by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As we close out 2023 and ring in 2024, we travel back 112 years to the New Year’s Eve celebration held at Café Bristol, a mammoth 2,000 seating capacity restaurant run by Jacob Fieber and William Schneider and situated in the basement of the Herman W. Hellman Building, built by the prominent Jewish merchant and banker Herman W. Hellman, completed in 1903 and located at the northeast corner of Spring and Fourth streets (recently renovated with 188 luxury apartments). The featured object from the Homestead’s collection for this post is a souvenir menu from the Café’s New Year’s Eve dinner from 1911.
As to the owners of the restaurant, Jacob Charles Fieber (1866-1924) hailed from Landau-an-der-Isar, about 75 miles northeast of Munich in Bavaria, and was born just as the unification of Germany was underway. He appears to have been the chef of a hotel in Topeka, Kansas by 1890 and then opened his own European Hotel shortly thereafter. By the mid-Nineties, he was chef for a Harvey House, part of the Santa Fe Railroad system, near the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the earliest mention of him in Los Angeles was when he came to the city to become the chef at the Palace Conservatory/Saloon.
William Schneider was born in 1870, probably in the German-speaking part of Switzerland (some sources record that he was born in Germany, but others, including his marriage record, state he was a Swiss native). He was said to have been in Chicago before migrating to Los Angeles and a report in the 8 February 1894 edition of the Los Angeles Herald noted that “William Schneider, a young German waiter . . . received two packages from Berlin, having been forwarded to him from Chicago . . . [and which] contained some of the most obscene pictures ever witnessed.” Assuming this is the same man who became the restaurateur, a federal charge was filed and a conviction secured, with a jury recommending mercy, and a one-year sentence at hard labor for the county jail handed down.
In April 1898, Schneider and John Bernhard secured a liquor license transfer from Bernhard’s previous partnership with a brother for the Palace Saloon at Spring and First streets. Two months later, Schneider married Sophia (Sophie) Berth, born in Paris in 1876 to Sophie Kaetzel and Theodore Berth, who was from Alsace-Lorraine in France near the Swiss and German borders. Theodore was a French Army musician for fifteen years, emigrated with his family in 1881, and who was well-known in musical circles at Grand Island, Nebraska before the family migrated to the Angel City about 1890.
Sophia was a violinist whose family orchestra, including her father, five sisters and a brother, appeared at the New Vienna Buffet on Court Street between Main and Spring streets just south of the former Courthouse, built as a Market House by Jonathan Temple and razed during the Nineties. Subsequently, she led the Berth ensemble at concerts held at the Meyberg Brothers’ Crystal Palace store on Main south of First and at what was known as the Palace Conservatory.
In 1897, Sophia was a witness in a forgery trial involving checks purported written and signed by Griffith J. Griffith (whose shooting of his wife Christina Mesmer, prison term and donation of the massive Griffith Park are major elements of a colorful life and who lived in the same hotel with the Schneiders in the 1900 census) and in which it was alleged that she was showered with attention and gifts from the suspect, Richard A. Bird. In June 1898, she and Schneider were married and it was reported that she was stepping aside from performing—the couple had two children named for themselves.
Fieber and Schneider joined forces to assume control of the Palace in fall 1900 with the Los Angeles Express of 2 November reporting that the former headed the kitchen and the “genial” latter exercised “great executive ability” whose management “makes it certain that an era of prosperity for this most popular resort is at hand.” It was added, moreover, that a key factor in the restaurant’s operations was that “an aggregation of more accomplished musicians than the Berth orchestra would be difficult to find.”
The Los Angeles Times of 19 May 1904 reported that “‘Café Bristol’ is to be the name of fine resort to be established in the basement of the new Hellman building . . . by William Schneider and Jacob Fieber, proprietors of the Palace Café.” The account noted that the former returned from San Francisco with contracts for the construction, fittings, furnishings and other accoutrements of the establishment, with well north of $60,000 to be expended on the service, silver, linen and china. It was added that three marble-lined stairways would lead from the street to the basement, with the space to have tile floors, marble wainscoting and oak monogrammed furniture.
When the Bristol opened on 22 December, with Herman Hellman and the building’s architect, Alfred F. Rosenheim present for a special luncheon, a large ad in that day’s edition of the Los Angeles Record called the establishment “A Glory of White and Gold” and with $125,000 in total investment. Touted were the glass-clad columns, crystal chandeliers of the main café; the “Primrose Path of Dalliance” that was the grill with its “ambrosia of Parnassus”; a banquet hall that would bring cheer and fellowship and dissipate sorrow as that done to “storm clouds in the southern sun of California;” the “society nooks” with ones “sacred to the ancient guild of architects” and the “disciples of honored [A]Esculapius, the Father of Medicine” along with those for bankers and fraternal societies; and “the cutest little private dining rooms” set behind frosted glass and ideal for theater parties.
Also highlighted was the décor that was averred to be “more like the club rooms of some palatial home of millionaires than like an ordinary café.” Ventilation in the below ground space was assured through a 24-horsepower suction engine recirculating that air every few minutes, while “no odor of the kitchens, however good they may be to a hungry man, can get astray in the dining rooms.” Employing the humor that would frequently mark other Bristol ads, it was noted that “burglars will have no more trouble getting into the Cafe Bristol than any other human being” because guests were “ever welcome” through those multiple entrances, two on Fourth, including the main one for the building, and one on Spring.
The Bristol was such a success that a branch of sorts was opened in Ocean Park, which became part of Santa Monica, on an L-shaped wooden pier built 1,000 feet out in the Pacific at the end of Hollister Avenue by Lycurgus Lindsay (1859-1931), who parlayed a grain and cattle business operating in Kansas and Texas into a mining empire developed in Sonora in northern Mexico and the area near the border town of Nogales, Arizona, and named for the new restaurant. Lindsay moved to Los Angeles in 1905 and the Bristol Pier Café opened in late June 1907.
As with the debut of the Los Angeles enterprise, the pier café was the subject of large, detailed ads in local newspapers, with one in the Los Angeles Record of the 20th, proclaiming “the most the epicure or pleasure-seeker expects will be the least they will receive in the entertainment offered at the new magnificent Bristol . . . which will be offered to the lovers of pleasure and the good livers of the world.” The restaurant was reached through an illuminated arch and there were a deli, grocery and meat market at one side of the entrance with ice cream available at the other, while a drug store was provided “for those who over-indulge in picnic pleasure.”
The café had three private dining rooms which could be reconfigured into a large banquet hall and the “public bar, where the finest liquors are dispensed and the traveler from any clime made to feel at home by drinking his favorite native beverage out of glasses, bumpers or steins imported from the countries of the world.” The main dining room, with capacity for 800 diners spanning more than 11,000 square feet, “is finished in the attractive mission style” and it was noted that “here the health-giving, appetizing sea air can be enjoyed the same as on the salon deck of an ocean liner . . . and without any danger of seasickness.”
Also mentioned was that Donatelli’s Concert Band would perform daily afternoon concerts in a band stand as well as two shows evenings in the restaurant, while an adjacent hotel “where a limited number of desirable guests can lengthen their stay over night if they so desire.” Rooms faced the sea and were “furnished with the same luxurious appointments as the finest city hotels.” With all of this, it was boasted that “there is no pleasure pier on either coast in any way comparing with the ‘Bristol’ in completeness and attractiveness. It is destined to become one of the show places of Los Angeles.”
Whatever success Fieber and Schneider experienced with their pair of restaurants, serious challenges came to the Bristol enterprise by the early 1910s. For one, dining establishments of all kinds were often suspected of being, to greater or lesser degrees, dens of iniquity and vice by reformers of all stripes in the Angel City. This was especially the case when it came to the serving of alcohol and the assumed or real evils associated with it.
The 28 March 1911 issue of the Times reported on a Police Commission investigation over sales of drinks purportedly without food, which would have been a violation of the café’s license. A woman acting as an LAPD detective asserted this, but Schneider produced a check showing that a roast beef sandwich and salad were purchased and consumed by her before she imbibed. A pair of male detectives, however, stated that he purchased two quart bottles of beer and was given a piece of bread passed off as a sandwich.
While Schneider also explained to the Commission the Bristol’s system for ensuring that no drinks were served clientele without food, reformist Mayor George Alexander (who replaced the disgraced and recalled Arthur C. Harper—feted at the pier café in 1908 and declared a sure candidate for higher office beyond the mayoralty of the Angel City) questioned him as to the relationship of the Los Angeles restaurant to the Wieland Brewery of San Francisco. The proprietor explained that Hellman desired more financial security for a five-year lease, so Wieland assumed that arrangement and then subleased to Schneider and Fieber, but, purportedly, without any consideration in offering Wieland beer.
Mayor Alexander then stated, as chair of the Commission, that the body relied entirely on the statements of the two male officers concerning their purchase of beer “with only a pretense at a sandwich,” as the female detective’s account did not appear to hold up as strongly under scrutiny. Alexander added that, as paraphrased, “he did not care to go further into its conduct with regard to the class of women patrons served” and told the assemblage that he’d received frequent complaints that the Bristol “was being run wide open—that it was possible to get drinks without meals openly,” so, in his view, the cafe’s license provisions were violated.
The Board agreed and the license pulled, forcing the proprietors to employ trucks and wagons to haul cutlery, linen and other material from the Los Angeles restaurant to the Bristol pier as well as transfer employees, so they could expand summer operations there and minimize the financial damage. Yet, noted the Times of 15 April, the Santa Monica City Council condemned the pier as unsafe (concrete ones were then the standard, rather than the wooden structure of the Bristol edifice), though repairs were apparently planned.
To get the Hellman Building enterprise back in operation, the Los Angeles Café Company was organized in mid-June with three men as incorporators, but not Schneider or Fieber, and capital set at $150,000. By the end of the month, the firm petitioned the Police Commission for a new license and, reported the Times of the 28th, “it was stated that the new proprietors are former employees of the old Bristol, and it was also hinted that the old proprietors are back of the new project.”
Two weeks were set aside for an investigation, though, while one of the five commissioners voted no, it was approved. Alexander, however, was quoted as uttering, “I am not satisfied either, but as the applicant furnishes good references I cannot consistently oppose it. I do not like the idea of the establishment being in a basement, but there are many others located in the basements.” Another commissioner offered “we can close it again if it isn’t conducted properly.” Notably, advertising did not mention Schneider and Fieber by name, suggesting they were the “powers behind the throne” at the reopened restaurant.
At the Bristol Pier, however, matters worsened as, at a meeting of the the Santa Monica Police Commission, as noted by the Venice Vanguard of 29 December, just two days before the festivities covered by the souvenir menu, “the proprietors of the Bristol Pier cafe asked permission to close their bar and dining room until repairs were made to the pier,” while also requesting suspension of operating license payments. Given that the pier was condemned, the request was granted.
The souvenir menu contains the lyrics to songs like “America” and “Auld Lang Syne” as well as a “Stein Song” set to the music of the “Prince of Pilsen” and the lyrics of which included,
California! California!
Thy sons will ne’er forget
The golden haze of student days
Is ’round about us yet . . .
Here’s to my College, I know her worth
Here’s to the flag she flies,
Here’s to her sons, the best on earth,
Here’s to her smiling skies,
Here’s to California’s pride,
Ever to her be true;
We’ll sing her praises far and wide—
Here’s to the Gold and Blue.
The bill of fare offered such delicacies as oysters “Mignonette;” Consomme Rice and Tomatoes soup; striped bass “a la Normandie;” a “Croustade of Lamb Sweetbreads ‘Financiere’; roast chicken; salad; and Arlequin ice cream, cake and demi-tasse. The wine list offered martinis, manhattans, and rye, bourbon and scotch whiskies at 15 cents a shot, a dozen imported brands of champagne; “domestic Champagnes,” denoted usually as sparkling wines; “Rhein” varieties and domestic offerings in quarts and pints. Patrons were notified that nothing except sparkling wine would be served after 10 p.m. The back page of the cover contains the signatures of over 20 guests.
Shortly after the festivities concluded (and the libations quaffed), more trouble ensued for the Bristol. The Ocean Park pier continued to worsen as winter storms battered the wooden structure and the restaurant did not reopen, though the remodeled edifice, known as the Crystal Pier, survived until 1949. In July 1912, stockholders sued over dissipated funds and, not long later, Fieber exited his partnership with Schneider, who, however, continued to operate the Bristol Café. At the end of 1912, a 17-year old, son of a Los Angeles Express advertising manager, purchased beer at the restaurant and because he turned 18, the legal drinking age, shortly afterward and was 6’1″ and 170 pounds and, apparently, looked older, the Police Commission suspended the café’s license for only a weekend, with Mayor Alexander remarking on the size of the young man as a mitigating factor.
As efforts in the Angel City to curb alcohol sales and consumption culminated in the passing by voters of the Gandier ordinance in November 1917, Schneider, who was stated in a 1915 profile in the Record to have been in the business since “his boyhood,” decided to exit the enterprise early the following year and retire to an orange grove he owned in what is now Pico Rivera. Fieber moved on to other endeavors, including the New Grotto Cafe on the boardwalk at Ocean Park and the long-operating Rathskeller Cafe on Spring Street south of Second in downtown Los Angeles, and was caught in the snares of enforcement of the ordinance in August 1919. He died at age 58 in 1924.
Schneider returned to the restaurant racket after a few years in suburbia and opened the Bilmar Cafe at the northwest corner of Grand Avenue and Fifth Street, where the One Bunker Hill tower is now across from where the Central Public Library opened in 1926. He took on a cashier as wife and partner, but both the business and the marriage collapsed in short order (!) He went on apparently to operate the dining room at the Glendale Country Club in 1923, but nothing could be located about him after that, although a William Schneider of the right age and a native of Switzerland was working at Hillcrest Country Club when enumerated in the 1940 census. Beyond that, his later years are, so far, a mystery.
As to the former quarters of the Bristol, it did reopen briefly and, patriotically, as the new “American Cafe Bristol” with all American employees and the displaying of the flag—perhaps a knock on the German ancestry of its former proprietors. Whatever you are doing this New Year’s Eve, enjoy the ringing in of 2024 and we hope you will visit the Homestead and support its programs, including this blog.