by Paul R. Spitzzeri
For nearly a quarter of a century, I’ve given presentations for the “Art Collectors” program for Road Scholar (also known as Elderhostel,) a lifelong-learning non-profit based in Boston that will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. My contributions have been on some of the history of Henry E. Huntington, J. Paul Getty, Norton Simon and Eli Broad, as well as discussing general issues and projects involving the museums they founded and aspects of the field, as well.
Hotels in which the participants have stayed and where the talks have been given have been in Pasadena, Monrovia and downtown Los Angeles, the latter for the previous 17 years, but this morning’s presentation was the first in a new locale: the Biltmore Hotel on Olive Street between 5th and 6th streets and across, on the west, from Pershing Square. Prior posts here have shared history of this nearly 160-year-old park space, including its early years as Sixth Street or Central Park as well as the change to honor World War I hero, General John J. Pershing.
As for the Biltmore, it has been mentioned on occasion, including when a theater bearing the name opened at the east end of the complex, at Grand Avenue and 5th Street, in 1924. The Museum has a few artifacts connected to the landmark hostelry, so we’ll share some of those in this multi-part post along with detailing its construction over about a two year period between 1921 and 1923.
For context, it is well worth observing that the timing of the building of the hotel was particularly significant as the Angel City emerged from the First World War and an economic recession that followed and entered into another of its remarkable booms, including a strong component tied to tourism. The peak, as noted here several times, came in 1923, during which time Walter P. Temple was one of many developers who hastened to take advantage of opportunity to push through their projects. His was on a far smaller scale than the syndicate of prominent investors who built the hotel, but the connection is important as we at the Homestead seek to better understand his work in the midst of what was taking place regionally.
The southwest portion of downtown Los Angeles was the next hotspot of development during the boom, following the movement historically from the Plaza, the center of the Angel City from its earliest days; then south, along Main and Spring Streets, as well as Broadway (and its string of theaters) through the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and, allowing for the important expansion of the city’s industrial core west of the Los Angeles River, then the push towards the area around Pershing Square.
There were already important structures like the Temple Baptist Church and Auditorium, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra was established in 1919, not to mention the vital shopping district along 7th Street. Almost immediately west of the hotel site, the formal Normal School property was slated to be converted into the first purpose-built home of the Public Library, though there was some controversy about that, to which we’ll allude here. The main point is that the area around the park, largely residential through the 19th century, took on great importance for its commercial potential in the 20th.
Another common element of the area during the prior decades were the presence of several large Protestant churches, with the Biltmore locale being the site from 1881 of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, renamed a Pro-Cathedral fourteen years later and which then moved to Figueroa and 6th. An early mention of the hotel project came in the pages of the 4 April 1921 edition of the Los Angeles Express, which reported that “James Wood[s], nationally known hotel man and for many years connected with the Bowman interests and the Biltmore hotel, New York City, arrived in Los Angeles today.”
Woods was a representative of John McEntee Bowman, a native of Toronto who moved to the Big Apple at 17 and got his main chance in the business at the Holland House on Fifth Avenue by being responsible for wine and cigars and then was promoted to the secretary and assistant manager to Gustave Baumann. When the latter opened the New York Biltmore, Bowman became vice-president and managing director, but Baumann’s 1914 suicide by jumping out one of the hotel’s upper-floor windows led to Bowman’s accession to the presidency, while Woods became vice-president.
In short order, he amassed a portfolio of several hostelries, including outside of New York City, with a booming Los Angeles catching his eye. The Los Angeles Times of 18 April featured a portrait of Woods; William G. Clark, who was another Bowman official; and Los Angeles realtor Joe Toplitzky, who brokered the deal to acquire the church property. A rendering of the proposed hotel was also included, with the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Building and its 1921 extension to the south at Olive and Sixth also prominent.
As to the leadership of St. Paul’s, the Times of 23 May offered editorial praise for their “giving an option on its Olive-street property in order to facilitate the erection of the superb Biltmore Hotel” and which established “a pace for the entire community in co-operative endeavor.” The paper added,
This undertaking means much to Los Angeles—advertising, an adequate commercial hostelry and a sound investment for all who go into it. It also offers another opportunity for the community to demonstrate its cohesive powers and to gain greater strength by increasing its capacity for teamwork among all of its citizens.
Bowman was lionized for paying the Angel City the compliment of wanting to build there and it was asserted to be another compliment that he felt that locals could raise more than $6.2 million in investment, while providing a good rental rate. The editorial concluded that the Biltmore was led “by a number of the ablest business men of the city” and should not only attract investors but be supported by all residents “because it will beautify and improve and benefit Los Angeles.”
Two days later, the Los Angeles Express noted that the hotel design was in its final form and that the project forced a Seattle man to abandon his plan to reconfigure the Temple Baptist Church and Auditorium, then on the northeast corner of Olive and 5th into a hostelry. The unnamed architects were said to be working on a plan for what was anticipated to have more than 1,000 rooms. Lastly, the paper commented that “it is the expectation that the actual construction will be under way before summer passes.”
There was an additional piece of property on the corner of Olive and Fifth that was owned by the City and the Express of 1 June reported that the Public Service Commission voted to approve a sale of what was acquired a decade before for $195,000 for a future fire station, but which was to be sold to the Biltmore promoters for $250,000, with a $6,750 commission to realtor W.W. Mines. Dr. John Randolph Haynes, a noted reformer, and Reginaldo F. del Valle were holdouts for a higher price netting the quarter million dollars but were outvoted. Another piece desired for the hotel was a Salvation Army young women’s home on the Grand Avenue side of the tract, but it was hoped that an agreement would be reached soon regarding that parcel.
The excitement over the Biltmore and other project was such that the Express of the 15th had an article with the headline “Pershing Square Fast Becoming New ‘Plaza’ For Los Angeles,” though the establishment of the park in 1866 actually referred to the site as a new plaza, following the historic one established during the Spanish period. Writer E.F. Howe, however, stated that Pershing Square was to be viewed as “a substitute for the old plaza,” a view many, including the Latino population, would, of course, dispute.
With the Philharmonic auditorium, the Pacific Mutual expansion, the nearby Pacific Finance Building and, of course, the Biltmore, there was also continuing debate about whether the Public Library should be built on the Normal School property, partially because there were concerns that it would be hidden behind the hotel and lack the proper visibility.
The Times of 21 August ran an interesting rendering that showed the library built within Pershing Square instead, something that Library stalwart Luther Ingersoll reminded city leaders was the wish of the voters in an election in 1904. The 11 August edition of the Express printed a map of another proposal for the area, which involved establishing a “Park Boulevard” to run from Pershing Square through the Biltmore project site and westward.
The concept by George L. Dunlop was to have the library where the hotel was slated to go, add a veterans’ building at the proposed library site to Hope Street and then a municipal auditorium on the rest of the latter to Flower Street. Between Grand and Hope on the southern part of he Biltmore parcel was to be a Los Angeles City Schools headquarters, with Dunlop’s idea that this grouping of public buildings was better suited than the private hotel obscuring the library.
A few months passed before the Express offered an editorial called “A Really Great Plan” in which it averred that the Biltmore was “more than a business project,” but was instead “a civic enterprise of importance” that would both benefit Los Angeles “and make a profitable investment at the same time.” It specified that Bowman would lease the hotel so there’d be a net 6% return on the value of the land and 8 1/2% for the building and was surely appealing to any investor “by purely business considerations.”
It was, the paper continued, up to citizens to decide, by the power of the purse in investment, whether the site was to be a hotel or end up as something else, but their support was crucial for “this meritorious enterprise.” The paper concluded,
The investment, sound as an investment, possesses the additional merit of being valuable as a civic enterprise. Los Angeles has many hotels, some of them exceptionally attractive, but it has need of a hotel with the thousand-room capacity of the Biltmore. During recent years the city at times has been unable to house its visitors. There have been periods where tourists by the hundreds have been obliged to forego their purpose to remain for weeks or months in Los Angeles and have been compelled by lack of accommodation to seek shelter elsewhere. As an advertisement of Los Angeles this hotel, equal to any on this hemisphere, will be worth its cost.
By mid-November, advertisements were being issued from the Central Investment Corporation, created to manage the Biltmore construction and readers were asked “Will Los Angeles—Will YOU—support, with actual pledges of money—this proposed great project of building in Los Angeles a hotel as fine as any in America? It was added that a citizens’ committee “that has worked for months, quietly and assiduously, securing the site, negotiating for a lease, has paved the way” for residents to pony up for stock.
It was repeated that, if a lack of funds were subscribed, “the site will have to be put to other uses” and the corporation was prepared to issue $5 million in stock toward the more than $1.2 million for the acquisition costs of the land and $7 million for the building. It was anticipated that $4 million in stock was to be purchased and the rest secured through bonds of no more than a 6 1/2% yield. The ad continued that “this hotel, if erected, would mean added prosperity for every man and woman in Los Angeles” and “add impetus to the present rapid growth of the city to the greatest possible degree.”
As to members of the committee, it was a veritable Who’s Who of local elites, such as film producer/director Cecil B. de Mille; banker Andrew M. Chaffey; Times publisher Harry Chandler; viticulturist Secondo Guasti; bankers Marco H. Hellman, Joseph F. Sartori and Henry M. Robinson; real estate developer William I. Hollingsworth; merchant Hans Jevne; Arthur Letts, owner of The Broadway department store; General Moses H. Sherman; oil man Mericos “Max” Whittier; and developer William May Garland, among many.
Chapin Hall in the 23 November edition of the Times favorably analyzed the economic merits of the Biltmore project, opining that “no financial undertaken at present in the perspective of local investors is of so far reaching interest.” Calling it “an undertaking worth shooting at,” the writer commented that it was a city-building enterprise beyond its investment potential, but added that it “is not a charity. It’s a business; a great big business, the success of which is assured—guaranteed, before a spade full of earth is turned.”
Noting that $3.3 million of stock was subscribed and that only another $700,000 was needed to get the plan to where it was needed, Hall praised the lease terms from Bowman and added that it was a “duty laid upon keen, farsighted business men and women” to aid “in the consummation of a constructive forward-looking development.” Expecting that last sum would soon be subscribed, he reiterated that the hotel “is a sure thing” and would have the added dividend of “pride of possession” and in being “in a pioneer group, which is engaged in putting over a big deal in a big way.”
In early December, Bowman arrived from New York City and the Times quoted him extensively as he opined that “what Los Angeles needs is a substantial and thoroughly modern hotel” so that tourists would not be disappointed “not because hotel accommodations were not good enough, but because they are inadequate.” Continuing that “it is a fact that a first-class hotel brings business to a city,” the hotelier clarified that older hotels found benefit from newer, more modern ones” in an “under-hoteled” metropolis.
Having covered some of the progress of the Biltmore project for 1921, we’ll return next and look at the following year, so be sure to check back for that.