On Olvera Street, Unearthed Past Faces Uncertain Future

What began as just one more hole in the ground revealed an archeological cornucopia in downtown Los Angeles--and a wealth of bureaucratic problems.

A 1970 state law requires that an archeologist be on hand during significant construction excavations in case historic artifacts are unearthed. So when digging began for elevator shafts and wheelchair ramps on city land on Olvera Street, archeologist Stephen Alexandrowicz was hired to be there, shovel in one hand and camera in the other.

What he found was the richest cache of artifacts from the city’s birthplace--more than 50,000 cultural treasures, layer by layer, the belongings of the city’s earliest denizens.

But don’t count on seeing them on display any time soon; Alexandrowicz has yet to be paid in full. So the artifacts still repose in bags and boxes in his Victorian house in San Bernardino.

It was an exciting five months for Alexandrowicz’s team in 1995 as they unearthed thousands of artifacts from the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument site--including part of the city’s 1860s brick aqueduct called Zanja Madre, the Mother Ditch. Items from two centuries of Los Angeles lifestyles were discovered: mortars and pestles, a chamber pot and privy foundation, bottles, English and French ceramics, Chinese porcelain.

It was an archeologist’s dream come true: The finds were layered era by era, each marked bydifferent-colored strata of dirt, like a multilayer cake. The exceptional find of artifacts in situ will tell a fuller story of the region’s people: the Native Americans, Spanish, Mexicans and finally modern settlers.

Alexandrowicz’s discoveries offer valuable details of early inhabitants’ lives. “These are probably the most important finds ever discovered at El Pueblo. The excavations are not only of local and state significance, but of national significance,” Jean Bruce Poole, historic museum director for the monument, told the Downtown News in 1995.

More than 30 years of random digging in the area had not turned up nearly as many relics as this one excavation.

“We were basically given the opportunity to peel back the layers of history to uncover indications of the first vestiges of Los Angeles,” Alexandrowicz said.

For five months, Alexandrowicz and his team of excavators hand-carved six-foot shafts into the plaza floor and delicately sifted the earth from their “core sample” diggings.

“We found items from the Native American period as well as Spanish, Mexican and American artifacts, many of which were buried in a trash pit. People had walked across here every day and had no idea they were walking on history,” Alexandrowicz said.

A dark soil nearly a foot deep contained Native American objects, while the caramel-colored layer above it held Spanish and Mexican-era items that were “exceptionally well-preserved,” Alexandrowicz said. “They were sealed in an air lock and weren’t allowed to deteriorate over time.”

An intact hand-blown cod liver oil bottle from the 1880s was buried inches below a concrete walkway on Olvera Street. A few feet outside the back door of the Casa la Golondrina restaurant--a 142-year-old brick house built for the Italian Pelanconi family--Alexandrowicz found the brick foundation for a privy, and inside it, a chamber pot, glassware and bottles.

The artifacts are being carefully held hostage in a dispute between the archeologist who excavated them and the city of Los Angeles, on whose property they were found, as both sides fight--not over the relics, which are clearly city property, but over the archeologist’s bill.

State law requires the finding, cleaning, cataloging, labeling and storage of artifacts. Alexandrowicz also videotaped much of the dig, and reconstructed the site on computer graphics.

But no one expected the find to be as huge or the excavation to go on as long as it did. What everyone thought would last a few weeks lasted five months, and the price ballooned to $160,000.

Alexandrowicz has already been paid $70,000 by the contractor, who was reimbursed by Proposition G money--a fund to make city edifices accessible to the handicapped and seismically sound.

But not long after Alexandrowicz sent in a second bill for $89,000, the contractor declared bankruptcy, and the bill went to the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument Authority Commission, which in 1994 had taken over the area from the Department of Recreation and Parks, which originally authorized the work.

Alexandrowicz’s request was denied--no money. (The last such occurrence was in 1984, when the Gabrielino “Lost Village of Encino” was found. An archeologist took the city to court for the $2.6-million fee in that case, and settled for an undisclosed amount.)

But Alexandrowicz says he doesn’t want to sue.

The El Pueblo commission is still trying to find the money to pay him. Alexandrowicz, for his part, has cut his original $89,000 bill to $50,000.

But even if Alexandrowicz’s bill is paid and the matter settled, the city of Los Angeles has no civic museum to display the artifacts.

El Pueblo has hoped for years for an archeological research center in the Pico House; the few hundred artifacts culled from other digs cannot be shown except on private tours because there is no money to keep even that exhibit open.