a little piece of heaven...

so we may tune to a more fable-us frequency

FABULOUS CHRONICLES

A sixfold Story of Revival for the Spring Equinox

In the early spring of 2024, in the hills of Eastside L.A. I happened upon Rinconcito Del Cielo: Little Corner of the Sky, or a Little Piece of Heaven. Now feels like the time to share it.

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here’s part one…

There is a little garden of saints, one angel, two Jesuses and three Marys, called Rinconcito del Cielo. It is behind Mission San Conrado, a little church on a secluded hill in a hidden, almost secret, canyon, called Solano.

There were three barrios that were made to disappear when Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley bought this land around Elysian Park and razed whole hills, scooped out a mountainside, and flattened and cemented meadows to build Dodger Stadium and its surrounding parking lots. I once wrote a play about Chavez Ravine and how that 1950s erasure resonated on both coasts, and in many strata of society, in Los Angeles and in Brooklyn for three generations.

I developed the play in live serial performances in Brooklyn & Los Angeles

Because of that, I’d known of this church and of Los Desterrados - The Uprooted Ones — a group of older people who grew up in these neighborhoods— and that they sometimes made their way here to gatherings where they shared memories and elegy for the places that had been erased. I had driven into this little pocket many times while researching my play and driven up the too-brief Amador Street to the small terra cotta Mission San Conrado, its outer walls the tone of a soft orange-rose.

Indeed, the forgotten barrio had excited my imagination and, in the early 2000s, I’d often walked around hoping to encounter someone. But until now, I’d never seen this garden of holy shrines, set further back on the hillside behind the church.

I’d known too, that the barrios were called Bishop, Palo Verde, and La Loma. I’d been told by both my neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Sui, the octogenarian Chinese-American couple next door, and by Armando, down the street, who grew up with his extended Mexican-American family in the house in Echo Park where my husband and I now live, how the topography of the three barrios had been altered beyond recognition by the Dodgers’ move there.

view of La Loma now, Rinconcito at the base

My play focused on a fictional family from “La Loma”: “The Hill”. And I’d thought that I knew a fair amount about the real people who had lived there, and their streets and general stores and fiestas. But what I didn’t know was that this very hill - where las ermitas— or sanctuaries — honor The Holy Cross; El Cristo Negro (The Black Christ of Equilupas, Guatemala); Santo Nino De Atocha (the child Jesus, of Spain and Mexico); San Judas, (the patron saint of lost causes); San Miguel el Archangel ( the light-filled archangel who battles the forces of darkness and evil); and San Pio (Padre Pio of Italy who died in1968) - was the neighborhood called La Loma. It also holds shrines for the Virgin Mary in three of her apparitions: Fatima, Guadalupe, and Lourdes. And I was about to find out how the third of these, Our Lady of Lourdes, had played a catalyst role in the community of La Loma and in the garden that revived its memory.

Notre Dame De Lourdes in her La Loma Grotto

Rinconcito de Cielo, ensconced in its verdant well-tended garden of plants and flowers, framed in trimmed trees and artfully arranged rocks and stones, neatly railed and gracefully winding upward on an ample, sloped landing, marks the border between the neighborhood of Solano Canyon, what I always referred to as “the one that got away” and the remainder of the hill, about two thirds of it, which is fenced off and barred, overgrown and abandoned, and where the vanished neighborhood of La Loma began and was named for. I never knew this until I met Alicia and Lydia each, in her own, truly special and awesome way, a keeper and guardian of this place and its story.

coming soon… part two

Alicia

It’s raining hard, and I’m in my small Honda Fit, taking shelter with Alicia as she recounts the story of the place where we find ourselves, on this wet Saturday morning before Palm Sunday, in the uppermost of two banked parking lots up behind the Mission San Conrado Church.

…to be continued…