Getting Schooled Through the Viewfinder: Students at Angeles Mesa Elementary School, Los Angeles, 15 May 1917

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Among the Workman and Temple family’s multitude of connections to widespread areas of greater Los Angeles are those pertaining to the Rancho La Cienega o Paso de la Tijera. This square league parcel of just over 4,200 acres southwest of the pueblo of Los Angeles lay on the eastern side of what have long been called the Baldwin Hills and was granted by Manuel Micheltorena in 1843 to Vicente Sánchez.

Just over three decades later, Sánchez’ grandson, Tomás, who was among the Californio defenders of their homeland against the American invasion of 1846-1847, a member of the Common (Council), a leader in the hunt for the Flores-Daniel gang after the January 1857 murder of Sheriff James R. Barton, and, beneficiary of Anglo support because of this, a three-term County Supervisor from 1857-1859 and Sheriff from 1860-1867.

Because he resided on land on the Rancho San Rafael in modern Glendale owned by his wife, María Sepúlveda, Sánchez sold, in 1875 at the peak of the first boom in the region, most of the La Cienega to Daniel Freeman, Arthur J. Hutchinson, Henry S. Ledyard (managing cashier of the Temple and Workman bank) and the latter’s boss, F.P.F. Temple.

Along with the acquisition of the ranchos Aguaje de la Centinela and Sausal Redondo, the group, with others, planned the Centinela townsite, but, with the collapse of the local economy in fall 1875, including the failure of the Temple and Workman bank, the project ended, though the towns of Inglewood and Redondo Beach arose during the bigger boom that peaked during William H. Workman’s mayoral term in 1887-1888.

Because of Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin’s loan to the institution, the Cienega was among the many properties held by Temple and Workman that went to his massive portfolio after he foreclosed on the transaction in 1879. This included the Baldwin Hills, which was largely considered worthless until well after Baldwin’s death in 1909 when his daughters and heirs, Anita Baldwin and Clara Stocker, as was the case with the Montebello Hills, were the beneficiaries of massive amounts of oil found there.

A small portion of the Cienega not sold to Temple was held by Bertrand Riviere, a native of France and a dairy farmer, and, in February 1874, he sold 360 acres of the ranch “below the race track,” meaning southwest of Agricultural (Exposition) Park, where a horse-racing track was in wide use, to Andrew Joughin (1825-1889). A native of the Isle of Man, situated in the sea between Ireland and England, and close to William Workman’s hometown of Clifton in the latter, Joughin was the son of a blacksmith in the parish of Jurby on the isle’s northwestern shore.

After his marriage to Ann Cannell in late 1851, the couple traveled to America, apparently as something of a honeymoon, but the couple did not return to the Isle of Man and, after a brief sojourn at Rochester, New York, ended up in Rockford, Illinois, northwest of Chicago. There, Joughin continued his blacksmith trade, but demonstrated a proficiency in real estate during the eight years he, his wife and their children resided there.

In 1860, the family migrated, using the Panamanian isthmus route, to California and settled in Sacramento, where Joughin hung up his smithing shingle and had a partner. After ending that enterprise in 1865, however, the Joughins headed south and took up residence in Los Angeles. In 1866, the pueblo and region were just emerging from a terrible period of flood, drought, grasshopper infestations and a smallpox epidemic and land was incredibly cheap. At Hill and 2nd streets, Joughin acquired a quarter of a city block for $500 and soon sold it for triple that amount.

After a brief period in Arizona, the Joughins returned to this region, where, in 1869, Andrew set up a blacksmith shop and ran a hotel in the mission town of San Juan Capistrano in the farthest southeastern corner of Los Angeles County (two decades later, it became part of Orange County.) An advertisement in the Los Angeles News of 10 May 1870 found Joughin stating that he “would be pleased to see any friends passing and any one else desirous of having first-class accommodations” and he added that the San Juan Hot Springs were near his Pioneer Hotel.

Then came the purchase from Riviere of the 360 acres at the Cienega for $6,000, a sum that reflected how much the real estate market changed in not quite a decade as that first regional boom was at its peak. In February 1875, Joughin disposed of his San Juan Capistrano lands for $1,000 and, the following year, as the economic situation worsened with the end of the boom, moved his family to the Cienega. In 1876, the ranch was the staging ground for the important Wheeler Expedition that yielded federal survey maps and data about large sections of the American Southwest. A future post here will highlight a Wheeler map in the Museum’s holdings.

Meanwhile, he acquired several hundred acres in the Santa Susana Mountains at the northwestern edge of the San Fernando Valley where Chatsworth is today and what is called the Michael D. Antonovich Regional Park at Joughin Ranch embraces north of 2,300 acres. A Thousand Oaks newspaper article from a few years ago featured the property and noted that descendants of Joughin sold more than 1,700 acres in 2003 for the park.

Joughin’s knack for acquiring valuable land continued with the 1883 purchase of just north of 300 acres known as the Tom Gray Ranch, north of his Cienega holdings, and which was developed into the Arlington Heights neighborhood north of Interstate 10 and generally between Western Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard as well as south of Olympic Boulevard. Two years later, he picked up another 600 acres of the Rancho Palos Verdes, with his sons farming on this tract near the harbor at San Pedro and Wilmington.

At the end of 1885, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad completed a direct transcontinental link to greater Los Angeles that ushered in the major boom that followed. As noted above, Inglewood and Redondo Beach were established on what was intended for the Centinela project more than a decade before.

Nearby, “just beyond the ranch of Andrew Joughin” and at the “old Rosencrantz [Rosecrans] tract” observed the Los Angeles Herald of 26 January 1887, was the new town of Hyde Park with the paper noting that “standing on the plain where the town is to be, one is surprised to see how great a space of territory is taken in by the eye.”

This included surrounding orchards and vineyards, “the entire city of Los Angeles,” and the distant mountains even to San Jacinto near where Palm Springs is now. Reflective of the fever of the boom, “the ink on the maps of the town is scarcely dry,” but almost all Hyde Park lots were gone and a repeat of the success of Monrovia in the San Gabriel Valley was anticipated.

In 1888, as the boom peaked, Andrew Joughin journeyed to Australia and then extended his trip to include his hometown on the Isle of Man. Not long after his return, however, and just shy of his 65th birthday, the imposing figure who was well over six feet tall and far north of 200 pounds and who was accounted as “a fast friend to all who had a claim on him” as well as “industrious and sagacious in business,” died at home.

Harris Newmark, in his 1916 memoir, Sixty Years in Southern California, cited Joughin as “a good example of what an industrious man, following an ordinary trade, could accomplish in early days.” The prominent Jewish merchant, whose eagle eye and prodigious memory captured so much of 19th century Los Angeles, added that Joughin made “rather ingenious plows of iron and steel which attracted considerable attention” and noted that “as fast as he accumulated a little money, he invested it in land.”

Andrew’s estate was managed by his widow Ann and, while there was some family infighting regarding bequests made to the children that were slow in being distributed, she seems to have invested a good amount of time in her endeavors. During the peak of the boom in 1887, Joughin and his son, also Andrew, conveyed the 305 acres of Cienega acquired thirteen years before from Riviere, to real estate promoters Dan McFarland and Theodore Wiesendanger for a cool $90,000. The deal, however, involved mortgages as well as a partnership with the Joughlins and, when the boom went bust, so did most of the plans the quartet made. Ann, though, successfully sued for return of the land and more than $50,000 owed the estate.

In 1909, however, a new project was launched by Fred W. Forrester and a group of investors who formed the Angeles Mesa Land Company, named for the elevated plateau on which sat much of the land the firm purchased from the Joughin estate. Forrester (1878-1941) was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania and came to the Angel City at age seven just before the Boom of the Eighties burst forth.

His father, Edward, was a developer in the red-hot Westlake Park area and, later, along Wilshire Boulevard, at Harvard Heights (centered at Western Avenue and Pico Boulevard) and the old Ascot Park, and Fred and a brother joined the business, which built a commercial structure still standing on Broadway between 6th and 7th streets in downtown next to the old Orpheum/Palace Theatre.

Forrester, who, in the mid-Twenties during yet another boom, developed the Monte Mar Vista Tract, which was then taken over by Frank Meline, adjacent to the Cheviot Hills tract and recreational center, led the intensive advertising and selling effort by the family’s E.A. Forrester and Sons, Inc., which had its offices in its Broadway structure.

The first major ad was in February 1910 and called Angeles Mesa a “mammoth subdivision on [the] highest ground southwest” of downtown and added that the tract was north of Slauson and east of the Los Angeles and Redondo Railway, which was a descendant of lines dating back to the Boom of the 1880s. Streetcars of the L.A.& R., as it was known for short, framed the advertisement as a reminder of how important interurban transport was while the automobile was not yet as near-universal as it would become within a decade or so.

At the end of the month, a grand opening was held, with the Los Angeles Herald reporting that the Forrester firm purchased 440 acres of the “famous old Joughin ranch” for more than a half-million dollars. The Angeles Mesa tract included 80 acres subdivided first, another 280 that were held in reserve for subsequent phases and 80 that remained to be surveyed and mapped. The piece continued that,

The plans include wide streets, beautiful parkings [parkways?] to be set out with grass, shrubbery and flowers, oiled and rolled roadways, cement walks and curbs, the terracing of each lot to the street, and developing and piping of pure artesian water from the water belt underlying the entire tract. A very special feature will be a splendid 180-foot boulevard [Angeles Mesa, now Crenshaw, Boulevard] with improved public parkings, flanked by wide drives and walks.

It was emphasized that a general landscape plan of shrubs and trees was to be implemented and this enhanced by a requirement of a 35-foot setback for all houses and the company was to plant lawns on vacant lots. Moreover, a minimum house price of $2,000 was to be enforced, with those on Crenshaw to be not less than $3,000. Later ads, not incidentally, advertised the excellent views from the tract, similar to what was stated in the Hyde Park article from more than two decades prior.

The account commented that “this subdivision is purely for residences, and the restrictions are such that no unsightly business stands in straggling one-story shacks . . . can ever possibly find a foothold in this fastidious suburb.” A single structure “on the casino order” would be erected to “centralize all business” and would include the sales office “as well as the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker,” to quote from the old nursery rhyme about three men in a tub.

Within a few weeks, an ad in the Los Angeles Times added that there were other reasons to purchase at Angeles Mesa, including a county highway to be improved under a bond act (this was Slauson), as well as the contemplated new campus of St. Vincent’s College, then located south of downtown on Grand Avenue and Washington Boulevard, though the eventual new home is where Loyola Marymount University opened in 1918 in Westchester near Los Angeles International Airport.

Also featured was the new campus of St. Mary’s Academy, like St. Vincent’s a Roman Catholic institution with the former for girls and the latter for boys. Completed in 1911 at the corner of Slauson and Angeles Mesa/Crenshaw, the academy, which opened almost two decades earlier a block south of St. Vincent’s at Grand and 21st Street, purchased its new site in 1904 and began planning for a much bigger campus to accommodate a significantly larger student body.

After F.P.F. Temple’s son, Walter, and his family realized the small fortune from oil found on the Montebello Hills land (lost by F.P.F. to Baldwin and then partially repurchased by Walter in 1912), Agnes, the only daughter of Walter (a high school graduate of St. Vincent’s) and his wife, Laura González (a product of the Catholic Sisters of Charity school in Los Angeles), was enrolled at St. Mary’s.

She boarded at the Angeles Mesa campus during her several years there, culminating in her high school graduation in 1925 (the year Mount St. Mary’s College began operating there prior to its move elsewhere—Agnes’ niece, Josette, the only child of Walter P. Temple, Jr. was a Mount St. Mary’s graduate). St. Mary’s Academy remained at the Slauson and Crenshaw site until a move in 1966 a couple of miles to the current campus across from Inglewood Park Cemetery.

A struggle during booming real estate markets concerns keeping up infrastructure along with the houses and business buildings springing up during intense development. While a school, in a district shared with Hyde Park, was planned early in the pursuit of the Angelus Mesa project, the process proved to be full of bumps, hurdles and road blocks. This was exacerbated by the opening of a new major addition in 1913 and issues that began that year with the voter’s passage of bonds that had to be divided with Hyde Park, not leaving enough money for the school.

As the Los Angeles Times of 20 December 1915 noted, moreover, “then came a long and bitter war over the site” but one was finally selected on 53rd Street, between 4th and 5th avenues, though that first mentioned thoroughfare is actually now 52nd Street. With more delays over how much joint bond money would be available, a contractor, Mann and Knox, was hired, but, once construction began, “it became apparent that there would not be money enough . . . to complete the building.”

This led to a second campaign for bonds, but the Hyde Park section of the district rejected it. In addition,

The dilatory manner in which the building work is alleged to have been prosecuted is a sore point with the residents of Angeles Mesa, who have been fighting for more than two years to secure an adequate school . . . Under the present circumstances it is the intention of the school trustees to take personal charge of the building, buying materials and hiring labor, and deducting the cost of it from the contract price to have been paid to Mann & Knox.

This extraordinary situation was purportedly going to save money, low bids being the standard then as now but creating problems like this, according to advice from Los Angeles County’s attorney. The article went on to note that the campus, designed either by George A. Howard, Jr. or T. Franklin Powers, both named in a 1915 engineering publication as working on Hyde Park district schools—the Powers listing specifically stated the project was in Angeles Mesa, but the Howard one mentioned a 500-seat auditorium— was 170 x 194 feet with “the classrooms being grouped around an open court with a large entrance loggia in front and an auditorium in the rear, seating 500.”

Beyond classrooms, spaces were to be used for manual training, domestic science, rooms for teachers and the principal, the cafeteria, nurses’ office and the restroom, while the loggia was set aside for “physical training and class exhibition work,” while “the stage opens both back and front, so that the court can be used as an open-air theater.”

The Times of 20 September 1916 reported on another logjam over which of two contractors was to be considered for the $60,000 campus because the bids were “so difficult to interpret as to which would complete the work at the lowest price consistent with good material and workmanship.” The result was that both bids were rejected and the request for proposals reopened and “the ruling means no school at Angeles Mesa this year,” even though a $21,000 bond was approved in June to continue work on the half-finished school, leading residents to celebrate with music and fireworks.

There was, however, an important landmark achieved on the last day of May 1917, just about two weeks after the highlighted photo for this post, dated 15 May and showing the entirety of the Angeles Mesa student body posed in front of the imposing and impressive entrance to the campus. The Times of 1 June noted,

Graduation exercises of the Angeles Mesa grammar school were held last night in the auditorium of the new building. The gathering was the first of its kind ever held within the structure now nearing completion. The bonds recently voted will be sufficient to complete the school buildings and furnish them . . .

Ten graduates were matriculated and all the students participated in the ceremony, which included music. Trustee Henry M. Lannan addressed the assemblage and made the extraordinary statement that “while my position . . . has been very unpleasant, as I was the minority member of the board, I feel amply repaid tonight for whatever effort I may have made for the school when I see what remarkable improvement” the students made during the course of the year. He concluded that, if he had anything to do with their success, “I am satisfied to retire.”

In early September, Angeles Mesa Grade School, as it was then known, was formally annexed to the Los Angeles City [Unified] School District as the 1917-1918 year began, with construction apparently completed in July or August. Over a century later, there has, of course, been a significant demographic transformation at the school and in the area, with today’s student body being about 60% Latino and 36% African-American (2% are considered white and the remaining 2% are identified as being of two or more races) in an area that had race restrictions when it was developed and where 90% of students are considered from low-income households.

It is notable that the school website’s history page, providing some interesting information about its past as well as its present, such as modernization efforts to bring the school up-to-date while “respecting our classic architecture” embodied by its “elegant beaux-arts” design, includes this very photo in it. Angeles Mesa certainly has what may be a truly unique architecture to it, but its role in serving its community now, as well as its nod to its past, is what stands out on the site.