Los Angeles County History

Rocked by gang violence, civil unrest and a proliferation of lethal weapons, 1992 was the deadliest year in Los Angeles County history, officials said Monday. Last year's 2,589 homicides, based on a tally by the Los Angeles County coroner's office, was up about 8% from the year before and represented enough slain people to fill the downtown Ahmanson Theatre to more than capacity.

A 63-foot-long fin whale, one of the biggest skeletons owned by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, will become its public greeter, the museum announced Tuesday, in a new brightly lit glass entrance pavilion made possible by a $13-million gift. "It's a major statement. It's beckoning and saying, 'Come in and see who we are,'" said Jane Pisano, the museum's president. The Otis Booth Pavilion, named for the successful investor and former Los Angeles Times executive who was one of the museum's most influential funders and board members before his death in 2008, will replace what Pisano described as an "ugly, dark, barricading" array of steps and walls that had faced Exposition Boulevard.

It owes its name to a saloonkeeper and never has offered its residents a whole lot more than hard work and a hard time. But the tiny tract called Jimtown in the Whittier area is not only one of Los Angeles County's oldest continuously inhabited communities, but also the most enduring legacy of California's last Mexican governor, Pio Pico.

The U.S. Forest Service has launched an internal inquiry into the agency's attack on the deadly Station fire, an operation that was scaled back the night before the blaze began to burn out of control. "With the significant loss of life, and impacts to the local community, we must determine the effectiveness of our efforts," Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell said in a written statement Wednesday. Tidwell said he would ask other agencies to participate in the review. But the Forest Service has declined to release detailed information about its response to the suspected arson fire, citing in part an ongoing homicide investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department into the deaths of two firefighters whose truck fell off a mountain road.

The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission will hold a public hearing Tuesday to discuss the Newhall Ranch project, a development for 70,000 residents proposed in the Santa Clara Valley on the Ventura County line. The hearing will begin at 9 a.m. at the Planning Commission's headquarters, 320 W. Temple St., in Los Angeles. The proposed Newhall Ranch project would encompass 11,963 acres in Los Angeles County near Lake Piru and include a lake, 200-acre business park and a golf course.

An indictment was unsealed Tuesday against two members of a band of so-called "gypsies" accused of running one of the largest welfare fraud schemes in Los Angeles County history. Marelene Demetrio de Gomez, 33, and her 18-year-old son, Anyelo, appeared in Los Angeles Superior Court but did not enter pleas to the charges. Their attorneys were not in court and the arraignment was postponed until this morning.

History made the Sycamore Inn one of Rancho Cucamonga's best-known places, first as a tavern and post office, then as a Butterfield Stage stop and at last as a rustic steak house along what would become the fabled Route 66--a site that's been feeding travelers for 140 years. But what makes this restaurant even more memorable is the cowardly murder of a ranch foreman and the plot to murder a land-rich widow that took place there just after the Civil War.

A cynic might say that his former life as a loan shark and acrobat perfectly prepared him for his role, but Los Angeles' first legitimate theatrical impresario succeeded by never forgetting the Bard's maxim that "the play's the thing." The roots of the city's theater actually run back to the early 1800s, when traditional posadas, or Nativity plays, were held in the old plaza each Christmas.

If spirituality had a primal soup, it certainly must have been located somewhere within Los Angeles' city limits. No other community on the face of the globe has given rise to half as many mystic, philosophical, psychological, occult, consciousness-raising, therapeutic and alternative creeds as 20th century L.A. And, among them all, none was quite as entertaining or as, well, Los Angeles-like as the I AM movement.

August, with its searing heat and explosive weekends, was the most lethal month in Los Angeles County history, surpassing a record set just the month before, the coroner's office reported Wednesday. During the 31 days of August, coroner's officials investigated 263 possible homicides. That exceeded the previous high of 254 set in July, which had broken the 12-year-old record of 253 set in August, 1980. "Has Los Angeles become the killing fields?" asked coroner's spokesman Bob Dambacher.

In 2000, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office celebrated 150 years in business. Prosecutors have a duty to uphold the "search for truth," but district attorneys aren't spared fallibility. The office that nailed the Night Stalker and the Alphabet Bomber has also weathered the embarrassments of the McMartin Preschool and O.J. Simpson trials, and D.A.s have played the bad-guy roles themselves on occasion.

During Prohibition, tourists came here to get their kicks on the brand-new Route 66. In the Great Depression, it was a landmark for those seeking the promise of California. In the 1960s and '70s, flower children and druggies flocked here, looking for harmony. Today, the landmark Aztec Hotel is being spruced up and restored to the landmark it once was.

History made the Sycamore Inn one of Rancho Cucamonga's best-known places, first as a tavern and post office, then as a Butterfield Stage stop and at last as a rustic steak house along what would become the fabled Route 66--a site that's been feeding travelers for 140 years. But what makes this restaurant even more memorable is the cowardly murder of a ranch foreman and the plot to murder a land-rich widow that took place there just after the Civil War.

Native Angelenos speak in mirages. "Over there," they'll tell you, gesturing like a civil engineer, "used to be orange groves." (They inhale deeply. You inhale deeply and gag through the smog.) "And there, my father tried to grow avocados." (Everyone's father tried to grow avocados.) Clear eyes and a complete set of desert crow's feet scan the horizon.

Fred, Barney, Wilma, Pebbles and Bam-Bam would dig this place. Enough big rocks to coax any caveman--or woman--out of a dark abode and into a charming, tract home hewn from hefty, granite boulders. And hey, we'll even throw in a Ford Model T in your new garage. Forget the Pleistocene era. This was 1924, and developer "Pep" Rempp was eager to market his lovely stone cottages in Roscoe--which is now known as Sun Valley.

You are driving to Big Bear Lake for the weekend. The year is 1928. You live in Los Angeles, home to slightly more than 1 million people. You are a bright young real estate salesman, and when one of your bosses invites you to his roomy cabin for a two-day house party, you jump at the chance. Now you need a car.

An array of groups that depend on Los Angeles County government for public services descended upon the Hall of Administration to plead their cases Tuesday, each hoping to protect its small chunk of the county's $13-billion budget. Library patrons and welfare clients, mental health advocates and crime victims, doctors and social workers filled the board's downtown hearing room. Sheriff Sherman Block and Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner also addressed the supervisors.

As a seventh outbreak of fertile Mediterranean fruit flies was reported in Los Angeles County, the leading scientific adviser to the eradication effort conceded Wednesday that it now appears likely the outbreaks constitute a single infestation of the pest. While saying "there is no way we can know for sure," Roy Cunningham, U.S.

Long before he became a 19th century folk hero as Texas' "Law West of the Pecos," Judge Roy Bean--gambler, con man, boozer and bigot--reshaped a bit of Los Angeles' history in his own irascible image. Books, magazine articles and movies starring Walter Brennan and Paul Newman have recounted the escapades of the crusty old judge and the whiskey-flavored justice he dispensed from the porch of his saloon, the Jersey Lily.

Maybe it's the movies' doing, but in these parts, we tend to take our history in little dollops, ladled out in easily digestible portions, flavored with more spice than subtlety, heavy on the myth. We like the long and large shadows cast by archetypes like The Cowboy, The Military Hero, and The Marshal, pretty much free of shadings or equivocations that might blur the clean outlines of square shoulders and square deeds.