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Description of Photograph
This is an 8x12 inch Reproduction Photograph made from a high quality scan of the original. When evaluating the quality of the photo, please keep in mind that most photos in our collection were taken over 100 years ago.
Title: Rancho La Brea Adobe, 6301 West Third Street, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, CA
Creator(s): Historic American Buildings Survey, creator
Related Names:
Rocha, Antonio
Date Created/Published: Documentation compiled after 1933
Data Page(s): 15
Notes:
Significance: The one-story adobe house built by the original grantee of Rancho La Brea continues to serve as a family residence, the plan of the basic structure virtually unchanged since pastoral times. The history of the house, as simple and straightforward as the lines of its construction, contrasts dramatically with the complex development of the surrounding ranch lands it once governed. It has changed hands only twice and has retained its original function without interruption, while most of the 44 hundred acres granted in 1828 to Antonio Jose Rocha have lost identity beneath the grid of city streets. The rancho\'s gentle hill and stange, black-pooled brea marshes noted by the first Spanish explorers have seen herds of cattle and flocks of sheep come and go. The Indian brea artisans have given way before Californios loading carretas with the heavy asphaltum for the roofs of the flourishing pueblo of Los Angeles, and they in turn to the insistent gringos. A sudden forest of derricks once covered the oil-rich land, only to be succeeded by tracts of suburban homes, the houses by apartments, stores and towering office buildings. Skeletons of prehistoric animals came to light in the brea pits, drawing archaeologists from all over the world to the sorting tables set up where the new Los Angeles Museum of Art has recently taken shape. A racing stadium and a baseball park flourished and vanished; a vast television studio taking their place. Dusty roadside stands selling corn and melons during the depression years evolved into Farmers Market which now draws some 20 million visitors each year to the very courtyard of the adobe. The significance of the structure has been recognized by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board. The building bears a plaque placed by the Native Daughters of the Golden West on June 28, 1935 when Hancock Park-La Brea was made a State of California Historical Landmarks No. 170. The importance of the one square league of land (7 square miles, approximately 4400 acres) - granted by the Mexican government to Antonio Jose Rocha and Nemisio Domiguez as the Rancho La Brea - was well recognized in 1828 when Jose Antonio Carrillo, Alcalde of Los Angeles, set his signature to the document. It contained a provision that inhabitants of the pueblo were to have unmolested rights to take brea from the pits as they might have need of it for the roofs of their adobe houses. Only 8 miles west of town, the pits had been a source of supply for three-quarters of a century - ever since the first tule huts had been replaced by sapling-roofed adobes. Workmen called it \'la huesementa,\' the boneyard, in joking allusion ot the debris of old bones which encumbered the pits. Much earlier the site had been noted as valuable for the missionary explorer Fray Juan Crespi in his journal entry for Thursday, August 3, 1769, wrote: \'...the explorers saw some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch; they were boiling and bubbling, and the pitch came out mixed with an abundance of water. They noticed that the water runs to one side and the pitch to the other, and that there is such an abundance of it that it would serve to caulk many ships.\' The Indians used the brea, in fact, for just such a purpose. The plank canoes with which they navigated between the mainland and the Channel Islands were made water-tight with it. They also employed it to fix shell decorations in place, to secure fibre lashings, and as a fuel. A contingent of Spanish soldiers sent from San Diego in 1770, subsequent to Crespi\'s report, found themselves forced to battle with the Indians encamped at the pits before they could return with the load of brea they had been ordered to fetch.
Survey number: HABS CA-354
Subjects:
Houses
Place:
California -- Los Angeles County -- Los Angeles
Latitude/Longitude: 34.05222, -118.24278
Bookmark /ca0248/ 8x12 inches.
Note: Some images may have white bars on the sides or top if the original image does not conform to the 8x12 dimensions.
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Source: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
