Angelino Heights.

Description

This is a highly scarce c. 1906 promotional real estate map of the Angelino (or Angeleno) Heights neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles.

The map is oriented towards the northeast, setting Sunset Boulevard horizontally at the top. The neighborhood is roughly bounded by Sunset Boulevard at the top and right, Bellevue Ave. at the bottom, and Echo Park Ave. at the left. Individual lots and blocks are numbered, with their size recorded. The neighborhood is advertised as having ‘Sewer, Gas, Electricity, and Building Restrictions,’ referring to limitations placed on changes to homes and properties, but also perhaps to the housing covenants popular in California at the tim,e which excluded certain ethnic and racial groups from housing developments and neighborhoods. The verso contains tables of lots, divided by block, with their corresponding prices. 

The reservoir mentioned at the top-right here, leading into Elysian Park, was later intended for a housing development, which was then cancelled and turned into Dodger Stadium. Just below Bellevue Ave. at the bottom here, the Hollywood Freeway (now U.S. 101) was built in the 1940s and 1950s.

Angelino Heights

Angelino Heights was one of Los Angeles’s earliest suburban neighborhoods, first developed in 1886 during the city’s great land boom. Located between Chinatown and Echo Park near Downtown Los Angeles, it is known for its lovely homes built in the styles of the late 19th and early 20th century, including the Eastlake and Queen Anne styles (the homes along Carroll Ave. at the center here have been featured in many films, television shows, and music videos over the years). The area’s hilly terrain made it easy to promote as an exclusive residential enclave, which was promised (as here) to be more temperate than the city center, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and safe from the floods that still washed out parts of the city in the winter rainy season at this time.

From its early days, Angelino Heights offered railway and then streetcar access (no fewer than five lines are marked here) to the city center while maintaining a sense of hillside seclusion. The neighborhood was laid out with curving streets adapted to the natural topography, in contrast to the rigid grid of central Los Angeles. Many wealthy Angelenos were drawn to the area’s elevated setting, and its early residents established it as one of the city’s most fashionable addresses by the 1890s. Although the neighborhood later saw waves of decline and redevelopment, Angelino Heights remains celebrated today as Los Angeles’s first historic district, preserving some of the finest examples of nineteenth-century residential architecture in the city.

Publication information and rarity

This map was prepared by the real estate company Fielding J. Stilson Co. (publicly traded but named for its founder). The verso includes a handwritten note of ‘October ‘03’, which might date the map to 1903, but in any event from context it looks to have been produced in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century (a 1906 newspaper advertisement in the Wikimedia Commons taken out by Fielding J. Stilson touts the neighborhood with much the same language used here).

We have been unable to locate any other examples of this work in institutional collections or on the market, though the California Map Collection at the Loyola Marymount University Department of Archives and Special Collections catalogs a promotional real estate map for Angeleno Heights that might be another example of the present map.