When Wild Beasts Roamed Eagle Rock

One of the highlights of the somewhat claustrophobic lobby at Eagle Rock City Hall is a five-foot-long 1982 painting by the artist Concie Kibbe. It depicts what longtime Eagle Rock resident Richard Espinoza aptly described in his January 2011 Neighborhood Nomad column for Patch as "a bucolic scene" of a Tongva encampment by a stream below the 50-foot-tall granite Eagle Rock, from which the neighborhood gets its name. (See photo.)

"What is depicted in the panoramic scene are a Tongva man, standing and pointing, and a woman sitting off to his side, both surveying the valley and looking east and just beyond the Eagle Rock to a bear shown standing on its hind legs," wrote Espinoza. "If there is any tension in the scene it can be directed to the bear, which, I presume, if the tableau was to play out, is heading to the stream for a little fishing and the possibility of an encounter with the people swimming in it."

This was of course a time when wild beasts roamed Eagle Rock—as a recent article in the Pasadena Star-News reminds us. Written by a Pasadena Museum of History volunteer, the article  pays homage to Pasadena's "thriving neighbor," which, a decade before the turn of the 19th century, was almost exclusively a blue-collar farming community of 110 people that cultivated tomatoes, apricots and blackberries in addition to corn, potatoes, melons and barley.

Click here to the read the Pasadena Star-News article and get a dose of Eagle Rock history.