Through the Viewfinder: A Stereographic Photograph, “Part of Los Angeles from Franklin St. hill,” ca. 1875, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

While there are a very few images of Los Angeles prior to 1870, the growth
of the town into a small city during a boom underway in the first half of the
Seventies meant that a cadre of photographers produced views of the city and
environs that help us visually document the expansion underway in the region.

Among the most active of the “shutterbugs” working in the Angel
City during this period was Henry T. Payne (1844-1933), a native of Illinois
who thought himself as a painter primarily, but whose photography is why he is
best remembered. After acquiring the Sunbeam Gallery of William M. Godfrey,
including the negatives, Payne reprinted them under his own name, as was
typical, and then was assiduous in going out and taking images throughout the
region.

The Homestead’s collection has dozens of photos, mostly stereographs (two of
the same image slightly offset on a card that, when viewed through a
stereopticon, gives a three-dimensional effect), from Payne, as a solo
practitioner and with the 1880s firm he operated with Thomas Stanton and his
brother, Daniel. Most are images of streets, buildings and panoramas in Los
Angeles, with a few outside the city, while there are a very few portraits
(competitor Valentine Wolfenstein, by contrast, focused heavily on portraits
and took, it appears, very few outdoor scenes).

What’s important about Payne is that, without Godfrey’s images, which tend
to be rare under his own imprint and less so under his successor, and his own,
our visual knowledge of the Angel City and environs during the 1870s would be a
great deal less—at least until such photographers as Francis Parker and Arthur
C. Varela arrived towards the middle and end of the decade and added to the
store of images that are available.

By 1875, Payne developed (!) what he termed the “Semi-Tropical
California Scenery” series, which might have been inspired to Los
Angeles Star newspaper proprietor Benjamin C. Truman’s book of that name,
published the prior year, but which also was prepared for the American
Centennial celebration in Philadelphia in summer 1876 and where Payne exhibited
his work. In any case, the photographer traveled throughout the southern part
of the Golden State documenting images, which were used to promote the region
at the centennial and otherwise.

The featured Payne photo for this post has such interest that we’re going to
break this into two parts and it is part of the series and titled “55. Part
of Los Angeles from Franklin St. hill.” If that thoroughfare sounds
unfamiliar to the reader, that’s because it has not existed for a great many
years, having been eliminated in downtown and civic center redevelopment during
the last half of the 1920s. As to the hill that, too, is gone due to the same
relentless reinvention of the area and this view is about where Broadway, then
called Fort Street, is between Temple Street on the north and First Street to
the south.

Obviously, Payne stood on a fairly steep vantage point, directing his camera
eastward, and it appears that Franklin was only just starting to be extended up
the slope as, while there is fencing at the left leading down to a fairly
substantial dwelling with a pair of dormer windows and a porch running along
its front elevation, weeds were plentiful in the path of the thoroughfare. At
the base of the hill, however, Franklin was fairly level, smooth and
graded—though there were common complaints during the 1870s of problems with
all of that, as well as standing water that could cause problems when it came
to insects and disease.

Franklin terminated at Spring Street and, at the northwest corner of that
intersection is the Rocha Adobe, the “town house” of the family that
owned the Rancho La Brea west of the city. The structure became the property of
Jonathan Temple and, in 1853, he sold it to the city and county for use as a
courthouse and other offices. In the expansive rear yard, among the little
addition to the southwest corner of the adobe and the wooden lean-to structures
at the north end, stood a two-story edifice, with the lower adobe level being
the city jail and the second floor, built of brick, being the county lockup. At
the southwest corner of the jail complex is a white outhouse.

Because of the importance of the courthouse (used into the early 1860s) and
the jail (which operated well into the Eighties), we’ll return to them for part
two. We’re going to turn our focus for the remainder of this first part to the
further ties in this image to the Temple family, beyond Jonathan’s ownership of
the Rocha Adobe, and these are at the far left of the Payne photograph and
demonstrate the involvement of the family in developing the commercial section
of downtown Los Angeles from the late 1850s to the early 1870s.

At the left center are two structures. The one “above” with the
distinctive white clock tower was constructed by Jonathan in 1859 as a
“market house,” apparently modeled after the famous Fanueil Hall in
Boston and which shared the attribute of a central east-west corridor flanked
by stalls, which were intended to be rented to merchants. The second floor was
rendered into the town’s first purpose-built theater, the Temple Theatre. The
problem was the timing, because the regional economy was in a challenging period
following the end of the Gold Rush and a national depression that burst forth
in 1857.

In short order, it was realized that the market house concept was not going
to work, so an arrangement was made, by 1861, to lease the structure to the
City and County and move the courthouse from the Rocha Adobe just a few hundred
yards or so away, with the chambers installed on the second floor and the
theater dismantled. Government offices were placed on the first floor, though a
basement was rented out for commercial purposes. A prior post here has covered
much of the history of the structure, so here are links for those who want more
about the courthouse and theater.

At the left edge of the image to the left of the courthouse is just a sliver
of the first part of the Temple Block, built in 1857 by Jonathan and which, at
the time, represented a major change in commercial building as a fairly elegant
two-story brick edifice compared to what came before—bricks, in fact, were only
introduced to Los Angeles five years earlier and most buildings in town were of
adobe construction.

When Jonathan, who left Los Angeles and his Rancho Los Cerritos in what is
now the Long Beach area after terrible floods and punishing drought wreaked
havoc on the region during the first half of the Sixties, died in 1866, the
Temple Block was sold to his much-younger half-brother F.P.F., while the
courthouse was acquired by the City. Over about four years, the younger Temple
added three buildings to the block northward to where Spring, Main and Temple
streets then intersected and the Temple Block was, for at least a few years,
the core of commercial Los Angeles.

F.P.F., though, added to his remaking of his section of town by acquiring
property on the west side of Spring and building more business structures, one
of which is at the left center “below” the courthouse. After razing
some adobe edifices there, on either side of the short Court Street, which ran
from Main along the north side of the courthouse to Spring (the south side of the courthouse was known as Market Street,
though it only ran between Main and Spring, just a couple hundred feet or so),
Temple embarked in the first days of 1872 on the two-story brick edifice we see
in the view.

On the south side of the structure is a sign painted on the brick reading
“FURNITURE & BEDDING” and this referred to one of the tenants,
Henry Newbauer (1830-1876), who was a merchant in the Gold Rush town of Jackson
in Amador County, southeast of Sacramento, before relocating to Los Angeles
during the latter 1860s when the city and region were on the eve of that first
boom. Newbauer had a partner and then went on his own with a furniture store at
the west side of Spring, where it met Temple and Main.

When, however, the “New Temple Building” was completed at the end
of March 1872, Newbauer relocated there, informing readers of the Los
Angeles Star in advertisement that the new location was “where he
will always keep a full stock of FURNITURE AND BEDDING, Upholstery Goods and
Paper Hangings,” the latter being an older term for wallpaper. Another
tenant of the structure was the Capitol Store of Edwards and Hoff, two of the
many purveyors of “dry goods,” meaning, as an 1875 ad in the Star
read, included clothing, carpets, matting, and oil cloth—this latter was common
in houses and was of canvas coated, typically, with linseed oil and one reason
why those who had live Christmas trees decorated with candles on the boughs in
their houses kept buckets of water near by was because of oil cloth covered
walls and ceilings!

In early 1874, a fire broke out in the Newbauer establishment and accounts
noted that it appeared to have initiated in a mattress manufacturing component
in a side structure, possibly something like the lean-to observed at the right,
or south side, of the Temple edifice. In any case, the blaze quickly tore
through the store, destroying it and its contents, as well as burning the
residence and gunsmithing business of August Stoermer, another German migrant
to Los Angeles, which was adjacent to the west on New High Street, which then
ran parallel to Spring. Because of the trees in the foreground of the photo,
New High is basically hidden, though its intersection with Franklin can be
discerned towards the center right and the white fence of the jail yard along
its western side fronted that thoroughfare.

With respect to those streets, New High long existed from Temple Street
northward, running parallel with Main Street as far north as behind the Plaza
Church area and, in fact, a section of New High still exists as a direct
extension of Spring in Chinatown north of César A. Chávez Avenue (Spring,
meanwhile, continues slightly to the east.) In November 1860, New High was
extended south from Temple to what was then called Jail Street, which, in turn,
was renamed after a late 1871 petition by residents who preferred what was
deemed by the Star of 5 April 1872 as “the dignified name of
Franklin street.”

It is likely that the swift economic downturn that came in late August 1875
with the collapse of a Virginia City, Nevada silver mine stock bubble, the
resulting failure of the Bank of California, the Golden State’s largest, and
then the panic that followed the telegraph to Los Angeles, with the Temple and
Workman bank cratering soon afterward, in January 1876, doomed Newbauer’s
business, along with his poor health. In early 1876, an auction of his goods
was held and he died shortly afterward at just age 45. The Capitol Store also
ended up in failure as one of its owners was accused of fraud in purchasing
merchandise, though it reopened under new ownership.

The Newbauer quarters were acquired by Edward A. Preuss, Jr. (1850-1932),
who was born of German parents in New Orleans, but spent much of his youth in
Louisville, where his father, Edward, Sr. was a druggist. The family came to
Los Angeles about the same time as Newbauer, arriving in 1868, with the elder
Preuss opening a drug store, but also going into real estate, acquiring much of
the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas (partly owned for several years by William Workman
of the Homestead) with the intention of developing a German emigrant colony
(Anaheim was a precursor of sorts a decade before) to be called Santa Maria—the
scheme, however, failed and the area is now Beverly Hills.

Preuss, Jr. followed his father into the drug store trade and opened his
enterprise in the Temple Building (soon to be lost with all of F.P.F.’s
properties in the aftermath of the bank failure) with his brother-in-law, John
Schumacher (whose son Frank was a late 19th century photographer of note). After
three years, Schumacher bowed out and Charles B. Pironi joined the enterprise. Preuss
left in 1885, served as postmaster in Los Angeles by appointment of President
Grover Cleveland and during the Boom of the Eighties when William H. Workman
was mayor, and had a blemished public record when he was arrested, convicted
and fined in 1900 for practicing medicine in Arizona.

As noted above, we’ll return tomorrow with the second and final part of this
post, so please check back for that.