Wo/men at Work with “The Intake,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, May 1929, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

It is hard to overstate the incredible importance of the revolutionary effects of electric power and large-scale water distribution in the City of Los Angeles during its astonishing growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A municipality that largely went dark before electricity was delivered to houses, businesses and others starting in the early 1880s was radically transformed (!) as the onset of reliable and affordable provision of this resource literally lit the way for future growth.

Water, provided by simple zanja (ditch) systems for most of the 1800s and then gradually and often inefficiently through pipes, pumps and other components by a private company for three decades until just prior to the end of the century, was a crucial challenge because of very limited local supply. The planning and development of the Los Angeles Aqueduct (for which City Treasurer William H. Workman sold bonds in the early stages of the project) was truly and engineering marvel of its time when it was completed and the precious fluid poured forth into the municipality in 1913.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is a massive institution, the largest of its kind in the nation, providing enormous amounts of both to a city of more than 4 million people, though it has also been much maligned over the years for its glacial pace of operations when it comes to new construction and service to existing customers and continuing and dogged corruption issues. A recent leaked report following the imprisonment of a former general manager and two other executives revealed what the Los Angeles Times has called “long-standing problems with its culture and management structure.

One of the interpretive questions we continue to explore at the Homestead concerns confronting historical legacies of the extraordinary development of greater Los Angeles during our interpretive era of 1830 to 1930 in terms of constraints in funding, human resources, climate change. The early 20th century in particular was a period of seemingly unbridled optimism about untrammeled growth with plenty of resources at hand and, a century or so later, looking back at those attitudes is notable in the face of current perceptions and future possibilities and probabilities.

This post takes a look at the pages of The Intake, the monthly employee magazine issued by the Department of Water and Power. The water supply portion of the institution was established in 1902 with the electric supply section inaugurated fifteen years later in terms of city-owned distribution (the Bureau of Power and Light was established in 1911 when electricity was provided by private firms).

The publication began in 1924 and the Museum’s collection has nine issues during the period of 1926-1929, with a prior post dealing with the September 1926 edition. At 64 pages plus the wrappers, it is a hefty employee magazine, so we’ll, as with the previous post, present this one in parts. Notably, the feature article had nothing to do with water or power, though it did concern another important municipal entity: the Los Angeles Public Library.

As noted in yesterday’s post, the first organized library in the Angel City was in the stationery and book store of merchant Samuel Hellman, with an early reference for it found in an 1857 newspaper advertisement. An attempt two years later by Jonathan Temple and others to establish a separate library proved to be unsuccessful, though, in 1872, his nephew Thomas was among the founding trustees of the system that exists today.

The article here was penned by Faith Holmes Hyers, the publicity editor for the Library, and is titled “The Library Barometer or What Are People Reading?” and she referenced (!) an interview by the prominent Philadelphia publisher, Joseph W. Lippincott, who mentioned the institution as an example of rising American production and consumption of literature: “He cited in proof of his statement, the phenomenal increase in [the] circulation of books by the Los Angeles Public Library—a gain last year of 1,179,884—an increase exceeded only by the Chicago Public Library.”

Patron loans in 1928 were about 8 million, while the inventory of the central library, opened not quite three years prior, and the 46 branches and deposit stations throughout the sprawling metropolis, totaled around 1 million volumes with 600 works a day sent to the branches. Hyers added that,

But it is a matter of still greater gratification that the library barometer records a rise in quality of reading as well as quantity. From all parts of the world come reports of a thirst for books of information and inspiration.

After quoting a writer for the recent issue of McCall’s Magazine regarding the value of books as “designed to supply the mental, emotional and spiritual hungers” of readers, the library official noted that reading was no longer considered a highbrow endeavor as works “are written in [an] appealing popular style” and “are humanized by the great forward surge of mankind towards wider horizons of knowledge,” while people had “many inventions for the annihilation of time and space.”

Hyers continued that readable works were more readily available on art, education, philosophy, religion and science and added that “we have history that reads like the most fascinating story of mankind—and biography that vies with fiction in originality and charm.” In fact, biography was the most popular subject of the period, a point made by Lippincott and there were efforts in developing new forms, while there was a trend towards the “debunking” as well as the genres of autobiography, “worshipful” biography (J. Perry Worden’s failed effort regarding the Temple family would have been one of these), anthologies of the letters, diary entries or speeches of an historical figure and fictional biography.

Gamaliel Bradford VI (yes, the sixth!) was well-known then as the “Dean of American Biographers” including of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee as well as prominent figures from that force and the Union Army, prominent American women, and notable wives in history and he was quoted as suggesting that “biography used to be written to depict men as God did not make them,” or idealized, but that, in his view, changed to who the subjects actually were, at least “so far as we can find this out.” He concluded that the fact that we could never really know for sure “only adds to the charm of the research.”

A separate offering was headed “All Sorts of People You may Meet at the Library in Recent Biography” and works included one about Alexander Dumas, Lotta Crabtree (a famous Gold Rush California dancer), Rasputin, Queen Elizabeth and Robert Essex and “fictional biography” works about Helen of Troy, the conversion of Saul to St. Paul, Charles Dickens, Joan of Arc, Andrew Jackson and Will Durant’s Transition, otherwise called a “mental biography” or novelistic treatment of the writer’s intellectual development by the creator (with his wife, Ariel, for much of it) of the monumental 11-volume The Story of Civilization (published between 1935 and 1975.)

Germane to the publication and the Department, there is an interesting serial contribution by the Burns-McDonnell Smith Engineering Company titled “100 Reasons Why 100 Cities Approve Municipal Ownership of their Public Utilities.” The fifteen examples for this edition included the assertion that “municipal ownership tends to distribute the wealth and power of a community and increases the democracy in the industrial and civic life of the people.”

Another is that such a model “enables a city to fix and control rates,” rather than the courts and commissions which would do so in the example of private ownership. It was claimed that the promises and contracts for the latter were “worthless” because the legal entities would “raise rates if, in their judgment, existing rates do not yield the companies a sufficient return on their capital account.” Also of note is that “a franchise is a prize for bad government,” the insinuation being that a poorly run municipality would turn to issuing private franchises instead of seeking to efficiently operate utilities.

Francis J. Heney, who achieved fame for his prosecution of corruption and graft in San Francisco in the first decade of the 20th century, but who also co-wrote the Alien Land Law of 1913 that prohibited non-citizens from owning land in California, limiting them to leases of no longer than three years duration (an example was “K. Yatsuda,” who was leasing the Homestead when Walter P. Temple purchased it at the end of 1917), told a Kansas City audience,

After five years of investigating the causes and cure for graft, I bring this one message: I am driven to believe that the public ownership of public utilities is the only cure for graft.

Echoing his was a statement from the National Civic Federation and its report on the operation of utilities and which stated that investigation found “that the campaign funds of the dominant political party, and not infrequently of both parties, have been derived, to a considerable extent, from public utility interests.”

An interesting fact was the, in 1881 there was one city-owned electric light plant—though it has to be borne in mind that the industry was in its infancy— and, some four decades later, the total was pushing 2,600, with the total percentage of such plants pegged at just north of 40% of all such entities. The cost for operation was lower than with private plants, about 16% on an average basis, while the maximum rate differential was more than 30%. Moreover, the averaged cost per arc light was over a third lower. Lastly, it was observed that Pasadena cut its rates by more than two-thirds a couple of years after it assumed ownership of electricity production.

Another serial was “In the Beginning: Early Events in the History of Los Angeles,” with thirteen of these highlighted. The first was that,

The first attempt at a theater in Los Angeles was when John [Jonathan] Temple fitted up a hall in the second story of a building in 1860 with a 20×45-foot stage, flanked on either side with private boxes—this building subsequently became the County Court House and stood on a portion of the site of the New City Hall.

The next item observed that “the first theatrical performance” in the Angel City was in that venue in November 1860 when Stark & Ryer’s Great Star Company presented two weeks of comedy and drama “and played to packed houses.” It is not true that these were the first professional presentations, however, only that the short-lived Temple Theatre was the first purpose-built venue, as part of what was constructed as the Market House, in town. The theater space was soon converted to courtrooms, while city and county offices also occupied the structure, which was leased to the City from 1861 onward.

On 8 October, a communications milestone was achieved when Mayor Henry Mellus, who soon died in office, sent a telegram to San Francisco to mark the completion of a line, by the Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph Company, that put the Angel City “on the wire.” A dispatch was transmitted for the celebration of this landmark, with the first telegraph office in the Bella Union Hotel, though a ten-word message cost a steep $2.50.

In September 1861, the city’s first planing and saw mill was opened by William H. Perry and Wallace Woodworth, the latter being the grandfather of the DWP’s R.C. Woodworth of the Water Cost Division. The partners, who worked together for a quarter century until Woodworth’s death, constructed the first water delivery system not using zanjas or ditches, operated a furniture business and constructed the only covered bridge in the region, which spanned the Los Angeles River. Perry’s fine Mount Pleasant House, built in the new community of Boyle Heights (founded by William H. Workman and others) in 1876, is now at the Heritage Square Museum.

With the small, but growing, Jewish community of Los Angeles including the mid-1850s arrival of such figures as Samuel Hellman, the subject of yesterday’s post, it was noted that “the first Los Angeles permanent Jewish religious organization was the Congregation B’nai B’rith,” which was established in 1862 with Rabbi Abram Wolf Edelman leading the congregation and Joseph Newmark, of another prominent early Jewish family, but not mentioned here, obtaining a state charter.

With the Angel City then predominantly comprised of citizens of the Roman Catholic faith, it was added that the first Protestant church structure was built in 1864 on the southwest corner of Temple and New High streets. While it was noted that this was the “forerunner of the later St. Paul’s Church, located on Olive Street where the Biltmore [Hotel] now stands,” nothing was said of the church’s first name, this being St. Athanasius’ Episcopal Church. Also mentioned was that the First Congregational Church was informally formed with a half-dozen adherents in July 1866 and a sermon at the aforementioned Court House, while the organization took place a year later.

The oil industry came to the region with the February 1865 founding of the Pioneer Oil Company, capitalized at $1.5 million, and it was stated that the firm had a “15,000-acre petroleum lease of the San Pasqual Rancho, but which never drilled a well.” While there was a lease for the ranch that became Pasadena and surrounding communities, the work conducted by the firm was west of Los Angeles near where the La Brea tar pits and the future La Brea oil field are, though the primitive drilling techniques yielded no success.

Lastly, a few items pertained to the first college established in the Angel City, this being St. Vincent’s, a Roman Catholic institution, which, however, educated boys as young as grammar school and through high school (including the brothers Walter and Charles Temple) throughout its earliest history. The school opened in August 1865 with the magazine noted that it began in a building east of the Plaza (this being the Vicente Lugo adobe house) and added that a student was Reginaldo F. de Valle, vice-president of the Board of Water and Power Commissioners.

The first Los Angeles college graduate, earning a degree from St. Vincent’s, which was known as Loyola College in 1929 and is now Loyola Marymount University, was Isidore B. Dockweiler, though it was not mentioned that he completed his collegiate work in 1887 and, two years later, also received the first master’s degree issued by the institution. Dockweiler then was admitted to the bar and became a prominent member of the local legal fraternity, business community, an active layperson with the Catholic Church and a powerful leader of the Democratic Party.

Next we’ll move to part two of this post with more interesting content from the issue of The Intake, so check back for that!