Episode #120: Boyle Heights Blossoming: Everything’s Different at Ray & Roy’s Market

You Can't Eat the Sunshine

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Join us this month for an episode dedicated to the vibrant, historic and soulful neighborhood of Boyle Heights, centered on the southeast corner of 4th Street and Camulos. We’ll talk with Yolanda Diaz, who recently purchased Ray & Roy’s Market, which was founded by a Japanese father and son after internment. Yolanda has a fresh new vision for this community hub, which includes inviting 15-year-old Isabel Peinado to create an ambitious, hand-painted mural about female empowerment on the market’s long west wall. What won’t change? The vintage walk-in freezer, which famously serves the coldest beer in Boyle Heights!

We’ll also discuss: the pending revival of Angels Flight Railway, East L.A. roadside attraction The Tamale back on the market, Downey’s neglected band-owned Rives Mansion to be sold, the rededication of Victory Memorial Grove in Elysian Park, concerns about Onni Group’s out-of-scale Afton & Vine project, another suspicious fire on the historic southern campus of Rancho Los Amigos, the awful new Bringing Back Broadway-funded LED lighting scheme on the Bradbury Building and Los Angeles Magazine only tells part of the story about the troubled Gage Mansion in Bell Gardens.

Introducing The Cranky Preservationist, who loves Los Angeles and HATES what you’re doing to it. Catch all the rants on Facebook or YouTube and RSVP to attend his LAVA Sunday Salon in search of lost Art Deco.

Angels Flight is coming back, and soon will have a tall, shiny neighbor. But how will the new tower treat the past?

Back on the market: the world’s biggest tamale, delighting travelers along East L.A.’s Whittier Boulevard for nearly a century.

Victory Memorial Grove: after a lot of elbow grease, a neglected corner of Elysian Park is once more a place of honor and reflection.

Afton & Vine: Hollywood development aims to move historic bungalows around like pawns on a chessboard, demolish 1930 Deco market.

Downey finally does something to protect its National Register Rives Mansion, which badly needs an owner who cares. It will be listed for sale shortly.

More suspicious fires at Rancho Los Amigos. We’re as sad to lose historic buildings as we are that our homeless neighbors aren’t housed in them.

Los Angeles Magazine takes a look at the Gage Mansion preservation problem, but fails to cover all the drama of our ongoing public access battle. We have been visiting, and more recently being denied access to visit, the Gage Mansion for the past decade on our twice-yearly South Los Angeles Road Trip tour. The preservation and public access problems are even more dramatic than this piece suggests, and it’s important to note that, while surrounded by private property, the historic house is held in the public trust. To get the scoop, join us on the bus in February

The awful new Bringing Back Broadway-funded LED lighting scheme on the Bradbury Building facade. (Corner view. Third Street view.)