Heart of the Eastside

Some habits are just too hard to break. Eddie Ramirez knows that his family-owned pharmacy is at the corner of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and Soto Street in Boyle Heights. But as much as he tries to keep current with new things, he still succumbs to the old ways by referring to the intersection by the name it bore when he shined shoes there in the early 1930s.

"Brooklyn and Soto," he says, the names rolling easily off his tongue. "There's no other place like it in L.A."

The corner is considered by locals and some historians as the Eastside's premier intersection. To them, it has more importance than Hollywood and Vine or Wilshire and Rodeo. They see it as a vibrant place that was at the center of the country's biggest Jewish community west of Chicago before World War II and the nation's largest concentration of people of Mexican descent after it.

It was there in 1938 that Jews marched to protest Kristallnacht, the vengeful day when Nazi supporters looted more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses and burned nearly 270 synagogues throughout Germany.

It also was there in 1994 that Chicano activists and others, mindful of Chavez's role in the fight for decent pay and better working conditions for migrant farm workers, cheered when Brooklyn was formally renamed to honor the longtime president of the United Farm Workers union, who had died the year before.

Despite the change of the street name and the language heard on it, the intersection evokes an intimate sense of neighborhood that is often missing in Los Angeles.

"I've found that I can't go anywhere in the city without finding someone who has some connection to Brooklyn and Soto," says oral historian and filmmaker Ellie Kahn, who produced a film about the Jews of Boyle Heights, "Meet Me at Brooklyn and Soto."

Mail carrier Marion Rodriguez, who recently retired after delivering mail in the neighborhood for nearly 30 years, notes that little has changed over the years. "You meet all kinds of people there," she says. "They're walking down the street, doing their shopping. I see them all every day. 'Where's my check?' they'll say."

The history of the intersection is intertwined with the development of the bluffs east of downtown Los Angeles after the Civil War. Developer William H. Workman began subdividing the area in 1876. Married to the daughter of Andrew A. Boyle, who built the first brick home on the bluffs, Workman turned the area into the city's first suburb. He called the area Boyle Heights in honor of his father-in-law.