by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Santa Catalina Island (most folks leave out the sainted part of the name) is one of the best known pleasure places in greater Los Angeles and, while its full-time population is around 4,000, there are hundreds of thousands of visitors each year enjoying its beaches, tours, hiking, sailing, fishing and other activities.
Some estimates are that indigenous people occupied the island as far back as some 7,000 years ago. While Catalina was part of Spain’s colony of Alta California and then under the authority of the department of that name during the Mexican era, it was not until the looming threat of an American invasion that a land grant was issued in 1846 by Governor Pío Pico to former sea captain Santa Barbara resident Thomas Robbins.
This was purportedly the last official act by Pico before he fled to México as the Mexican-American War came to California and other islands granted in those days included nearby San Clemente, given to the governor’s brother and William Workman, and Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay, granted to Workman. Whereas the latter two were seized by the United States as military property and are still government-held, Catalina remained privately owned.
In 1850, Robbins sold Catalina to José María Covarrubias, also of Santa Barbara and one of the members of Pico’s administration, for $10,000. After three years, it was again sold and the buyer was another Santa Barbara resident, Albert Packard, a lawyer and merchant. San Francisco capitalist James Lick began buying interests in the island in 1864 and, three years later, took sole ownership. The following year, F.P.F. Temple and William Workman purchased portions of a silver mine stake on the southeast section of Catalina, though nothing came of the investment.
Lick also dealt with squatters, who were evicted; otherwise very little transpired on the island over four decades. Whether any of the owners saw commercial value in Catalina or not is a general question, but it was not until the Lick Trust sold it in 1887 to George Shatto for $200,000 that the situation changed. A business owner and real estate speculator from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Shatto, who had many Los Angeles properties, acquired Catalina as the great Boom of the Eighties was in full swing. This was significantly aided by the completion of a direct transcontinental railroad connection to the region that brought hordes of home-seekers as well as tourists, many of the latter coming during the balmy winters.
Quickly, he laid out a town that was named Avalon, this suggested by Shatto’s sister in reference to “Idylls of the King,” a famous poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. As was often the case with new communities, a hotel was soon erected by Shatto and thought it became known as the “Hotel Metropole,” it is interesting to note that advertisements and official documents referred to it in its earliest days as the “Metropoe.” Early photos show the structure, which opened its doors in February 1888, standing out amid the undeveloped town and, in fact, Shatto had trouble in the bust that followed the boom.
In early 1892, Shatto (who died a year later in a railway accident north of Los Angeles) was foreclosed upon on several of his local properties, including the island and the hotel, referred to in the newspaper notices as “Metropoe,” and Catalina was acquired by the Banning Company, owned by the sons of “Port Admiral” Phineas Banning, the driving force behind what became the Port of Los Angeles and his town of Wilmington. For some thirty-five years, the Bannings developed the island as a tourist haven adding many important features to Avalon and other areas on Catalina until it was sold to chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, Jr., whose family still own the Catalina Island Company.
As the 20th century dawned, another major boom came to greater Los Angeles and tourism escalated accordingly. Catalina benefited from the growth and the hotel, now standardized as the Metropole, continued its expansion, which included the completion of a west wing in 1893, an eastern one three years later, and a ballroom in 1897. While there were a few other hostelries on the island as the new century arrived, the Metropole was the largest and finest, drawing well-heeled guests as was often pointed out in newspaper accounts, including regular island reports in the Los Angeles Times.
The highlighted objects from the Homestead’s holdings for this post are a trio of snapshots taken on 28 February and 1 March 1901 of the hotel, the Banning-owned steamer Hermosa approaching the wharf on Crescent Beach next to the Metropole, and the recently established Catalina Golf Club course in the canyon to the south. They show an Avalon that was in its early stages of significant development and provide an obviously fascinating comparison and contrast to the bustling town of today.
The first image, taken on the last day of February, showed the Hermosa heading towards the wharf, this latter being crude by modern standards with thin wood piles and the most basic of decking without rails. On the shore and in the water near it are craft of various sizes, but there are no docks or defined places of anchorage and the sole person in the image is a woman at the lower right corner at the water’s edge carrying what appears to be a net.
To the left of the steamer is the rock formation called “Sugar Loaf” and which had a wooden staircase installed on its southern side for folks to climb to the top and enjoy the view—in May 1929 the famous Catalina Casino opened on the site after the formation was blasted away and its materials used for a breakwater in the adjoining harbor. Behind the rocky outcropping to the left is Descanso Beach where the Bannings built a famous hotel, the St. Catherine, where the three sons of Homestead owner Walter P. Temple visited, along with famous Western author Zane Grey (whose son went to military school with the Temples) in summer 1925.
As for the Hermosa, it was built by William Banning (son of Phineas and one of the Banning Company owners) in 1889 and used by the family-owned Wilmington Transportation Company, when Shatto still owned Catalina. The wood-hulled craft had mahogany from Honduras and bird’s-eye maple panels in the interior, held 150 persons, and took two hours to get to the island. When it debuted, passengers paid $2.75 for a round-trip excursion from Los Angeles, including train service to Wilmington and there were sailings each day during the peak summer season, with thrice-weekly trips otherwise. The ship was drydocked in 1902 and much of its components used for her successor, Hermosa II, and much of the old material was consumed in an Independence Day bonfire that year.
The second photo is a fine panoramic view taken from a slight elevation on the west end of the canyon back of Avalon and taking in part of the golf course. While sources suggest that a three-hole course opened in 1892 with other dates of 1894 and 1895 given for the opening of links, the Santa Catalina Island Golf Club was formed at a meeting at the Metropole at the end of July 1898 and this was the earliest located newspaper reference to golf on the island.
The Los Angeles Times of 30 July reported that the founders included Pasadena naturalist, author and outdoor sports enthusiast Charles Frederick Holder, Joseph Brent Banning, Pasadena financier William R. Staats, and South Pasadena business owner William A. Tufts, and added,
The links, situated on the hill southeast of the Metropole, are well-patronized and promise to be very popular. Miss Ida Belle Palmer of Oakland holds the ladies’ championship and William A. Tufts of Los Angeles is the champion player among the men. The house on the hill near the first teeing ground is being remodeled and fitted up as a clubhouse, to be run in connection with the links. Here may be obtained baths and liquid refreshments. Two tennis courts will be built near the links. The courts and links will be inclosed [sic].
In a separate item in the island report, it was noted that Holder returned from a camping (and, presumably, plenty of hunting for which he was widely known) trip in the “Middle Ranch” to the west of Avalon, and noted that an artist in town discovered a cave used by indigenous people and in which there were “hieroglyphics” or petroglyphs painted with red material. The find was deemed “one of the most interesting of the rude homes of the men of the stone age ever found on Santa Catalina or in California” and is apparently Torqua Cave, which has been studied by archaeologists.
As for the course, it offered 9, 18 and 36 hole tournaments from early in its history, became an 18-hole course in 1929 after a renovation under the Wrigley ownership and was reduced back to 9 holes at the close of World War II and remains in that configuration today. Open to the public, the course, the oldest continuously operating one in California, offers remarkable views of the sloping canyon down toward Avalon and the Casino as players move northward towards the sea.
The third photograph takes in most of the front elevation of the three-story, wood-frame, green-painted Metropole, with the original 1888 portion at the center and surmounted by a tower with a flag pole and the aforementioned wings, the western one with a projecting tower capped by a “witch’s hat” and featuring a wrap-around veranda or porch. To the right is another hostelry with a tall pole projecting from it, while in the distance is the section of hill that terminated at the water as seen in the photo of the Hermosa.
In March 1901, local news regarding Catalina included fishing reports, with mention of early tuna catches; nine-hole golf tournaments for men and women; a baseball game between islanders and Metropole guests, led by Tufts, with the “Knockers” as the latter were known taking it to the “Catalinas” by a score of 11-3; tourists made sick by rough seas on the trip from the mainland; and the crowded school necessitating a new building.
Other items of interest included the island band playing on the mainland with daily concerts at Central Park, renamed Pershing Square after World War I hero, General John J. Pershing. A brief note recorded that an unidentified man who killed a seal was convicted of the illegal act and subject to a fine and the paying of court costs, though the Times of 17 March added “apparently some of the boatmen there thought he should have been lynched.”
On the 2nd, the paper reported that a pair of visitors from Kansas City and New York City left the Metropole for a hike to Eagle’s Nest, near the aforementioned cave, and went goat hunting (this was permitted to thin herds of wild goats introduced years before). The men got lost, however, and, when night fall, the hungry and thirsty hunters, decided that one would remain in place while the other headed out to seek a familiar landmark. Fortunately, he sighted Eagle’s Nest and they got their bearings and returned to the hotel “almost famished from their fast.”
There was a tragedy in Avalon on the 12th when Mrs. F.J. Moll, whose husband owned the town’s dry goods store, died in her sleep. She’d worked in the establishment and was “cheerful as usual,” but, when the couple went to bed, she said she felt poorly and took some quinine. An inquest was held by the island’s justice of the peace and a doctor determined in his testimony that she died of “uraemic convulsions” or seizures due to chronic kidney disease.
With regard to the Metropole, at the end of the month the Times noted that the manager was startled by what he thought was an earthquake and a rain of glass that poured down in his office, only to discover that a woman drying her hair on the roof after a bath sat on the skylight causing the disturbance.
On the 20th, the paper reported the arrival of members of the elite “New York 400,” including the wife of Stuyvesant Fish, president of the Illinois Central Railroad and son of former governor, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln, Hamilton Fish, and descendant of Peter Stuyversant, the last governor of Dutch New Amsterdam (which became New York City.) Marion Graves Fish was widely known as a Gilded Age “fun maker” at the couple’s ornate Manhattan house, now owned by financier and former mayor, Michael Bloomberg.
Lastly, the Times of the 4th tendered the news of the demise of Clumsy, a St. Bernard who was brought to the island by Hancock Banning, another of the owners of Catalina, and who was then given to the company’s superintendent, Ed Stanton. It was averred that the canine was the best known on the Pacific Coast because of his near-continual presence greeting the steamer by grabbing the rope tossed from the ship to the dock so it could be secured. Among the stories about the dog, however, were his “encounters” with a Chinese vegetable peddler and an African-American boy—examples of the casual and blatant racism endemic in newspaper accounts of the era. As he became subject to what were termed wild fits in recent days, “poor old Clumsy was taken out and shot.”
Previous posts here have alluded briefly to a devastating fire that ravaged Avalon in 1915. The blaze burst forth at the end of November, perhaps a case of arson as some reports suggested a house owner behind the Metropole set the fire for insurance money. About half of the town was consumed by the conflagration, including the hotel, which was not quite three decades old, with losses pegged at around $1.5 million in reporting at the time. Because it was off-season, the Metropole was closed, but it was not rebuilt, and the devastation apparently was one reason why the Bannings sold Catalina to Wrigley a few years later. A new Metropole was built on the site and opened in 1990.
The Museum’s collection has other Catalina photos and artifacts, so we will certainly look to feature more of them in future “At Our Leisure” posts.
Great article. I read the postings every day.
Thanks, Ruth Ann—we very much appreciate your continued support!