The Sparkletts Company (originally the “Sparkling Artesian Water Company”) was founded in 1925 by an Eagle Rock resident who was dissatisfied with the quality of the LA municipal supply. The company established a bottling plant where the Eagle Rock sub-aquifer, rising toward the surface before overflowing into the tail end of the San Fernando Valley aquifer and the LA River, produces an artesian well field.
Its Moorish-domed bottling plant can still be seen just a couple blocks from rapidly-hipsterizing York Blvd, surrounded by a fleet of sparkly-green trucks.
Oh, and a great deal of local distrust of municipal supplies comes from our Mexican and Central American immigrant populations, who often had very good reason to distrust the tap water in their countries of origin. They’re the reason we have so many “agua puro” storefronts in mini-malls. Those stores do R/O purification and refill customer bottles at prices far less than Sparkletts delivery.
