Long before they put the town in downtown, before shops, offices and theaters lined Broadway, this area was home to Biddy Mason. A slave with three daughters, she walked behind her master's wagon train to California in 1851. In 1856 she petitioned the court to declare her free, as the state was anti-slavery. Biddy won her freedom and settled in Los Angeles to work as a midwife. Ten years later she bought a house where she operated an orphanage and eventually founded the city's First African Methodist Episcopal Church on land she had purchased and then donated to the church. She acquired numerous parcels in what is now downtown.

Biddy Mason's life is commemorated in a series of plaques on a wall in the park that bears her name. Betye Saar's "Biddy Mason's House of the Open Hand," 1990, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville's "Biddy Mason: Time & Place" 1990, indeed give one a sense of Biddy's time and place. Built on what was previously a narrow parking lot and a web of raw alleys, the park, designed by landscape architects Burton & Spitz, is now graced by willowy camphor and jacaranda trees that shade a procession of engaging courtyards and walkways, focused on an unusual sculptural assemblage of water-spouting pipes.

Biddy Mason Park
Broadway Spring Center
333 South Spring Street
Mon. - Fri. 8:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.,
Sat. & Sun. 9:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.

From the wall in the courtyard turn right and walk a few steps north, go up the steps and into the back door of the...