September is a majorly busy month for MrLA. For one, September 11 is my birthday. I'm now in my 18th year of celebrating my birthday for the entire month. As anyone who is MrLA's age (born 1959, do the math!) can understand, Einstein was right: the more time one lives, the more warp speed time passes. It seems like there are 1,000,000 + 1 choices for anyone to choose and live by. And, so it's been for me this month. Lots of fun, lots to do, lots to fulfill me.
Last Wednesday, under the guise of "lots of fun" and "lots to fulfill me", I convinced my friend, Amy, to take her on a cruise to a land that existed long ago and far away. New York is The Big Apple. Chambers of commerce and LA Times reporters tried calling Los Angeles The Big Orangebut it never caught on. Anyone younger than I am might say, "Who cares?" but there likely would've been no Los Angeles had there not been oranges.
The Spanish who founded Los Angeles might well have been the first ones to call their new settlement, La gran naranja (The Big Orange). Because one of the reasons for creating Los Angeles was to establish a settlement for the Spanish Empire, the settlers needed to open a Gelson's or Trader Joe's. Had they existed, that would've ended my post. Since food had to be grown back then, the Spanish grew the things they knew best back home and in the other areas of their empire:
pears, apples, peaches, sugar cane, plums, lemons, wine grapes, and ORANGES.
From the moment, the horses, oxen, donkeys, and settlers said, "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" after months of hot, dusty, grimy journey, oranges represented the good life for Californians. Fresh-squeezed orange juice was the order of the day from then on and few things spelled Southern California more than the orange. To the Americans that came slowly but steadily through the next 50, 60 years, oranges were like the best sex and the most divine orgasm (oops, one-track mind :-) rolled into one: a delicacy and an experience beyond description. Then William Workman and William Wolfskill had to "throw a monkey wrench" on the whole thing and turn it into the McDonald's of fruit by being the first large-scale growers of oranges in California. They even had the gall to pack them in iced boxes and ship them off to other parts of the United States by train. Those "delicacies" woke up the "meat and potatoes" diets of the United States and truly created what the Gold Rush of 1849 had started: the idea that California was the Golden State because of the climate and the fruits, vegetables, and geography that you could only find there, nowhere else. Gold was the orange ranch that could turn you into a millionaire like Workman and Wolfskill and you'd live the life of an emperor, an Orange Emperor!
The rest, as they say, is history!
The Orange Empire, it was called. That was the ad copy given to tourists the world over who could ride a streetcar from Downtown Los Angeles to Riverside, then San Bernardino, then back to Los Angeles, most of the way smelling orange blossoms, seeing orange groves for hours on end, and eating delicious sweet fruit or drinking freshly-squeezed juice at roadside stands. The entire American habit of drinking orange juice for breakfast came out of the advertising that said orange juice from California made you strong, happy, and was just plain delicious, so why wouldn't you want to drink this "food from the gods". Los Angeles County, until 1950, was the largest orange-growing producer in the United States. Sunkist was created here and made California oranges synonymous with sunshine, Mediterranean climate, having it all in California, and living the good life, and health.
When I was a child, the Orange Show in San Bernardino was as much a Southern California ritual as the Rose Parade or the L. A. County Fair. There was an Orange Queen and there were floats as intricate and as spectacular as those in the Rose Parade, even though orange groves were becoming vestiges of the past, "things that aren't there anymore. There was a reason why the county was named Orange County.
I'd always wanted to visit that Los Angeles, that Southern California that I was too late for. So Amy and I visited two of the many communities that, if oranges didn't build them, they made them prosper: Whittier and Fullerton.
Whittier is approx. 20 miles southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. It was an agricultural community founded by Quakers. In 1907, when Whittier was laid out and incorporated, it was as rural as rural could get. Even a family named Nixon farmed there, with the middle son, Richard, doing everything he could to get away from farming. He grew up to be President of the United States. While Whittier grew exponentially, as did everywhere in Southern California, it's as if 3 Whittiers existed: the newer suburbs, looking as if tract-home seeds were spread and cookie-cutter, same floorplan, no-character Home Depot-approved houses sprang up; the area on and just off of Whittier Blvd., from the San Gabriel River and 605 Fwy. to the Orange County Line looked as if Nixon were still Vice-President under Eisenhower and 1960 were still in the future. Never had I seen an entire area look as if it had been frozen in time more so than traveling large stretches of Whittier Blvd. to Fullerton. Then, there's Uptown Whittier, where the city began and one can see the 1907 village that grew wheat and oranges that was Whittier: Craftsmen houses, many with orange trees; 1920's multi-story Spanish colonial banks, shops, and the Hoover Hotel. The 1920's street lamps are there, intact. The newest thing in Uptown seems to be the "Public Parking" sign that the Harry Truman for President campaign would've seen in 1948. To be sure, Uptown has a mix of the funky, grungy, pretty, sleepy, and the party-hearty but it's all housed in a neighborhood that someone in a covered wagon in 1910 could still recognize. What they wouldn't recognize would be the Golden Triangle, one of two Burmese restaurants in Southern California.
The Golden Triangle is a portal to a tasty, sensual, mouthwatering, sultry Burma of 50 years ago, a paradise that offered a tropical feast of the senses. Anyone familiar with Indian, Thai, and Chinese food will see elements of them in Burmese food: fruit-tinged curries, sticky rice, coconut milk sauces, tropical fruit shakes, fragrant, subtle teas, pungent, garlicky, lemony, spicy fish, lamb, goat, and chicken dishes all with Indian-style flatbreads and even "falafel", fried fava bean patties wrapped in phyllo dough. As if Burmese food weren't enough, the owner's Thai wife features even more Thai dishes, with a smattering of Laotian dishes there, too. Lunch is a bargain at less than $7.00 for any combination plate there. An incredible deal to sample one of the least-known but most sophisticated cuisines of the world! And, it's in Uptown Whittier!
After showing Amy around the Craftsman homes and Whittier College, a highly-regarded junior college with an Ivy League reputation, its buildings are what a Hollywood film of the '30's would've pictured the typical college to look like: stucco, white, ivy-covered and vaguely Mission Revival. It's school of law is one of the most famous in the country. It is the same school of law where that boy who hated farming, Richard Nixon, became a lawyer, met his wife, Pat, there, and headed out of Whittier for good to became president.
By this time, 3:00 was rolling by and there mas more Big Orange/Orange Empire to cover. Next stop, Fullerton!
Fullerton is so Orange Empire that one its most elegant building is still the Sunkist Exchange Building, where orange farmers sold their crops and Sunkist made them rich. It's elegant, sexy Spanish colonial building with wrought-iron grill doors has the words "Sunkist Exchange Building" chiseled into the top of it's doorway. It is now a public art gallery, displaying any and all art made by local residents.
Fullerton has done a great job of harking back to it's Orange Empire days by having the downtown area saving and restoring it's World War I/Roaring Twenties buildings while, surprisingly, offering some avant-garde eateries and, who knew Fullerton had a long-time, highly-developed theater and art scene going on. In October, there is a month-long festival of the arts in Fullerton: dance, theater, film, and art exhibits going on all month.
London may have its tea time at 4 but I'm sure few Britons have experienced tea at the Tea Fusion, a tea bar that looks like a club in Hollywood, except you can tie one on on Oolong and white teas rather than beer and vodka shots. The whole decor and vibe owe more to the trendiest such places opening up in Downtown Los Angeles but it is in Fullerton, where you can have dozens of varities of teas from several countries in Asia plus freshly-made mochi ice cream, creme brulee, and other great accompaniments to the phenomenal teas. I defy anyone to try the white tea and not become a committed teaholic!
Already, Fullerton is the first Amtrak stop if you leave Los Angeles and head to San Diego. It is also a Metrolink stop, so, if you live in the San Fernando Valley, you can take the Orange Line to the Red Line to Metrolink or Amtrak to the 1930 Pueblo Indian-inspired Santa Fe/Amtrak Station and easily walk into your own Orange Empire tour. If you truly want to experience the Los Angeles that made Los Angeles grow from 50,000+ inhabitants in 1880 to 1.2 million in 1930, a Big Orange/Orange Empire tour will let you know what the people saw (and what they created) when they came out here to stake their own claim to the good life.
No Big Orange/Orange Empire Tour is complete without visiting the town that was so essential to the Orange Empire that its very name says it all: The City of Orange. If you've never visited The Orange Circle, then you're not a true Angeleno.
More on what makes that city so important to any understanding of Los Angeles and Southern California, along with great restaurants, the best tea room in Orange County, coffeehouses, art galleries, antique shops galore, and Chuck Jones.
As our governor used to say in his movies (what else is more L. A.?):
"Hasta la vista, Baby!"
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