Home Care In Pioneer, LA

Nine months after breaking ground just south of the SR-134, construction continues for an affordable housing complex which will be the largest in the history of the City of Glendale.

The project, a joint venture from Linc Housing Corp. and National CORE, is now taking shape on a former AT&T site at 515 Pioneer Drive which Glendale acquired in 2019. The 2.8-acre property will eventually yield an apartment complex consisting of 340 studio, one-, and two-bedroom dwellings which will cater to households earning between 30 and 80 percent of the area median income level. Plans also call for a two-level, 342-car subterranean parking garage.

KFA Architecture

KFA Architecture is designing the approximately 300,000-square-foot development, which will feature a trio of five-story buildings. Plans show an exterior of stucco, fiber cement panels, and thin brick veneer, as well as open spaces and common features such as courtyards, community gardens, rooftop decks, and children's play areas.

When the project was presented in 2021 to the Glendale Design Committee, plans called for the conversion of an existing cul-de-sac on Kenilworth Avenue into a pedestrian paseo. That would connect to an existing tunnel beneath the SR-134 freeway leading to Fremont Park, where the developers would build a new plaza.

Urbanize LA

Completion of 515 Pioneer is expected in Winter 2025, according to the National CORE website.

The project site is one of two large properties acquired by the City of Glendale in 2019 to preserve them for affordable housing development. The other, located at 900-920 Broadway, is now being developed with 92 income-restricted apartments.

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Looking for affordable housing? Visit lahousing.lacity.org/aahr and housing.lacounty.gov

Like the rest of the San Gabriel Valley, El Monte, and South El Monte are now home mostly to people of color.

And like the rest of greater Los Angeles, they used to be racially segregated. For a long time, the telling of their history was too.

One narrative about El Monte’s past tells of white pioneers who came out on the Santa Fe Trail before the Civil War and settled a wild frontier; but there’s also the less-celebrated story of the laborers of color who fled dangerous situations to work in its fields and factories.

In 2012, the city honored the former narrative in its hundredth anniversary celebration “ using a lot of the imagery of the covered wagon,” says journalist and South El Monte native, Carribean Fragoza. “And that history as we know excludes people of color.” As of the 2010 census, the two El Monte’s were mostly people of color.

A high view of the Valley Mall on display at the El Monte Historical Museum. Date unknown. Photo credit: Chris Greenspon

With her partner, public history professor Romeo Guzman, and historians Ryan Reft and Alex Cummings, they created a local history project called East of East.

The project is an attempt to fill in El Monte’s narrative with more relevant, but lesser-known aspects of local history: indigenous rebels, interracial rock n’ roll concerts, the Asian-American working class, and muralists. None of them left as celebrated a mark on the cityscape as the pioneers and their descendants did. The point isn’t just to challenge the pioneer narrative, Guzman says, is “to be historically accurate.”

“In the 1930s we started seeing these quote unquote ‘pioneer parades,’” says Guzman. These festivals could be several days long, he says, and told the story of a southern wagon train that included the area’s original settlers. “And what happens is after a couple years of doing this in the 1930s, they eventually create the El Monte Historical Society.”

The schoolhouse exhibit at the El Monte Historical Museum on Tyler Avenue. Photo credit: Chris Greenspon

The descendants of the pioneers were the town’s earliest leaders. In 1958, they established the El Monte Historical Museum in the old city library on Tyler Avenue. It’s an award-winning collection, rich with late 19th and early 20th century antiquities.

The museum also holds a historical manuscript written in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal which asserts, “El Monte has no Spanish, Mexican or even Indian background... It bears the outstanding distinction of being the first purely and strictly American settlement in Southern California.”

Groups from Texas and Oklahoma established successful farms here between the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers, instead of seeking fortunes panning gold in Northern California in the 1850s.

“Monte was known as a rest area,” says the El Monte Historical Society’s Vice President Chuck Hoffman. “People were going to the church, to the Los Angeles Pueblo — they would stop here and rest. They had feed, they had water, but nobody really lived here.”

There may have been unsettled parts of the floodplain, but it was not uninhabited. Wealthy Californios owned parts of the Monte area prior to the Mexican-American War in 1849. Before them, the land was owned by the Spanish Mission system. And before that, the Tongva Native American tribe had villages here.

Model covered wagons at the El Monte Historical Museum on Tyler Avenue. Photo credit: Chris Greenspon

After the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo’s call to preserve old land grants was disregarded. “We can think of American pioneers as essentially all being squatters,” Guzman says.

Some of them staked their claim by force. They were called “the Monte Boys.”

“They were former Texas Rangers,” says Hoffman. “They could shoot from a riding horse.” The group carried out lynchings and manhunts against real and suspected bandits.

“They’re much closer to sort of vigilantes whose sense of justice is very much dictated by their own sort of whiteness,” says Guzman, whose book describes arsons, decapitation, and intimidation of people of color.

“ We have our good past and we have our bad past,” Hoffman laments, “but no we don’t have any artifacts about the Monte Boys.”

The El Monte Historical Museum on Tyler Avenue. Photo credit: Chris Greenspon

Another part of El Monte’s past that won’t be found in this museum is segregated housing in the 1900s. The Historical Museum’s current leadership acknowledges that it happened, but it wasn’t part of what its past programmers chose to fill it with.

La Historia Society Museum on Tyler Avenue by the 10 Freeway in El Monte. Photo by Chris Greenspon.

To get more information on the area’s immigrant labor camps, whose residents worked in El Monte’s farms, the museum’s director Cathy Eredia says you have to go up Tyler Avenue about one block to La Historia Historical Society Museum.

It holds a large collection of photos from the barrios on the outskirts of town,where Latinos were allowed to rent. The largest was Hicks Camp; it began in the 1910s and grew into an unplanned shantytown with its own church, pool halls, stores, and more than one thousand residents. It existed until the 1970s. Former El Monte Mayor Ernie Gutierrez grew up there in the 1930s, and told the East of East team about it in an oral history.

Former El Monte Mayor Ernie Gutierrez stands to the right at a birthday celebration in Hicks Camp, in El Monte. Date unknown. Photo courtesy of La Historia Society Museum

“ Hicks Camp was a dirt farm camp that had no streetlights, no stop signs, no street signs, no curbs, no gutters,” Gutierrez once told East of East,, “and potholes that you stopped counting when you got to a thousand.” Eventually in 1958, Fragoza says that the city of South El Monte was founded as a place where people of color could purchase land and build their homes.

The late Gutierrez and his wife Olga were part of a coalition of former residents of the barrios that founded La Historia in 1998. It began in the back room of the El Monte Historical Museum. Now they’re separate entities. “They wanted to have control of their story,” says Rosa Peña , President of La Historia.

A street level view of the Valley Mall, 2020. Photo credit: Chris Greenspon

El Monte has had its growing pains, according to Eredia: hangings, school segregation, a farmworker strike. “But the Mexicans, the Japanese, and the Chinese — they were our labor force here in El Monte and if it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t be the city that we are now,” she says.

“ What that begs is: if this is the case, if El Monte and South El Monte are populated by people of color and we’re the majority,” asks Guzman, “why aren’t we reflected in the history books?”

La Monte Young has had an utterly profound effect on the last half-century of music. However, the impact of the 79-year-old composer resonates largely without visible cause, due to the curious fact that much of his recorded work is out of print, encouraging an obscurity far out of proportion to his influence. But the work we can hear is profoundly moving and inspiring, and the very real aftershocks of his inventions vibrate across our entire era, whether or not their source is visible.

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La Monte Young (who will be taking part in a rare lecture and interview on May 6) responded to the mid-century world, humming with high-tension wires and jet engines, by creating a vastly original music that referred to the future but honored the eternal past; his hisses, drones, shimmers of sine waves, chants and ragas conjured the sound of Potala Palace and the Pyramids and the sound of the late-night test patterns.

I can think of no other composer who so evoked the irretrievably ancient and the inconceivably futuristic. Young may not have invented the maximum minimalist drone (then again, maybe he did, though more accurately he re-interpreted the sounds of the subcontinent via the ether-fizzing Telestarisms of TV-aerial America), but there is a gorgeous perfection and spontaneity in his work that his musical godchildren could never quite reproduce. Much of what La Monte Young did first he did best.

Much of what La Monte Young did first he did best.

And there’s a lot he did first. To put it in the most simplistic terms, La Monte Young did the raga thing years before the Beatles, the drone/stomp thing half a decade before the Velvets, and the ambient thing before Brian Eno had even grown pubes. La Monte Young was an inventor, profound, pioneering and sagely; the light bulb that went off over his head lit the way for 88,000 musicians and 10 times as many listeners, who felt his influence even if they never knew his name.

And lest we fucking forget, without La Monte Young, you wouldn’t have the Velvet Underground, no way no how, and where would we all be without the Velvets? Not only were the V.U. formed by three disciples of Young (John Cale, Angus MacLise and Tony Conrad), but that great sighing, sawing plod we hear in our heads when we think Velvets was appropriated, lock, stock and droning barrel, from the work of La Monte Young.

Aside from his influence, there is his music, shudderingly gorgeous, evocative, instantly emotional; when I listen to La Monte Young, I literally hear my earliest memory, the crib-wrapped sound of trucks rumbling on a far away highway at dusk (or maybe it was dawn); and I hear the hopes of a young man, his head exploding with the possibilities of sound that transcended Western chords; and I hear the hum of the hospital and the Bardo mantras of my old age and death. Very, very little can arouse such rich emotion in the listener.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLitnrAd9jg&w=420&h=315]

La Monte Young is also living evidence of an extraordinary (and somewhat hidden) moment in the artistic history of New York City. We all know the oft-repeated Golden Book version of NYC’s postwar culture: Beat Poets in the East Village, Bob Dylan on Bleecker Street, The Velvets and Warhol at the Factory, the Ramones on the Bowery, the Beastie Boys in Brooklyn, Madonna, Sonic Youth, and on and on.

The simplistic recounting of this tale often omits the volcanic Fluxus Movement moment of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a minimalist crusade that blew a giant hole in people’s perceptions of art and music. Typified by artists like Young, John Cage and Yoko Ono, your average cultural observer doesn’t think much about Fluxus because, well, part of their game was that they ran silent and ran deep. Those who witnessed the innovative destructions and reconstructions of Fluxus were inspired to build something new out of the ashes. See, it was these people—the ones whose ears were left ringing by the minimalism of Fluxus’ nude bombs—who created the future.

(That was a Get Smart reference, make no mistake about it.)

So go see La Monte Young speak, interviewed by the supremely qualified Alan Licht, on May 6 at 7 p.m. at Red Bull Studios, 220 West 18th Street, New York, N.Y.

Honor La Monte Young. He is the inventor of the chord that conquered all, the sound of an unimaginable future and an equally unimaginable past; he is the bridge between the whispers of the Bodhi Tree and the churn of the Ramones.

WHITTIER – Pioneer, Whittier and La Serna high schools have named among the top high schools in the country based on the numbers of Advanced Placement tests that students took last year, according to Newsweek magazine.

This is the second year in a row that three campuses in the 13,500-student Whittier Union High School District have been named to Newsweek’s annual list, which consists this year of about 1,600 schools – or about 6 percent of all U.S. public schools.

Newsweek’s Jay Mathews compiles the list by taking the number of students who take AP, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests every year and dividing it by the number of graduating seniors – and every school with a 1.0 score or higher makes the list.

That figure means those schools had as many tests in 2009 as they had graduates.

“AP, IB, and Cambridge (classes) are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations,” Mathews wrote on the Newsweek website.

“To send a student off to college without having had an AP, IB, or Cambridge course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels,” Mathews said.

At WUHSD, officials say making the Newsweek list means they’re doing their part to get kids as college-ready as possible.

“It shows we are continuing to push kids into the more rigorous courses we offer,” said Bill Schloss, assistant principal at Whittier High School, where last year’s congratulatory sign for making Newsweek’s list will remain on display for another year in the school’s first-floor hallway.

“And more and more, the kids are coming through for us and showing us that they’re really able to handle it,” Schloss said.

Of the 1,600 schools that made the Newsweek list, Pioneer was at No. 1,428, Whittier High was at No. 1,434 and La Serna was at No. 1,590.

At WUHSD, officials said AP courses are offered in math, science, English, languages and history.

AP prep classes are also available during the summer, including an honors chemistry class at Pioneer High and a pre-AP biology class for incoming freshmen at Whittier High.

Lauren Garcia, 16, is among a handful of Whittier High seniors who are getting a jump on their final year by taking an AP English senior project class that meets twice weekly this summer.

The senior project is a WUHSD graduation requirement that includes a thesis, research paper, community service hours and an oral presentation every spring.

“AP classes go more in depth,” said Garcia, who is also a cheerleader. “I think they prepare you more for college.”

By the end of her junior year, Garcia said she had already taken AP courses in European history, U.S. history, chemistry and English III. In the upcoming year, she’ll round it out with AP classes in Spanish, biology, English IV and government and macroeconomics.

“I think it’s a really good way to get motivated for college,” she said. “Yeah, it does get stressful for me because of cheer practice. But it’s definitely manageable.”

For Newsweek’s complete list of America’s Best High Schools, visit www.newsweek.com/tag/americas-best-high-schools.html

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A cook with experience in some impressive local kitchens strikes out on his own. Oh, and he’ll deliver.

August 6, 2012

Manuel, or Manu, Alfau, currently a cook at Blind Pig Bistro, is getting back to his Dominican roots. On Friday Eater Seattle reported the (very exciting) news that Alfau is opening a sandwich shop in Pioneer Square called La Bodega.

A Dominican-style sandwich, says Alfau, is similar to a Cuban, “except it doesn’t have a ham and cheese, which makes a Cuban a Cuban.” His signature sandwich will be stuffed with pernil, a roasted pork shoulder that’s been marinated in garlic, oregano, lime juice, and cilantro. The pork is one of the nation’s signature dishes, made even more tempting with pickled cabbage, mayo, and cilantro, as well as a square bun from Macrina that Alfau says is the closest thing he could find to pan de agua, and holds up to heat and pressing.

He’s also planning a vegetarian option and a rotating sandwich special, as well as “a good amount of salad,” like white bean or local babyhead greens, and plenty of plantain chips. Some platas del dia will give Alfau a chance to do some nonsandwich cooking, which should be second nature after working as opening sous chef at Anchovies and Olives and La Bête, then joining his former Anchovies chef, Charles Walpole, at Blind Pig Bistro. Those daily plates will be heavy on Caribbean flavors like yucca, plantain, or braised chicken.

All his ingredients, says Alfau, “will be as organic as they can be.” The space at 100 Prefontaine Place S, is near Third and Yesler, as well as roughly 10 million office workers and stadiumgoers. When Alfau first moved to Seattle and worked at Union, he had an apartment nearby and remembers thinking, “damn, this is such a cool little spot.” When he returned from a six-month stint cooking in Vancouver, he happened to ride his bike by the space heard the current occupant, one Seasons Cafe, was vacating, and swooped. The space will seat about 15 people, but Alfau says La Bodega will be heavy on takeout orders, and…delivery. He is envisioning a handful of scooters or bike messengers ferrying sandwiches north to office buildings or south to the stadium area.

A trial run at Montana’s most recent Sunday night barbecue sold out fast. Alfau says buildout begins this week on his shop, and says doors should open within the next couple of months.