![]() In a case of Hollywood fiction becoming reality, an anonymous tree in an unremarkable neighborhood of stucco homes is cast as a landmark - and becomes one. Somehow, that's made this tall, gawky tree a genuine tourist destination. The tree - which technically isn't a pine tree but an Australian conifer - was featured prominently in Taylor Hackford's three-hour, 1993 cult film Blood In, Blood Out, about East L.A. How did this pino get so famoso? A movie, of course. In 1914, plans for a larger train depot called for the tree to be moved once again, this time to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Figueroa, where it sits today at more than 100 feet tall.Įl Pino Famoso, made famous by the 1993 cult film Blood In, Blood Out, about East L.A. There, the tree would greet thousands of newcomers to L.A. ![]() In 1888, one of the trees was torn out (someone wanted to build a warehouse on the land), boxed and wheeled several blocks over to the newly built Southern Pacific Railroad Arcade Station at Central Avenue and Fifth Street. In 1888, the Times called the palms, which had witnessed the town’s evolution from a community of less than 5,000 to a booming city of nearly 50,000, “among the oldest landmarks of Los Angeles.” ![]() Over the next 30 years, the trees grew up as Los Angeles matured around them. Likely still a sapling when it was dug up from a desert canyon in the late 1850s, the tree was transplanted with several other young palms to San Pedro Street in present-day Little Tokyo. Here's what the incomparable history blogger Nathan Masters had to say about it: ![]() How this palm came to sit, unassumingly, at the edge of Exposition Park on Figueroa Street is quite a story. Palm trees aren't indigenous to Los Angeles. ![]()
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