calherewecome

On Tuesday we joined a group from the San Pedro Historical Society to visit Heritage Square in downtown Los Angeles. It felt a little bit strange to be the youngest two people on the tour. We dragged Mary K. along. By the time that we got back to San Pedro we were all tuckered out.

The Historical Society had chartered a bus for the occasion and we had a group tour arranged with the folks at Heritage Square. We had about thirty people for the tour divided into three groups for the tour. The tour was led by a volunteer docent. The docent was knowledgable about the various homes. I managed to stump him when I asked about the provenance of the piano in the Hale mansion.

In the 1880’s a piano was definitely a luxury item, especially on the West Coast. Cost was generally more than twice the cost of a pump organ. To see both a piano and pump organ in the same house was ostentatious indeed.

The site consists of about five houses, a church, drugstore and railroad station that were built sometime between 1880 and 1900. All of the buildings had been relocated from their original site.

The cost to build the various homes varied from about $10,000 to $1500. You could really see the differences in both size and attention to detail. Some of the houses are still in need of additional restoration. They seem to be always short of cash for restoration projects. Go to the website (link is in the first paragraph) for additional pictures and details.

After we were done with the tour, we headed off to Olvera Street for lunch and shopping. Olvera Street is in the oldest section of Los Angeles. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Olvera Street. We ate a little Mexican restaurant and sat outside. Lots of small birds eager to get some lunch from us.

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Location:Los Angeles, CA

This entry was posted on November 28, 2012 at 5:15 pm and is filed under California, Museums. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: California