Los Angeles
Mason worked in Los Angeles as a nurse and midwife. One of her employers was the noted physician John Strother Griffin. Saving carefully, she was one of the first African Americans to purchase land in the city. As a businesswoman she amassed a small fortune of nearly $300,000, which she shared generously with charities. Biddy also fed and sheltered the poor, and visited prisoners. She was instrumental in founding a traveler's aid center, and an elementary school for black children. Because of her kind and giving spirit, many called her "Auntie Mason" or "Grandma Mason"
In 1872 Mason was a founding member of First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the city's first black church. The organizing meetings were held in her home on Spring Street. She donated the land on which the church was built.
She spoke fluent Spanish and was a well-known figure downtown, especially at the old plaza, where she conducted business. She dined on occasion at the home of Pio Pico, the last governor of Alta California and a wealthy Los Angeles land owner.
Mason is an honoree in the California Social Work Hall of Distinction. She is also celebrated on Biddy Mason Day on November 16.
In her honor, the Biddy Mason Park has been established on South Spring Street in Los Angeles, California.
Read more about this topic: Biddy Mason
Famous quotes by los angeles:
“In the great department store of life, baseball is the toy department.”
—Los Angeles Sportscaster. quoted in Independent Magazine (London, Sept. 28, 1991)
“Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)