Spring breakin’ Olvera Street

We are live from Olvera Street! We couldn’t quite make it out of town for Spring Break, so we decided to come down to Olvera Street in Downtown Los Angeles instead. Olvera Street, formerly Wine Street, is the birth place of Los Angeles, where the governor of the Californias left the San Gabriel Mission and headed here to create a new settlement.

In its early days, this area, the main commercial artery of the city, was filled with pedestrians. In later decades, this area was the first stop for immigrants from Italy, China, Mexico and beyond. By the 1920s, Olvera Street’s adobe buildings were badly deteriorated and faced destruction. A popular movement arose to save it and Olvera officially became a pedestrian-only area devoted to its Mexican heritage.

While most of the rest of Los Angeles slowly succombed to the automobile, today, Olvera remains a car-free, pedestrian street. And just as Olvera Street symbolizes our city’s past, we hope it can also speak to our city’s future, as a place filled with cicLAvias, where pedestrians can walk freely and interact with each other and local shops.