The Southland's story of Greek Americans formally started when about 15 immigrants took out a state charter to organize their community in 1908. Among them was Peter Sakellaris, whose nephew, John, is a 90-year-old retired banker and St. Sophia foundation president.
John Sakellaris still recalls family visits to the community's downtown fruit stands, butchers and cafes. Unlike such cities as Chicago, where Greek immigrants formed ethnic residential enclaves, those in Los Angeles lived scattered throughout the city, Sakellaris said. He lived in a multiethnic neighborhood on San Pedro Street and attended school with Angelenos of Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Mexican descent.
The Greek immigrant community never rivaled the size of its German, Irish and English counterparts in the U.S., in part because of restrictive immigration quotas adopted in 1924. Primarily designed to appease growing public opposition to immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the new quotas cut Greek immigration allowances from a peak of about 340,000 between 1900 and 1917 to about 21,000 between 1925 and 1945, according to Stavros T. Constantinou and Milton E. Harvey in an article for the book "Race, Ethnicity and Place in a Changing America."
But Los Angeles was a relatively tolerant place, without the lynchings and other violent attacks Greek immigrants faced in other parts of the country, Sakellaris and others said.
Like so many immigrants before them, many Greeks had fled war, political turmoil, oppression or poverty to seek new opportunities here. Pastras, the researcher and a Los Angeles securities and real-estate consultant, said his father was spirited away from his home country in 1916 to escape the encroaching German army and survived in the U.S. speaking no English as a dishwasher, railroad worker and eventual restaurant owner.
"I am in awe of these people, who basically came here without capital but a lot of grit and determination, and made it," Pastras said.
One of the first things the early pioneers did was erect a church, the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, in 1912 on San Julian Street in what is now the Garment District; that church is now closed. Four decades later, Hollywood mogul Charles Skouras led the community to erect St. Sophia, a stunning structure of crystal chandeliers, stained-glass windows, gold-edged mosaics and paintings of the Trinity, Holy Family, saints and apostles.
