In 1895, with difficult access to water and need for police presence in an increasingly rowdy red light district, Highland Park was annexed to the city of Los Angeles, creating one of its first suburbs.
Just as the Los Angeles land boom of the late 1880's created an increased demand for water, new arrivals to the region needed expanded transportation arteries and options.
By the turn of the century, city officials had recognized that the underground water reserves of the L.A. River system, including the Arroyo, would not be able to sustain the growth and demand of the city.
The success of Portola's mission to colonize California launched an inexorable Spanish expansion driven by land grants and gifts that re-distributed Native American lands among the criollo elite.
Fear of British encroachment along the Pacific coast of California led the Spanish crown to expand its empire north in the late 1760s and begin colonizing an area previously documented a century and a half earlier by the Spanish explorer Sebastián Viz...
The Hahamog'na, a band of native Tongva people, settled alongside the Arroyo Seco from the confluence of the Los Angeles River through Elysian Valley, Highland Park, South Pasadena, and Glendale, to Pasadena and Altadena.
For several hundred years, the hills surrounding this small tributary of the Los Angeles River were home to the Hahamog'na people, the river's banks a rich source of both steelhead trout - now extinct in the area - and medicinal flora.