by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This truly is the concluding part of this post, as we continue a look at some of the history of the Rocha Adobe as the Los Angeles County Courthouse for most of the 1850s and into the early years of the following decade as well as the adobe and brick two-story jail that was in its courtyard and which operated for some three decades until well into the 1880s.
In the years after its 1853 completion, the jail was run on what could be called “strict economy,” but also on what can only be described as bare subsistence, with “white” prisoners, meaning Anglos and Latinos, receiving generally fifty cents daily for food, but indigenous people at half, with no mention made for what a Black or Asian inmate was considered with this schedule.
For those jailed on weekends for drunkenness, a general fifty-cent amount was set, but it should be added that these prisoners, overwhelmingly native, were part of a system of forced labor (slavery is often a word used) by which, in lieu of paying fines, these individuals were sent out to work for local farmers and ranchers. Many of them got drunk the next week, often with alcohol as pay instead of money or some using their wages to buy alcohol, not infrequently from their employer, and then returned to jail in a true vicious cycle.
With respect to the Rocha Adobe and the courthouse, whatever improvement it may have been on previous quarters, it still left much to be desired. In November 1856, a fire from an improperly built fireplace broke out in the county clerk’s office, which was exacerbated by the use of canvas, perhaps oil-cloth with the use of linseed oil as a coating. Fortunately, it was a daytime incident and was quickly extinguished before it could damage or destroy the county’s archives. That month, the Los Angeles Star colorfully and comically critiqued the courthouse, noting that officers and others were “condemned to long sessions in this terrestrial purgatory.”
Calling the courtroom a hog pen and the bench as a crib, the paper claimed that, whenever the judge had to make a move, “his heels must go up and his head down.” It was evidently worse, however, for the jurors’ box and the room set aside for lawyers, as the Star commented,
But the jury box, Gracious powers! The man who constructed the ‘iron cage,’ was tender-hearted as a woman, in comparison with the projector of his device of Satan . . .The men who would dispute a point to the extent of putting twelve innocent men to the torture of sitting there for an house—think of days being spent there—should be, in the first place, convicted under the statute against cruelty to animals.
But the accommodations for the Bar—that caps the climax. Language can’t do justice to the subject. It is an immense four-by-nine area. It can accommodate one man and a chair at a time. If you put in a second man, you must take out the chair. A table is a luxury unthought of—a useless extravagance. A lawyer sometimes has a hat—he may write on the crown of his hat, if it be a stove-pipe—if not, he must either borrow one or do without writing . . .
A year later, some improvements were undertaken, including the laying of a brick sidewalk along Spring Street and a better fence along what was then called Jail Street to the south and along the rear where New High Street was soon extended south from Temple Street. The Supervisors continued to work for a way to build a courthouse and, two years in succession, 1858 and 1859, secured from Sacramento legislation allowing the borrowing of $25,000 and then $80,000, subject to voter approval, for the construction of a building.
The vote the first year was relatively close, 236-194 against as reported by the Star and 237-176 as recorded in the minute book of the Supervisors, but, for the second, and turnout likely animated by what seemed a huge amount of potential added debt, the will of the people (well, those who could vote, this being limited to white, male property owners) was resounding: only 32 persons voted in favor and 953 rejected the idea.
It being abundantly clear that citizens had no appetite for expending the funds, either by a tax levy or borrowing through the issuance of bonds or other means, for a newly built courthouse, another opportunity soon arose, courtesy again of Jonathan Temple. Having finished, in 1857, the two-story brick Temple Block at the south end of a pie piece-shaped lot that ended at a point where Main, Spring and Temple streets then intersected, but widened considerably at the other side, he acquired a large open space adjacent to this and planned the Market House.
Roughly designed after Boston’s famous Fanueil Hall, the building was to comprise rented stores on the first floor and the Temple Theatre, the city’s first venue built for that purpose and Temple reached a deal with the city so that it would take responsibility for leases and receive the net proceeds and, after ten years, buy the structure from him for $30,000. By early 1860, the city hall was moved to the edifice, so that, when the theater began hosting performances in February, the structure was called “the City Hall building.”
Meanwhile, the courthouse was relocated in summer 1860 after further complaints about the poor condition of the Rocha Adobe. This included the petition, during County Court proceedings, by attorney Jonathan R. Scott, that, according to the Supervisors minute book, “the Court adjourn, for the reason that the building occupied as the court room, is so wholly out of repairs as to render it not only unsafe, but exceedingly dangerous.” Meanwhile, the Star reported,
a part of the roof has fallen in, and the timbers that support the balance of the roof are so worm-eaten, that Judge Scott [who, like future President Abraham Lincoln, was a towering 6’4″], in illustration of the insecurity of the room, crushed a large handful of them as if they were straw. It is high time that something was done to secure a decent place for the meeting of the Courts.
A new location was quickly found, this being a commercial building rented from former mayor, John G. Nichols just south of the Market House on the west side of Main and south of Market, north of First, while the Rocha Adobe was handed over by the County to the City for use as a station house for the marshal and constable. Grand juries during 1860, however, called for repairs to the adobe because it was owned and it was obviously better financially to return if possible.
In early 1861, negotiations with Temple began to have the County and City lease the Market House for the county courthouse and court and Supervisors’ offices as well as for city council quarters and the mayor’s office. In March, the County agreed to lease the first floor at $200 with the City contributing not far under half on a sub-lease that, for eight years, at which time a purchase option would exist. Soon, the second-floor was reconfigured so that the courthouse moved there, while a hall remained for theatrical, musical, exhibition and other purposes, including services to honor President Abraham Lincoln after he was assassinated in April 1865.
The courthouse remained in the former Market House until 1889 when the first purpose-built edifice for administering justice opened on the southeast corner of Temple Street and Fort Street (renamed Broadway the next year), while the jail continued in use until a few years prior to that. The latter, obviously, was perennially far below substandard during most of its three decades in the yard behind the adobe.
As early as winter 1855, its defects were pointed out in the press, as the short-lived Southern Californian, in its inimitable style, reported that ten city prisoners carved a foot-square hole in the adobe walls of the first floor of the jail to “take French leave,” i.e., escape, calling the opening “a more thorough ventilation of their boarding house.” In 1861, accused murderer Siriaco Arce (who was later convicted and executed) escaped and did so apparently unnoticed until he was found at liberty on the streets.
In May 1856, after not-infrequent reports of prisoners dying or being released because of very poor health because of conditions at the lockup, Judge Hayes wrote a Star editorial that
It is quite certain that our jail is not a suitable place for a man who is very sick. There should be a room built in connection with it for sick persons; this is required for humanity’s sake. The laws contemplate punishment—this is most true; but not slow torture to death.
The Grand Jury report of early 1858, as reported on in the Spanish-language El Clamor Público, provided some notable detail of the construction of the facility, recording that the first-floor adobe portion had two partitioned to separate men and women prisoners, with the latter “being of the ‘bow and arrow’ tribe,” that is, indigenous females, likely held for intoxication. There were, however, “no great accommodation provided for the inmates; they may select a soft spot in the earthen floor to sleep off ‘a drunk’; but the jailer does his duty in keeping the apartments clean.”
The second floor with six cells (considered insufficient by the jury) was far more secure because county prisoners were housed there for much more serious offenses than their counterparts below. The jury added,
The joists which support the floor are traversed with strong iron bars throughout, about six inches apart. Over these is laid down thick planking, then a covering of sheet iron, and over all plank again, forming a floor which it would be impossible to cut through without detection. . . The partitions are made of heavy timber, well secured by iron cramps [clamps?]. The doors are massive iron gratings. Altogether, the great necessity of strength and security is thoroughly attained—such a thing as a prisoner making his escape being almost, we should say, an impossibility. . . [As to prisoners,] they are secured by strong shackles on each leg, the chains being fastened to iron staples piercing the floor and clamping the joists underneath.
It concluded, however, that the space, not even five years old, was too small and unfit, lacking a space for treating ill inmates and entire lacking in sufficient light and ventilation (the occasional digging through the ground floor adobe walls aside). The jury commented that “to be confined in one of these dungeons in hot weather must itself by a torture” while it was also disturbed in reporting that prisoners were jailed for months with no change of clothing.
The grand jury of November 1859 praised jailor Francis Carpenter for his management of the facility, finding it largely “clean and healthy” and the yard “in good and cleanly order,” but it did register its complaint that “there is on the main upper room of the prison, a prisoner affected with a loathsome disease, from whence proceeds a stench which is almost intolerable.” It expressed concern that other inmates exposed to the “intolerable nuisance” and “the dangerous effluvia proceeding from the disease.” It was rare to see any reference to those in the jail as “human beings” and especially those “[who] should not be exposed to such nuisances.”
Nearly two years later, another grand jury visit found “the rooms of the prison filled with a foul and disagreeable atmosphere” and that “the walls of the rooms are yellow and discolored by noxious vapors.” The cause was “from an unpardonable neglect, [as] the conducting pipes from a water closet used by a large proportion of the inmates of the prison, had been suffered to remain in a leaky condition until the floor of the room became saturated.” Resulting was the fact that the jail “was highly impregnated with a most offensive and unhealthy effluvia.” After calling for a thorough disinfecting and whitewashing of the facility, cleaned only every eight days, the jury also reported on the lack of a reasonable quantity and quality of food, with paltry meals only at 7 a.m. and Noon.
The city jail and yard were also the locales for legal executions (until these were moved to state prisons in 1889) and extralegal lynchings, of which there were so many, especially in the decade or so between 1852 and 1863, that Los Angeles had a nationwide reputation for its lawlessness and extreme levels of violence. The record of mobs demanding the keys to the jail from marshals and sheriffs and, being rejecting, battering down the door and breaking into cells to seize prisoners and hanging them in various places in town, usually a beam at a lumber yard at Temple and New High streets and, in November 1863, at the front of the courthouse, is one that too often marked the Angel City as a den of deviltry. The last of these incidences within city limits took place in December 1870 when Michel Lachenais was pulled from the jail, hauled to the lumberyard and executed by a shadowy vigilance committee.
About the time this photo was taken, in June 1875, Mayor Prudent Beaudry visited the jail and found it “inadequate to meet the demand made upon it from its overcrowded condition” and added that “disease is the almost inevitable result in the small, ill-ventilated room.” There were 21 inmates, including two women “who are separated from the men by a cage 10 feet square where these poor creatures have to lie on an asphaltum floor.” Yet, it would be nearly another decade before a new jail was constructed.
As for the Rocha Adobe, it continued to be used the City, including as the offices for the marshal, clerk and mayor. This also included the court over which the latter presided, dealing with minor infractions, until, when William H. Workman was chief executive, a Police Court was established, relieving the mayor of this onerous responsibility. When Prudent Beaudry was elected to the office in December 1874, he sought to transfer his office to a building he owned on New High Street across from Pico House hotel. When the new Common (City) Council met, Charles Huber “contended that the city business should all be done in its own buildings,” to which “the Mayor stated that his only object in removing was to have more respectable quarters.”
As Los Angeles and environs underwent its first major boom during that era, there were occasional calls for a city hall that was more representative of the city’s enhanced status, but nothing would be done until 1888 (during Workman’s mayoral term) at the height of the much larger Boom of the Eighties and the completion of one on Fort Street (Broadway) between Second and Third more befitting a more substantial metropolis. As noted above, a new courthouse, more like a temple of justice found in larger American cities, was completed at Temple and Fort.
The woefully inadequate jail remained at the site until December 1886 when, as the latest boom was underway, a new two-story, with a basement, facility was opened, on the southwest corner of New High and Temple (about where St. Athanasius’ Church once stood) and where the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center stands at what is now Spring and Temple. A decade later, a city jail was opened on First between Broadway and Hill, but the continuing massive growth of Los Angeles included future jails that, as always, were too small, poorly funded and equipped, understaffed and dens of misery and abuse—a Curbed LA piece by friend of the Homestead Hadley Meares covers much of the history of the jail system into the 1920s.
The Rocha Adobe and abandoned jail were sold to Louis Phillips, Pomona rancher and capitalist, who erected the block bearing his name there. The main tenant of that structure for twenty years was the People’s Store, renamed in 1900 after its owners, the Hamburger family, and which then moved in 1908—later it was sold to David May and became one of his May Company branches. Four years later, the Phillips Block was gutted by a fire and, while there were plans for hotels and a city hall there, it was razed in sections in succeeding years before the site was part of the realignment of Spring Street for the City Hall project, completed in April 1928, that encompassed the destruction of the Temple Block.
As much historical interest as there is in this great mid-1870s photo, this post feels like the briefest of sketches of some of that history, especially when it comes to the Rocha Adobe courthouse and jail, of which volumes can be written. That in mind, we’ll look to return to that subject in future posts.