L.A. TACO is currently on its biggest mission yet: to create a food guide for every single neighborhood in Los Angeles! Along the way, we will also be releasing brief histories of each neighborhood to understand L.A.’s past and present a little more, all the while celebrating how each and every square inch helps make our fine city the best in the world. Today we’re taking a look at Arcadia.
Arcadia was established at the base of a canyon in today’s San Gabriel Mountains in the former site of a Tongva settlement known as Aleupkinga, said to be at least 8,000 years old. As discussed in last week’s Pasadena history, the arrival of the Spanish in the 18th century led to this society's forcible relocation, widespread death, cultural erasure, virtual enslavement, and the theft of their homeland under the Franciscan Catholic mission system. The San Gabriel Mission Arcángel was the fourth such mission, established in 1771, ten years before El Pueblo de Los Angeles was founded. Despite resistance over their resettlement, this Tongva land was stolen and Aleupkinga became the property of the Mission San Gabriel.
Following its War of Independence in 1821, Mexico seized much of the Mission’s lands, dividing it and selling it as different ranchos. What we know today as Arcadia, as well as nearby towns such as Monrovia, San Marino, and Sierra Madre, was initially based in what was once called Rancho Santa Anita. This 13,319 acre land was issued to “Perfecto” Hugo Reid, a Scottish born critic of the mission system and a chronicler of the Tongva who had become a legal Mexican citizen, and his Tongva wife, Victoria Bartolomea Comicrabit. As soon as he petitioned to take possession of the rancho land in 1839, Reid built an adobe house on it and began to farm it and plant vineyards. Alta California Governor Pio Pico recognized his claim in 1845. Two years later, Reid sold the land to London-born businessman Henry Dalton, who had already purchased neighboring Rancho Azusa de Duarte in 1844.
Enter Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin—a Midwesterner with a colorful life story, including multiple marriages and almost as many brushes with death—whose nickname came from a lifelong record of entrepreneurial and wagering successes. Initially, Baldwin found achievement through horse training, saloon, grocery, and grain trading businesses in Indiana. Heading west with his wife and child in a wagon caravan during the Gold Rush, he narrowly avoided a deadly attack along the way, then became a picks-and-shovels success providing supplies to fortune-seeking miners in San Francisco. Baldwin’s triumphs continued for decades, during which he amassed a tremendous fortune, buying hotels and resorts and all manner of luxury investments throughout the West. Moving to Southern California in 1875 amid the region's larger population boom, Baldwin spent $200,000 to purchase 8,000 acres of Rancho Santa Anita, which had been steadily carved up and changing hands since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe transitioned the lands to U.S. possession. Baldwin found the territory in Rancho Santa Anita to be a paradise, snatching them up in addition to the tens of thousands of extra acres he’d eventually buy in our region, at least some of which—Baldwin Hills on the former La Cienega Rancho—still bear his name. As always, seeing ever more opportunity before him, Baldwin turned some of Rancho Santa Anita into subdivisions, creating 11.1-square-mile Arcadia, a name chosen for the historically beautiful Peloponnesian wilds of the same name, and Monrovia next door.
Not only was Baldwin the father of Arcadia, which was incorporated as a city in 1903, he also became its first mayor. Around this time, Arcadia had a population of around 500 people, as well as a booming little economy largely based on entertainment, sporting, hospitality, and gambling, which included many of Baldwin’s own interests. Several sites related to Baldwin’s flamboyant life and insane amount of business interests are preserved in the area, notably Queen Anne Cottage at Baldwin Lake and the Rancho Santa Anita Depot, all housed at The Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, which the city opened in 1956 in the heart of Baldwin’s former rancho land.