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Old Posted Nov 30, 2015, 12:27 AM
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Those Who Squirm! Those Who Squirm! is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GatoVerde View Post
"La Esperanza" is a common name for a bakery. Just a guess.
That's exactly what it is, or rather, I mean it was the name of this bakery.

Although the bakery had already existed for many years, it didn't move to 507 N Main until sometime before 1935, based on a photo from that year appearing in William David Estrada's historical study of the neighborhood, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space
(Link to Google Books page, where the book is available in preview, and you can see the photo in question on page 131. You might need to be logged into your Google account for that to work.)

The last we see of it in the LAPL directories collection is in the 1969 volume:



It must have closed a few years later in the early to middle 1970s. When I first took an interest in the neighborhood, around 1980 or so, the sign with the cheerful little baker guy and platter was still there but had become so faded and weathered as to be indecipherable. It was a very sad scene; the main entrance was just a large locked door which, IIRC, didn't even have a knob or handle on the street side, and the entryway was filthy with accumulated dust and dirt. This, especially, was the period when I began thinking of the Plaza neighborhood as California's largest ghost town this side of Bodie.

I'm very glad to have seen what the sign was supposed to look like when it was in business.
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This Is Probably The Oldest Intact School Building In L.A.

Last edited by Those Who Squirm!; Nov 30, 2015 at 8:05 AM.
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