Before the horsemen of New Spain rode into Santa Monica Canyon, on the western coast of what has become greater Los Angeles, the Tongva would set whalebones into the nearby sand to mark their cemeteries. Within thirty years both the whalebones and the Tongva were scattered, and Mexican settlers nestled into pockets of the surrounding landscape.

Detail of the Diseno (Map) submitted in application for title to Rancho la Boca

Crosses on the property of Francisco Marquez, his adobe ruins at rear,  ca. 1908

Whale skeleton on the beach from Travelmag.co.uk

Among the early land grants, one comprising much of present-day Topanga, Santa Monica Canyon, and Pacific Palisades was Rancho la Boca de Santa Mónica: over six thousand acres of rolling hills and plateaus by the sea. In 1838 title to Rancho la Boca passed to native son Ysidro Reyes and blacksmith Francisco Márquez, who built his adobe home in the Canyon and, in consequence of life's frailties, began setting wooden crosses in the nearby soil to mark the shortened lives of his children.

A dozen years later, Don Francisco himself was laid to rest under a large wooden cross in the shadow of the family adobe; and in the following decades, as drought and land speculation brought the rancho era to a close, some three dozen family and friends came to join him in the earth. The final grave was dug in 1916 within the foundation of the old adobe's ruins; here Francisco's son Pascual, who had been an infant when the first cross was raised, was laid to rest, in venerable old age, in the same spot where he was born.

It so happened that the developer's daughter, Dorothy Gillis Loomis, loved history and wished to preserve the cemetery as a connection to our past: convincing her father to set aside Lot #30 as the Márquez Family Cemetery, she commissioned well-known architect John Byers to enclose the graves within a gated adobe wall. Dorothy then drove to a Downtown Los Angeles artesanía shop, on Broadway, where she purchased a statue to go in the adobe wall's nicho: the antique Mexican bulto she selected gave the street out front its name.

Witihin a decade of Pascual's passing, the isolation and silence of the Canyon passed as well, when Robert Loomis' Santa Monica Land and Water Company subdivided hill and dale into Tract 9247.

Saint Lawrence was a deacon of the Church and defender of the poor, on whose behalf he was martyred, around the year 258 of the Common Era.  A rather gruesomely popular legend tells that he was roasted alive (in the miniature at right, he holds a grill similar to that on which he is alleged to have been burned); and because his Feast Day falls on August 10th, believers interpreted the meteor showers as his fiery tears, raining from the heavens on the anniversary of his death.

Every August the nighttime sky puts on one of its most remarkable displays, known as the Perseid meteor showers: for several nights, beginning about midnight on August tenth, hundreds of meteors stream down from the direction of the constellation Perseus. Although astronomers only identified these meteor showers at about the same time that Ysidro Reyes and Francisco Márquez became owners of Rancho la Boca de Santa Mónica, it turns out that in Europe, rural peasants had known of them since long before the first Spaniards came to California.

Illuminated Capital depicting St. Lawrence, from the 15th century Breviary of Martin of Aragon

Dorothy Gillis Loomis never disclosed why she selected a statue of San Lorenzo - Saint Lawrence - to go in the nicho of the Márquez Family Cemetery; but it seems a pretty appropriate choice. For, every August the darting flares of San Lorenzo's tears remind us of the transience of our occupation of this land, as they also mourn the bygone evenings when las lágrimas de San Lorenzo were visible throughout Santa Monica Canyon, across Rancho la Boca de Santa Mónica, all over the City of Los Angeles, and in all of the old Tongva and Chumash lands.

Essay on San Lorenzo Street by J. Michael Walker, from his book, All the Saints of the City of the Angels, copyright 2008, Heyday Books. All Rights Reserved.