Timeline of the Portolá expedition
This Timeline of the Portolá expedition tracks the progress during 1769 and 1770 of the first European exploration of the Spanish possession of Alta California, present-day California, United States. Missionary Juan Crespi kept a diary detailing the group's daily progress and detailed descriptions of their location, allowing modern researchers to reconstruct their journey. Portions of other diaries by Gaspar de Portolá, engineer Miguel Costansó, missionary Junípero Serra, army officer Jose de Canizares, Sergeant José Ortega survived; when analyzed as a whole, they provide detailed daily information on the route traveled and camping locations, as well as descriptions of the country and its native inhabitants. The Portolá expedition was the brainchild of visitador in New Spain. On his recommendation, King Charles III of Spain authorized Gálvez to explore Alta California and establish the first permanent Spanish presence there. Gálvez was supported in the planning of an expedition by Carlos Francisco de Croix, Father Junípero Serra.
Gálvez and Serra met in 1768, to plan the expedition. The goals set were to establish nearby missions -- at San Diego and Monterrey; these places had been described and given names 166 years before by the maritime explorations of Sebastián Vizcaíno. In addition, the name San Carlos Borromeo was chosen for the mission at Monterrey. Gálvez placed Gaspar de Portolá appointed governor of Las Californias, in overall command of the expedition. Second in command was Captain Fernando Rivera y Moncada, commander of the Presidio at Loreto. Serra headed the Franciscan missionary contingent. Three ships were assigned: two to follow the land march up the coast and keep the expedition supplied from the naval depot at La Paz, another ship to connect La Paz with the mainland at San Blas; the expedition marched from Baja California to San Diego. Rivera led the first group, consisting of soldiers and engineers to prepare the road and deal with hostile natives. Portolá and Serra followed in a second group with the civilians and baggage.
Serra stayed with the new mission in San Diego while Rivera took a smaller group north. Led by Rivera's scouts, the road followed established native paths as much as possible, blazing new trails where necessary; the two main requirements for a camping place were an adequate supply of drinkable fresh water and forage for the livestock. For that reason, most of the campsites were near ponds or springs. All three of the main land expedition diaries give; as used at that time, one Spanish league equaled about 2.6 miles. A typical day's march covered 2–4 leagues, with frequent rest days; the following year, Portolá returned north as far as Monterrey to establish the second Presidio there and to establish a new provincial seat. Serra came north by sea to make the Mission San Carlos Borromeo del rio Carmelo his headquarters. Portolá's successor as governor, Pedro Fages, found an easier inland route in 1770 from Monterrey to San Francisco Bay, further explored the eastern side of the bay in 1772; the 1776 expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza used the official Portolá expedition report to follow in the footsteps of Portolá from Mission San Gabriel to Monterrey, taking the Fages route from Monterrey to San Francisco Bay.
Much of today's Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail in coastal California was the Portolá trail. Sixteen of the twenty-one Spanish Missions of California were established along the Portolá route; the Crespí diary is the most complete of the three land expedition accounts, because Crespí was the only diarist present during the entire expedition. It includes nearly all of the information found in the other two, plus many extra details about the country and the native peoples. Herbert Bolton annotated it with modern references. Bolton added information about the modern campsite locations. Bolton included maps with his "best guess" of the expedition's march routes, superimposed on modern California maps. In 2001, a new edition of the Crespí diary was published, with side-by-side Spanish and English text - both of Crespí's original field notes, his expanded rewrite for the official version. Vicente Vila, captain of the San Carlos — one of three ships supporting the expedition — kept a diary that has survived, but he only sailed as far as San Diego, never joined the expedition on land.
Free online translations of both Vila's and Costansó's diaries are available. Fages wrote, in 1775, an after-the fact account of the 1769–70 expedition; the official report of the expedition is available online. Written by Carlos Francisco de Croix, marqués de Croix, the brief document drew on the diaries kept by the expedition participants. "Three Portolá Expedition Diaries". The Pacifica Historical Society website includes a useful formatting of the three most complete diaries side-by-side for each day of the expedition from July 14 on
Parish
A parish is a territorial entity in many Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a parish priest, who might be assisted by one or more curates, who operates from a parish church. A parish covered the same geographical area as a manor, its association with the parish church remains paramount. By extension the term parish refers not only to the territorial entity but to the people of its community or congregation as well as to church property within it. In England this church property was technically in ownership of the parish priest ex-officio, vested in him on his institution to that parish. First attested in English in the late, 13th century, the word parish comes from the Old French paroisse, in turn from Latin: paroecia, the latinisation of the Ancient Greek: παροικία, translit. Paroikia, "sojourning in a foreign land", itself from πάροικος, "dwelling beside, sojourner", a compound of παρά, "beside, by, near" and οἶκος οἶκος, "house".
As an ancient concept, the term "parish" occurs in the long-established Christian denominations: Catholic, Anglican Communion, the Eastern Orthodox Church, Lutheran churches, in some Methodist, Congregationalist and Presbyterian administrations. The eighth Archbishop of Canterbury Theodore of Tarsus appended the parish structure to the Anglo-Saxon township unit, where it existed, where minsters catered to the surrounding district. Broadly speaking, the parish is the standard unit in episcopal polity of church administration, although parts of a parish may be subdivided as a chapelry, with a chapel of ease or filial church serving as the local place of worship in cases of difficulty to access the main parish church. In the wider picture of ecclesiastical polity, a parish see. Parishes within a diocese may be grouped into a deanery or vicariate forane, overseen by a dean or vicar forane, or in some cases by an archpriest; some churches of the Anglican Communion have deaneries as units of an archdeaconry.
The Church of England geographical structure uses the local parish church as its basic unit. The parish system survived the Reformation with the Anglican Church's secession from Rome remaining untouched, thus it shares its roots with the Catholic Church's system described above. Parishes may extend into different counties or hundreds and many parishes comprised extra outlying portions in addition to its principal district being described as'detached' and intermixed with the lands of other parishes. Church of England parishes nowadays all lie within one of 44 dioceses divided between the provinces of Canterbury, 30 and York, 14; each parish has its own parish priest and supported by one or more curates or deacons - although as a result of ecclesiastical pluralism some parish priests might have held more than one parish living, placing a curate in charge of those where they do not reside. Now, however, it is common for a number of neighbouring parishes to be placed under one benefice in the charge of a priest who conducts services by rotation, with additional services being provided by lay readers or other non-ordained members of the church community.
A chapelry was a subdivision of an ecclesiastical parish in England, parts of Lowland Scotland up to the mid 19th century. It had a similar status to a township but was so named as it had a chapel which acted as a subsidiary place of worship to the main parish church. In England civil parishes and their governing parish councils evolved in the 19th century as ecclesiastical parishes began to be relieved of what became considered to be civic responsibilities, thus their boundaries began to diverge. The word "parish" acquired a secular usage. Since 1895, a parish council elected by public vote or a parish meeting administers a civil parish and is formally recognised as the level of local government below a district council; the traditional structure of the Church of England with the parish as the basic unit has been exported to other countries and churches throughout the Anglican Communion and Commonwealth but does not continue to be administered in the same way. The parish is the basic level of church administration in the Church of Scotland.
Spiritual oversight of each parish church in Scotland is responsibility of the congregation's Kirk Session. Patronage was regulated in 1711 and abolished in 1874, with the result that ministers must be elected by members of the congregation. Many parish churches in Scotland today are "linked" with neighbouring parish churches served by a single minister. Since the abolition of parishes as a unit of civil government in Scotland in 1929, Scottish parishes have purely ecclesiastical significance and the boundaries may be adjusted by the local Presbytery; the church in Wales is made up of six dioceses. Parishes were civil administration areas until communities were established in 1974. Although they are more simply called congregations and have no geographic boundaries, in the United Methodist Church congregations are called parishes. A prominent example of this usage comes in The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, in which the committee of every local congregation that handles staff support is referred to as the committee on Pastor-Parish Relations.
This committee gives recommendations to the bishop on behalf of the parish/congregation since it is the United Methodist Bishop of the episcopal area who appoints a pastor to each congregation. The same is true in the Af
Spanish missions in California
The Spanish missions in California comprise a series of 21 religious outposts or missions established between 1769 and 1833 in today's U. S. State of California. Founded by Catholic priests of the Franciscan order to evangelize the Native Americans, the missions led to the creation of the New Spain province of Alta California and were part of the expansion of the Spanish Empire into the most northern and western parts of Spanish North America. Following long-term secular and religious policy of Spain in Spanish America, the missionaries forced the native Californians to live in settlements called reductions, disrupting their traditional way of life; the missionaries introduced European fruits, cattle, horses and technology. The missions have been accused by critics and now, of various abuses and oppression. In the end, the missions had mixed results in their objectives: to convert and transform the natives into Spanish colonial citizens. By 1810, Spain's king had been imprisoned by the French, financing for military payroll and missions in California ceased.
In 1821, Mexico achieved independence from Spain, although Mexico did not send a governor to California until 1824, only a portion of payroll was reinstated. The 21,000 Mission Indians produced hide and tallow and wool and textiles at this time, the leather products were exported to Boston, South America, Asia which sustained the colonial economy from 1810 until 1830, but tended to give British or New England merchant captains importance; the missions began to lose control over land in the 1820s, as unpaid military men unofficially encroached, but missions maintained authority over native neophytes and control of land holdings until the 1830s. At the peak of its development in 1832, the coastal mission system controlled an area equal to one-sixth of Alta California; the Alta California government secularized the missions after the passage of the Mexican secularization act of 1833. This divided the mission lands into land grants, in effect legitimizing and completing the transfer of Indian congregation lands to military commanders and their most loyal men.
The surviving mission buildings are the state's oldest structures and its most-visited historic monuments. They have become a symbol of California, appearing in many movies and television shows, are an inspiration for Mission Revival architecture; the oldest cities of California formed around or near Spanish missions, including the four largest: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco. Prior to 1754, grants of mission lands were made directly by the Spanish Crown. But, given the remote locations and the inherent difficulties in communicating with the territorial governments, power was transferred to the viceroys of New Spain to grant lands and establish missions in North America. Plans for the Alta California missions were laid out under the reign of King Charles III, came at least in part as a response to recent sightings of Russian fur traders along the California coast in the mid 1700s; the missions were to be interconnected by an overland route which became known as the Camino Real.
The detailed planning and direction of the missions was to be carried out by Friar Junípero Serra, O. F. M.. The Rev. Fermín Francisco de Lasuén took up Serra's work and established nine more mission sites, from 1786 through 1798. Work on the coastal mission chain was concluded in 1823, completed after Serra's death in 1784. Plans to build a twenty-second mission in Santa Rosa in 1827 were canceled; the Rev. Pedro Estévan Tápis proposed establishing a mission on one of the Channel Islands in the Pacific Ocean off San Pedro Harbor in 1784, with either Santa Catalina or Santa Cruz being the most locations, the reasoning being that an offshore mission might have attracted potential people to convert who were not living on the mainland, could have been an effective measure to restrict smuggling operations. Governor José Joaquín de Arrillaga approved the plan the following year, however an outbreak of sarampion killing some 200 Tongva people coupled with a scarcity of land for agriculture and potable water left the success of such a venture in doubt, so no effort to found an island mission was made.
In September 1821,the Rev. Mariano Payeras, "Comisario Prefecto" of the California missions, visited Cañada de Santa Ysabel east of Mission San Diego de Alcalá as part of a plan to establish an entire chain of inland missions; the Santa Ysabel Asistencia had been founded in 1818 as a "mother" mission, the plan's expanding beyond never came to fruition. In addition to the presidio and pueblo, the misión was one of the three major agencies employed by the Spanish sovereign to extend its borders and consolidate its colonial territories. Asistencias were small-scale missions that conducted Mass on days of obligation but lacked a resident priest; the Spanish Californians had never strayed from the coast. Each frontier station was forced to be self-supporting, as existing means of supply were inadequate to maintain a
Patron saint
A patron saint, patroness saint, patron hallow or heavenly protector is a saint who in Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism or Eastern Orthodoxy, is regarded as the heavenly advocate of a nation, craft, class, family or person. Saints become the patrons of places where they were born or had been active. However, there were cases in Medieval Europe where a city which grew to prominence and obtained for its cathedral the remains or some relics of a famous saint who had lived and was buried elsewhere, thus making him or her the city's patron saint – such a practice conferred considerable prestige on the city concerned. In Latin America and the Philippines and Portuguese explorers named a location for the saint on whose feast or commemoration they first visited the place, with that saint becoming the area's patron. Professions sometimes have a patron saint owing to that individual being involved somewhat with it, although some of the connections were tenuous. Lacking such a saint, an occupation would have a patron whose acts or miracles in some way recall the profession.
For example, when the unknown profession of photography appeared in the 19th century, Saint Veronica was made its patron, owing to how her veil miraculously received the imprint of Christ's face after she wiped off the blood and sweat. The veneration or "commemoration" and recognition of patron saints or saints in general is found in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, among some Lutherans and Anglicans. Catholics believe that patron saints, having transcended to the metaphysical, are able to intercede for the needs of their special charges, it is, however discouraged in most Protestant branches such as Calvinism, where the practice is considered a form of idolatry. Although Islam has no codified doctrine of patronage on the part of saints, it has been an important part of both Sunni and Shia Islamic tradition that important classical saints have served as the heavenly advocates for specific Muslim empires, cities and villages. Martin Lings wrote: "There is scarcely a region in the empire of Islam which has not a Sufi for its Patron Saint."
As the veneration accorded saints develops purely organically in Islamic climates, in a manner different to Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, "patron saints" are recognized through popular acclaim rather than through official declaration. Traditionally, it has been understood that the patron saint of a particular place prays for that place's wellbeing and for the health and happiness of all who live therein. However, the Wahhabi and Salafi movements within Sunnism have latterly attacked the veneration of saints, which they claim are a form of idolatry or shirk. More mainstream Sunni clerics have critiqued this argument since Wahhabism first emerged in the 18th century; the critiques notwithstanding, widespread veneration of saints in the Sunni world declined in the 20th century under Wahhabi and Salafi influence. Calendar of saints Guardian angel List of blesseds List of saints Patron saints of ailments and dangers Patron saints of occupations and activities Patron saints of places Patron saints of ethnic groups Saint symbolism Catholic Online: Patron Saints Henry Parkinson.
"Patron Saints". In Herbermann, Charles. Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. "Patron Saint". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920
Ohlone
The Ohlone, named Costanoan by early Spanish colonists, are a Native American people of the Northern California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley. At that time they spoke a variety of related languages; the Ohlone languages belonged to the Costanoan sub-family of the Utian language family, which itself belongs to the proposed Penutian language phylum. The term "Ohlone" has been used in place of "Costanoan" since the 1970s by some tribal groups and by most ethnographers and writers of popular literature. In pre-colonial times, the Ohlone lived in more than 50 distinct landholding groups, did not view themselves as a distinct group, they lived by hunting and gathering, in the typical ethnographic California pattern. The members of these various bands interacted with one another; the Ohlone people practiced the Kuksu religion. Prior to the Gold Rush, the northern California region was one of the most densely populated regions north of Mexico.
However, the arrival of Spanish colonizers to the area in 1769 vastly changed tribal life forever. The Spanish constructed Missions along the California coast with the objective of Christianizing the native people and culture. Between the years 1769 and 1834, the number of Indigenous Californians dropped from 300,000 to 250,000. After California entered into the Union in 1850, the state government perpetrated massacres against the Ohlones. Many of the leaders of these massacres were rewarded with positions in state and federal government; these massacres have been described as genocide. Many are now leading a push for cultural and historical recognition of their tribe and what they have gone through and had taken from them; the Ohlone living today belong to one or another of a number of geographically distinct groups, but not all, in their original home territory. The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has members from around the San Francisco Bay Area, is composed of descendants of the Ohlones/Costanoans from the San Jose, Santa Clara, San Francisco missions.
The Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen Nation, consisting of descendants of intermarried Rumsen Costanoan and Esselen speakers of Mission San Carlos Borromeo, are centered at Monterey. The Amah-Mutsun Tribe are descendants of Mutsun Costanoan speakers of Mission San Juan Bautista, inland from Monterey Bay. Most members of another group of Rumsien language, descendants from Mission San Carlos, the Costanoan Rumsien Carmel Tribe of Pomona/Chino, now live in southern California; these groups, others with smaller memberships are separately petitioning the federal government for tribal recognition. The Ohlone inhabited fixed village locations, moving temporarily to gather seasonal foodstuffs like acorns and berries; the Ohlone people lived in Northern California from the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula down to northern region of Big Sur, from the Pacific Ocean in the west to the Diablo Range in the east. Their vast region included the San Francisco Peninsula, Santa Clara Valley, Santa Cruz Mountains, Monterey Bay area, as well as present-day Alameda County, Contra Costa County and the Salinas Valley.
Prior to Spanish contact, the Ohlone formed a complex association of 50 different "nations or tribes" with about 50 to 500 members each, with an average of 200. Over 50 distinct Ohlone tribes and villages have been recorded; the Ohlone villages interacted through trade and ceremonial events, as well as some internecine conflict. Cultural arts included basket-weaving skills, seasonal ceremonial dancing events, female tattoos and nose piercings, other ornamentation; the Ohlone subsisted as hunter-gatherers and in some ways harvesters. "A rough husbandry of the land was practiced by annually setting of fires to burn-off the old growth in order to get a better yield of seeds—or so the Ohlone told early explorers in San Mateo County." Their staple diet consisted of crushed acorns, grass seeds, berries, although other vegetation and trapped game and seafood, were important to their diet. These food sources were abundant in earlier times and maintained by careful work, through active management of all the natural resources at hand.
Animals in their mild climate included the grizzly bear, elk and deer. The streams held salmon and stickleback. Birds included plentiful ducks, quail, great horned owls, red-shafted flickers, downy woodpeckers and yellow-billed magpies. Waterfowl were the most important birds in the people's diet, which were captured with nets and decoys; the Chochenyo traditional narratives refer to ducks as food, Juan Crespí observed in his journal that geese were stuffed and dried "to use as decoys in hunting others". Along the ocean shore and bays, there were otters, at one time thousands of sea lions. In fact, there were so many sea lions that according to Crespi it "looked like a pavement" to the incoming Spanish. In general, along the bayshore and valleys, the Ohlone constructed dome-shaped houses of woven or bundled mats of tules, 6 to 20 feet in diameter. In hills where redwood trees were accessible, they built conical houses from redwood bark attached to a frame of wood. Residents of Monterey recall Redwood houses.
One of the main village buildings, the sweat lodge was low into the ground, its walls made of earth and roof of earth and brush. They built boats of tule to navigate on the bays propelled by double-bladed paddles. Men did not
United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata
The United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, earlier known as the United Provinces of South America, a union of provinces in the Río de la Plata region of South America, emerged from the May Revolution in 1810 and the Argentine War of Independence of 1810–1818. It comprised most of the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata dependencies and had Buenos Aires as its capital, it is best known in Spanish-language literature as Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata, this being the most common name in use for the country until the enactment of the 1826 Constitution. The Argentine National Anthem refers to the state as "the United Provinces of the South"; the Constitution of Argentina recognises Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata as one of the official names of the country, referred to as "Argentine Nation" in modern legislation. The United Provinces of South America were bordered on the south by the sparsely populated territories of the Pampas and Patagonia, home to the Mapuche and Puelche peoples.
To the north, the Gran Chaco was populated by the Guaycuru nations. To the northwest, across the Upper Peru, lay the Spanish Viceroyalty of Perú. Across the Andes, to the west, was the Spanish-controlled Captaincy General of Chile. To the northeast was Colonial Brazil, a part of the Portuguese Empire the Empire of Brazil in 1821; the change from the Viceroyalty into the United Provinces was not a change of governors, but a revolutionary process that would replace the absolutist monarchy with a republic. The main influences in this were the Enlightenment in Spain, promoting new ideas, the Peninsular War that left Spain without a legitimate king after the Abdications of Bayonne; the concept of separation of powers became a tool to prevent despotism. The new political situation generated great political conflict between the cities for two reasons. First, the vacatio regis removed the sovereignty from the King of Spain, but there was no clear view about who and how would be able to claim such sovereignty.
Some people thought that it passed to other offices of the Spanish monarchy, while others held the notion of the retroversion of the sovereignty to the people: sovereignty returned to the people, who had now the right to self-governance. The vertical organization of the absolutist monarchy was compromised as well. Patriots thought that all cities, both in Spain and in the Americas, had the right to self-government, whereas Royalists assigned that right only to cities in European Spain, holding that the Americas should stay subject to the new government that Spain would provide; the other source of conflict was the nature of the new governments, which declared themselves to be provisional during the King's absence but were making strong changes in the political organization. Unlike the First Republic of Venezuela, which declared independence early on, the United Provinces were faced with the inconsistency of acting like an independent state without having declared such independence; the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata were established through a lengthy process that started in May 1810, when the citizens and militias of Buenos Aires, the capital city of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, ousted the Spanish Viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros in the May Revolution.
Although there was not a formal declaration of independence at the time, the government that emerged from the revolution declared loyalty to the deposed king Ferdinand VII, in fact it attempted to reorganise the social and economic structures of the Viceroyalty. As it faced immediate resistance in some quarters, the revolution soon turned to be a War of Independence. In the midst of the war of independence, during the entire 1810-1831 period there were serious conflicts among ever-changing factions regarding the organization of the state and the political aims of the revolutionary governments; these conflicts involved coups d'état, politically motivated trials and imprisonments and developed into an outright civil war. Since the revolution, there were serious conflicts among diverging views regarding the political organization of the provinces. While some advocated a strong and executive central government with little accountability to the regional interests, a position at first favored by the "enlightened" revolutionary and independentist elements, others sought to integrate representatives from the provinces in a larger deliberative assembly.
As the latter position gained the upper hand, the Primera Junta grew to incorporate delegates from the provinces in 1811. However, as it became evident that such an arrangement was not effective enough to lead the war efforts, a triumvirate assumed executive powers while the assembly retained some controlling functions; the Liga Federal, or Liga de los Pueblos Libres, was an alliance of provinces in what is now Argentina and Uruguay, organised under democratic federalist ideals advocated by its leader, José Gervasio Artigas. The government of the United Provinces of South America felt threatened by the growing appeal of the Liga Federal, so they did nothing to repel the incoming Portuguese invasion of Misiones Orientales and the Banda Oriental, the stronghold of Artigas. Brazilian General Carlos Frederico Lecor, thanks to their numerical and material superiority, defea
Plaza
A plaza, pedestrian plaza, or place is an open urban public space, such as a city square. Throughout Spanish America and the Spanish East Indies, the plaza mayor of each center of administration held three related institutions: the cathedral, the cantabile or administrative center, which might be incorporated in a wing of a governor's palace, the audience or law court; the plaza might be large enough to serve as a military parade ground. At times of crisis or fiesta, it was the space. Like the Italian piazza, the plaza remains a center of community life, only equaled by the market-place. Most colonial cities in Spanish America and the Philippines were planned around a square plaza de armas, where troops could be mustered, as the name implies, surrounded by the governor's palace and the main church. A plaza de toros is a bullring. In the US, they can be used to open spaces for low income neighborhoods, can the overall aesthetic of the surrounding area boosting economic vitality, pedestrian mobility and safety for pedestrians.
Most plazas are created out of a collaboration between local non-profit applicants and city officials which requires approval from the city. In modern usage, a plaza can be any gathering place on a street or between buildings, a street intersection with a statue, etc. Today's metropolitan landscapes incorporate the "plaza" as a design element, or as an outcome of zoning regulations, building budgetary constraints, the like. Sociologist William H. Whyte conducted an extensive study of plazas in New York City: his study humanized the way modern urban plazas are conceptualized, helped usher in significant design changes in the making of plazas. Plaza is a Spanish word, cognate to Italian piazza, Portuguese praça, Galician praza, Catalan plaça, Romanian piața, German Platz and French place; the origin of all these words is, via Latin platea, from Greek πλατεῖα plateia, meaning "broad". The first purpose-built shopping center in the United States, opened in Kansas City, Missouri in 1922, knowingly took the name of "Country Club Plaza" and adopted Spanish architectural details.
More plaza has been used to describe a shopping complex, similar to a shopping mall, borrowing its connotations of a center of cultural life. The name is even applied to a single building with some semi-public street-level areas with a hotel or office tower above, while mall more refers to multiple buildings or a street. Examples: Pantip Plaza, Plaza Las Américas, Plaza de las Estrellas, Central Plaza, Schiphol Plaza, Plazas del Centro Comercial Santafé, The Plaza, Cityplaza. Central Plaza, in Hong Kong, was at 78 storeys, 374 m. Gostiny Dvor Piazza Shopping mall
