Until I came across this circa 1930s photo, I wasn’t even aware you could see the Los Angeles City Hall from Olvera Street. Maybe you can’t these days. That street is so packed with stalls and shops and people, that it feels like it’s only little world. This guy with his donkey seem very at home there. I can’t imagine there were many donkeys to be found in downtown L.A. once this little guy clip-clopped into the great beyond.

Andie says: “In the ’50s and ’60s, around the back of one of the restaurants there was a shed with a huge steel flat top and about a dozen women making tortillas by hand. They alternated corn and flour tortillas every hour. I used to stop by when we were ready to go home and buy three dozen of each. They were the best tortillas I ever tasted. In the late ’60s my stepchildren would eat at least half a dozen each on the drive home, sometimes more. I would make enchiladas with the corn and burritos and quesadillas with the flour. I had an extensive garden and grew a lot of peppers, some quite unusual. On one visit there I took a bag of peppers I had grown from some seeds I had smuggled home from when I spent a couple of months at Palenque when it was first being cleared. The ladies were thrilled to get them as they weren’t available here. They filled up two shopping bags with tortillas, tamales and some pan dulce.”

My thanks to Jonny Yuma for this photo from November 2015: