Pío Pico and Antonio Cuyas

Abstract

The 1870 Pico House luxury hotel on Los Angeles’s historic Plaza has always been associated with Pío Pico, the last governor of California in the Mexican Era. Based on historical evidence in the Archive of the city’s El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument and further research, archives manager Michael Henderson traces the proprietorship of the hotel from its first conception as a partnership between Pico and Antonio Cuyas, through successive management and legal cases to its eclipse and the deaths of its original proprietors in the 1890s.