The Brief

At first glance, the fountain at the new Mathews Street Park in Boyle Heights looks like any other fountain. It’s round and lined with shiny tiles in tones of aquamarine blue.

But take a closer look and you’ll see that first, there’s no water. Walk around it, and you’ll find that many of the painted tiles depict Boyle Heights landmarks — places like Mariachi Plaza and the Breed Street Shul, along with less-familiar landmarks like the old Japanese Hospital on Fickett Street, and the Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church.

Then, look really closely at the tiles and you’ll see QR codes. Scan them with a cell phone and you’ll find a collection of oral histories from the historic L.A. neighborhood.

Colorful tiles depict the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights to the left; note the QR code at bottom right.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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This interactive public art project is the brainchild of local artist Mike Saijo, a longtime Boyle Heights resident.

“It’s titled Intersections, about the intersection of the Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, and Black communities in the Boyle Heights area,” Saijo said.

Saijo, who is Japanese American, has long been drawn to Boyle Heights’ past as a haven for people who, due to restrictive covenants, were unwelcome elsewhere in L.A. Over the years. All of these communities put down roots in the neighborhood. It’s a theme that Saijo has explored in his art before.

“I wanted to create a public art version of this concept,” Saijo said.

And that’s what he did.

The pocket park opened in February on the onetime site of a large house that, along with a smaller one behind it, sat abandoned before catching fire. Saijo, who lives across the alley, remembers that day.

The fountain structure at Mathews Street Park, a recently opened pocket park in Boyle Heights.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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“I saw the house catch on from my place,” he said. “I was kind of watching to see what's happening, and they started building this park.”

The city acquired the property and built the park for about $5 million using state Proposition 68 funds. Saijo got involved when he learned there was a callout for a public art feature.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, this is like right behind my studio, like, I gotta apply for this,'” Saijo said.

He applied and received the commission. Working with the Department of Cultural Affairs, he completed the project in about a year.

A tile rendition of the famous stone "kiosko" from Boyle Heights' Mariachi Plaza adorns the Mathews Street Park fountain.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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To design the tiles, he used old photos and hand-drawn sketches, working with several tile shops to produce them. Some of the tiles — like those depicting the iconic stone “kiosko” of Mariachi Plaza, the old Sears retail building and the Breed Street Shul — were intentionally made to look vintage using an old-school production process.

Some of the tiles are on the fountain structure, others are embedded in the concrete around it, which is designed to look like a street grid of Boyle Heights.

A fountain of stories

The heaviest lift was the oral histories. Saijo says he first reached out to the Boyle Heights Historical Society, and then began making connections.

Part of it involved paying visits to “the churches and temples that I've been living next to, but never really talked to anybody there,” he said. “So I had a reason to go over there and start asking questions.”

Mike Saijo scans one of the tiles embedded around the Mathews Street Park fountain.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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Saijo said that, altogether, he recorded 25 oral histories from Boyle Heights stakeholders: A pastor whose Creole great-grandfather started the Mt. Carmel church, once a beacon for Boyle Heights’ Black community; the granddaughter of a pioneering female doctor, an immigrant from Japan who treated Japanese patients in Boyle Heights when few doctors or hospitals would; the founding president of the Breed Street Shul Project, a group dedicated to preserving the historic synagogue; the owner of the venerated Candelas Guitars shop, owned by the same Mexican American family for decades.

Saijo worked with an audio professional, Alex Gomez, who worked on production and also provided narration.

There are also poems and stories about more offbeat landmarks, like “El Pino,” the giant pine tree made famous in the movie “Blood In, Blood Out.”

‘Like being in a research library’

Some of the oral histories are not necessarily related to landmarks, but family stories. One recent Friday, Saijo was joined in the park by Shirlee Smith, 87, who grew up in Boyle Heights. She’d just driven out from Las Vegas with her daughter to see the park for the first time, and to hear her story — about her dad, Eugene Pickett.

As Smith took a seat at the fountain, Saijo scanned a nearby tile showing an old photo of kids swimming in a pool. Smith closed her eyes and listened to herself tell the story of how her father and other Black parents protested racist policies at the local playground.

Mike Saijo, left, and Shirlee Smith at Mathews Street Park. Smith, who grew up in Boyle Heights, contributed one of the oral histories for Saijo's public art project.

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“They protested segregation of the swimming pool at Evergreen Playground, where colored people could only swim on Wednesdays, the day the water was drained and the pool was cleaned,” Smith’s recording goes. “They then took their protests to the Los Angeles City Council. They won.”

After her recording ended, Smith paused for a bit before speaking.

“Amazing,” she said quietly. “Technology. What can I say? I’m wordless.”

Smith added that she grew up swimming in that public pool whenever she wanted to. And she didn’t know until adulthood that her dad had helped make that possible.

“It's just amazing because there is so much information here in this area,” said Smith, who formed her own remembrance project a few years ago, Black Boyle Heights. “I mean, it's like being in a research library.”

Saijo agreed.

“Yeah, that's the idea of creating a place where we can archive all this,” he said.

And as he sees it, not necessarily in a research library, but at the local park.

This story first appeared in the Boyle Heights Beat.

Air regulators on Thursday ordered Lineage Logistics to strengthen odor-control measures, expand air monitoring and improve communication with residents as cleanup of the burned warehouse continues.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing board unanimously approved an abatement order on the second day of a public hearing into a series of air quality violations tied to the June fire in Boyle Heights.

The board did not require Lineage to pay any financial penalties, which several elected officials, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, had requested in light of the numerous air quality violations it had been issued.

Lineage is required, among other things, to:

• Each day remove 10%, or about 8.8 million pounds, of the food waste stored in the facility at the time of the fire; 
• Conduct more monitoring for airborne pollutants further from the warehouse; 
• Increase communication with the community, including providing updates on the cleanup in Spanish.

Many of the order’s requirements had already been implemented at the site, Lineage representatives said, while the community communication plan and increased air quality monitoring is expected to happen within five days.

Representatives for AQMD said the order was designed to strike a balance between swift food waste removal and work to control the odors plaguing the community. AQMD focuses specifically on air pollution regulation.

Dominic DiCarlo, Lineage’s vice president of global safety and compliance, said that he believes all of the rotting bulk food items will be removed by next week, without citing a specific date. He added that it would take another week to remove the rest of the material and fully disinfect the facility.

Bass ordered that all biohazard food waste be removed from the facility by Aug. 14. It’s unclear if Lineage will meet the mayor’s deadline.

DiCarlo said the company expects to spend between $80 million and $100 million on the cleanup and remediation of the burn site. He claims that about 80% of the approximately 88 million pounds of food stored at the facility has been removed to about 10 landfills and recycling facilities in Southern California and Arizona.

“This order will ensure that there are enforceable conditions on [Lineage] as it completes this cleanup project, which will minimize odor impacts on the community and expedite removal of food waste which is the source of these odors,” said Josephine Lee, senior deputy counsel for AQMD.

A new guide from a group of local scientists helps Angelenos affected by the 2025 L.A. fires navigate questions about soil testing and clean up.

The guidelines are based on soil tests conducted by USC CLEAN and Community Action Project Los Angeles on more than 6,000 lots in and around burn zones in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

Sujeet Rao, the health and well-being practice director at Public Exchange at USC, who contributed to the guide, said it's a response to questions that he and other contributors knew residents had.

“We all came together … to help fire affected families understand and navigate questions they may have about environmental contamination related to the fires,” Rao said.

The guide includes information about soil contamination, testing, cleanup methods and ways to reduce your exposure risk.

The dangers of soil contamination

When the Eaton and Palisades fires burned down houses and garages, items including paint, kitchen appliances and car batteries released dangerous substances into the environment.

Exposure to these substances can increase the risk of respiratory, neurological and reproductive problems, as well as certain cancers.

Lead was the most common concern, according to the scientists’ testing.

Rao said that’s worrying because lead is a neurotoxin.

“What that means is that [for] especially young children whose brains are still developing or women who are pregnant, lead can affect the development of the brain,” Rao said.

Should you test your soil? 

Rao said it’s hard to say whether any specific property needs soil testing or cleanup, but gave some general guidelines.

If your house burned, definitely.

If you saw ash in the air, on the ground or otherwise near your house during the fires, get your soil tested.

If not, testing is likely unnecessary.

Other things to consider are the age of the houses that burned and their proximity to your property.

“We do know that if you’re in a neighborhood that has a lot of old housing, it is more likely that there is lead that could have been mobilized,” Rao said. “The inverse of that is, in the Palisades, we generally see much lower levels of lead contamination because the housing there tends to be so much newer.”

What to know about soil testing

The guide suggests two main options for going about testing.

One option is to hire specialists to come to your house to collect and test samples.

The other option is collect samples yourself and submit them to a testing program, such as USC CLEAN.

In the testing results, look for contaminant levels that exceed the residential limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency or the California Department of Toxic Substances Control.

Both account for how the area is used, including whether children are playing outside or people are gardening.

Cleanup methods

If your soil test results are above the EPA or DTSC limits, the guide offers four main methods to clean it up.

1. Excavation: Removing the soil, throwing it out at a disposal facility and replacing it with clean soil.
2. Capping: Putting clean soil, gravel or another physical barrier between the contaminated soil and the people and animals who may come into contact with it.
3. Immobilization: Adding compost, phosphorus or other materials to stop the spread of contaminants.
4. Bioremediation: Putting plants, bacteria or fungi into the affected soil to break down biodegradable contaminants.

Some soil remediation can be paid for through insurance. Costs will depend on the size of your yard and which contaminants are present. The guide estimates that the least costly options are capping and immobilization, which can run around $10,000.

The full soil remediation guide is on the Consortium website.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is once more trying to limit the number of people who are born in the country who can become American citizens, in a sign that even after his first attempt at limiting birthright citizenship was rejected by the Supreme Court, he’s ready to try again.

The president said he was signing two executive actions on immigration, including one limiting the number of people eligible for U.S. citizenship after being born in the United States.

The written executive order released later Thursday was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations, as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.

It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.”

A second order seeks to curb what Trump called “birth tourism” by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.

Trump said he thought his latest actions would be constitutional.

“I thought we were going to win it at the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, we had a bad decision, very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it and we’re ending it a different way,” Trump said.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s previous efforts to declare that children born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily aren’t American citizens, and upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship.

On Trump’s first day in office of his second term, he signed an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship, which allows anyone born in the United States to automatically become an American citizen.

Trump’s administration was immediately sued by opponents who said the executive order went against the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, which makes anyone born in the country a citizen, with very limited exceptions.

The executive order was blocked by several lower courts and never took effect.

In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote. But the vote was too close for many immigration advocates and legal observers who felt the legal question of birthright citizenship was a long-settled issue.

Just past the doorway at ALTO, off busy Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, the bar opens up under exposed post-and-beam ceilings, tanned cowhides hanging along the walls like abstract art.

Grab a seat at one of the small tables and settle in for the open-fire South American restaurant's new, more casual bar concept, where street food takes center stage from executive Chef Esteban Klenzi and co-founder Juana Castellanos.

In its first year, ALTO has already landed a spot in the Michelin Guide California.

One culture, two chefs

Both chefs came up through fine dining — including time in Spain's Basque Country — and watched their peers wear rigid, high-pressure kitchen culture as a badge of honor.

But Castellanos and Klenzi wanted something different.

For Klenzi, cooking is as much about feeling as it is about food — an idea his new bar menu extends directly.

"It's like cooking at home for my friends or my family," he said.

ALTO Co-Founder Chef Juana Castellanos and Executive Chef Esteban Klenzi.

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Their connection runs deeper than the kitchen, though. Both chefs grew up around the Río de la Plata, the shared basin uniting Argentina and Uruguay into a single Rioplatense identity — once part of the same Spanish colonial territory before an 1828 treaty, brokered under British pressure, split them apart. Not unlike the Basque Country straddling Spain and France: one culture, divided by a border neither side chose.

What to order

The bar leans into what Klenzi calls the rotisserías tradition — the everyday, prepared-food spots common across Argentina. That shows up in the Tongue & Trout Roe Toast ($17): sous-vide beef tongue over brioche, finished with a celery-carrot vinaigrette and a crown of trout roe. It's a savory, briny bite, perfect for sharing to start the meal.

Close-up of two pieces of toast on a dark plate, each topped with ruffled, thin-sliced beef tongue tinted pale pink, scattered with chopped herbs and diced vegetables, and crowned with a generous mound of glistening orange roe.

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The Real Deal ($18) — ALTO's take on the classic choripán sandwich — pulls from the dinner menu, too: short rib and smoked pork, the same cuts used in the Asado Banderita and Pork Txuleta.

When the pair first sat down to design the menu, Klenzi found himself facing a deceptively simple question: "Should we make a burger? Or shall we make a choripán?"

They chose the choripán, prizing the way beef and pork together deliver, in his words, "the best flavor you can get from both of them." Lard from the pork chop trim adds richness; the short rib's fat keeps the sausage moist, with smokiness carried over from that same applewood-smoked chop.

For something heartier, there's the Banderita & Frites ($39): a thinner cut of short rib than its dinner-menu counterpart, seared on both sides.

Alongside it, try the smashed potatoes from Weiser Family Farms, cooked in the charcoal oven with beef tallow. Klenzi refuses to serve french fries — this is his answer instead, crisp outside, rich with tallow underneath.

What to drink

A pour from ALTO's Vermucito Experience, served over ice with soda water.

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Ever since I wrote about Spanish vermouth last month, I've been a magnet for the stuff — not complaining, especially during these warmer months. ALTO had me covered, though the serving style looked nothing like what I'm used to.

Unlike the Spanish and Italian style of an orange slice and olive, Argentine vermouth is served over ice with soda water — lighter, easier to drink.

A cozy corner of ALTO's dining room, where velvet chairs surround a wood-burning fireplace.

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On the table: a trio from the Vermucito Experience — Las Flores blanco from Uruguay, and La Fuerza's rojo and sideral from Argentina, Malbec-based pours ranging from $12 to $22.

"When you pour it in the glass, it's almost red. It looks almost like a wine," Klenzi said of La Fuerza's rojo, made with Malbec. "You can really feel the pure essence of the Malbec wine."

The regular dinner menu is a great choice for a special night out. But the bar is for every other night — the "almost every day" Klenzi imagined when he decided a choripán, not a burger, was the answer.

"If we see your face every day, we're gonna take care of you every day," Klenzi said.