in local nomenclature, perhaps more so than other also-rans mentioned in this article. But after construction of the Silver Lake Reservoir (named after the water board commissioner who helped bring it into existence, not the color of the water itself), it proved to be a better focal point for residents and visitors alike than the 1819 novel.⁸ Go figure.
Of course, reinvention isn’t exclusive to these smaller pieces of the city. In fact, you could say it’s built into the name. In his 1906 article “Some California Place Names — Their Origin and Meaning,” J.M. Gunn states that the first name that any European colonizers ever gave to the general Los Angeles area was specifically assigned to the L.A. River. Franciscan missionary Juan Crespi dubbed it El Río de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula, or “the river of our lady queen of the angels of Porciúncula.”⁹ (Porciúncula is a variant on the name of an Italian church where the Franciscan religious order began.) Whether or not that seemed like a mouthful at the time, it’s unlikely that anyone raised this concern, as one of the several ways people referred to the pueblo born next to the river was even longer: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula, or “the town of the queen of the angels on the Porciúncula River.” Other names persisted, for obvious reasons, including the much handier El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles, but also Santa Maria (the wife of St. Joseph, for whom the northern settlement San Jose was named) and El Pueblo de Abajo, or “the lower town,” in reference to San Jose. To further complicate matters, some historians maintain that the 63-letter name was never actually used to refer to the town.¹⁰
In discussing Los Angeles and its various place names, Gunn writes about a rivalry between two cultures: Spanish and non-Spanish European, or “two Christian nations antipodean in character,” in his words. Regrettably, he writes off the preceding Native American residents as “a pagan native lost to oblivion,” laying the blame on the Spanish for erasing the history of the original inhabitants, the people known variously as the Tongva, the Kizh, or the Gabrieleño. Many people have tried to rename this location in hopes of birthing a new beginning, and it should be said that downtown as it stands today was once the site of a large riverside settlement known as Yaanga.¹¹ And while the loss of and ignorance to this land’s Tongva past is something to not only bemoan but also remedy, certain Tongva place names have managed to endure. Most famously, the Cahuenga Pass takes its name from the Tongva phrase for “place on the hill,” but even those unfamiliar with the local geography may also know Topanga (“where the mountain meets the sea,” or “place above”), Tujunga (“old woman’s place”), or Cucamonga (“a sandy place”). Malibu, meanwhile, comes from the Chumash Humaliwo, or “the surf sounds loudly.”
Any Hollywood publicist would be proud of how well the city’s endless reinventions have concealed its humble beginnings. But, despite its best efforts, Los Angeles’s past bleeds through, just often in a way that’s hard to see. The next waitress who pours your coffee could be a never-been, an almost-was, or maybe even an “it” girl for a whole ten seconds, once upon a time. Unless you have an encyclopedic memory of every starlet who’s ever arrived in Los Angeles, you can’t know for sure. But if you know where to look and what proper nouns are clues to the city’s forgotten past, you can see all the lost versions layered beneath the current ones. It’s all packed in, and the next time you’re driving through that one area of Glendale, maybe you can tell whoever is in your passenger seat something like, “By the way, have you ever heard of Tropico?”
The story of Tropico is a favorite of mine, but if I had to point to one anecdote that illustrates this city’s ability to fold generations of history into a bit of modern syntax, it would be this: The aforementioned longest-possible title for Los Angeles, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula, is too burdensome a title for anything but especially for the second-most populated city in the United States. Because it sits awkwardly in the mouth, to say nothing about cartographers and notaries who would have needed to work around it, people shrunk it down, first to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, then to Los Angeles, and eventually, simply, just two letters, L and A. In a tremendous feat for such a small fraction of the original text, just two letters have effectively become the name of this city. Every time you or I use them, whether we realize it or not, we are recalling the city’s dramatic, elaborate history, just in a way that’s hard to notice.
That is, unless you stop to think about how much work those two letters are doing, how many versions of the city they contain, and how much history you could pull out of it, if you wanted to.
Works cited
Masters, Nathan. “The Lost City of Tropico, California,” KCET.org
About Beverly Hills, beverlyhills.pro
Masters, Nathan. “When North Hollywood Was a Town Named Toluca, or Lankershim?”
Brightwell, Eric. “No Enclave — Exploring the Remains of Los Angeles’ Little Italy.” KCET.org
Chiland, Elijah. “How a Silverlake Staircase Ended Up Being a Monument to LA’s Gay Rights History.” Curbed LA
Tobar, Hector. “A Los Angeles Paradise Lost.” Los Angeles Times
About the Silver Lake Community, Los Angeles, California. “Welcome to Silver Lake”
Locke, Michael. “Meet Herman Silver, Silver Lake’s Namesake.” Silver Lake News
Gunn, J.M. “Some California Place Names — Their Origin and Meaning.” Annual Publication of the Historical Society
of Southern California
Pool, Bob. “City of Angels’ First Name Still Bedevils Historians.” Los Angeles Times
Lloyd, Annie. “A Brief History Of L.A.’s Indigenous Tongva People.” LAist
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