El Pino is a pine that is not a pine, on a lot nobody may enter, and East Los Angeles once petitioned to save it from a felling that was never coming. It is a bunya pine, an Australian conifer of the monkey puzzle family, on a private lot at the southeast corner of Folsom Street and North Indiana Street, where Boyle Heights meets East Los Angeles. From the crest of the hill it is visible for miles, near Evergreen Cemetery, and that visibility is how it became a landmark. The 1993 film Blood In Blood Out used it as a location, and the neighbourhood took it up as a symbol of resistance to the gentrification changing the streets around it. In December 2020 a rumour spread that it was about to be cut down. It was false, and a petition followed anyway. In March 2021 the lot's owner told the Los Angeles Times he had no plan to develop it, and accounts from 2022 still describe it standing. Its age is soft. One local history source says it arrived on the lot in the late 1940s, which would make it roughly seventy years old or more, and nobody we found has measured it. We have no sighting dated after 2022 either, so if you pass it, tell us how it looks. The lot is private. This is a tree to see from the pavement on Folsom Street, not to walk up to.
Southeast corner of Folsom Street and North Indiana Street, East Los Angeles / Boyle Heights border You can recognise it from far off: a bunya pine visible for miles from the crest of the hill. It stands on a private lot at the southeast corner of Folsom Street and North Indiana Street; view it from the pavement.
Stands on a private lot but is seen from the public streets, Folsom Street especially; view only, do not enter the lot.
Local buses to Folsom St and Indiana St; no rail station within an easy walk (not checked).
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.