The Rise and Fall of Adobe Abodes in Greater Los Angeles, 1851-1876, Part Six

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

We move now deeper into the heart of the first boom in greater Los Angeles as we look at the transformation of the Angel City’s built landscape through the removal of adobe buildings in favor wood and brick structures. The general descriptor for this was “improvements” and the Los Angeles News employed this term again in its 10 March 1872 edition to reflect how this change in building material reflected the city’s development:

Building improvements in Los Angeles have taken such rapid strides in the last few months that the general appearance of the city is rapidly becoming changed. The adobe is fast disappearing and will soon be numbered among the things of the past as far as the city is concerned. In every direction handsome dwellings are springing up, mostly [wood] frame, while the central or business portion of the city is being rapidly filled with handsome brick edifices.

Economic growth was such that there was a greater demand for business offices and stores than a year prior and quick occupancy of existing inventory along with the increase in trade by steamship with San Francisco, the economic powerhouse of California at that time, was such that “everything considered, the rapid growth of our city is fully justified.”

Suburban adobe structures were far less referenced in the Los Angeles press, but there was a message in the 7 May issue of the Star to the region’s farmers recommending that, in addition to their toil in the soil, they not only “devote two hours each day to reading and reflection” to ameliorate ignorance, though it wasn’t specific on how that was to work exactly. It went on, however, to have a more important suggestion.

That is, the paper counseled, “the best investment a farmer can make for his children, is that which surrounds their youth with the rational delights of a beauteous and attractive home” and it continued that,

The dwelling may be small and rude, even an adobe hut, yet a few trees will gladden it as well as supply the most delicious semi-tropical fruits, for the use and enjoyment of its occupants. Grass and flowers should also be made to add their beauty and fragrance to the surroundings of the farm house.

It is interesting in this regard to note the Workman House at the Homestead and its transformations over thirty years to 1872. It began in the early Forties as a two and, shortly after, three-room adobe, with minimal ornamentation and, therefore, qualified, by the standards of the Star, as “rude.” By the end of the Gold Rush, it was greatly expanded, including two southerly wings with five rooms on each side and a plaster finish resembling granite.

Visitors in 1856, 1858, 1860 and 1865 commented on the structure and, one of these declared that it and the house built several miles to the west by Margarita Workman and F.P.F. Temple were among the best constructed in California and surrounded by flower gardens, fruit orchards and vineyards. The addition of El Campo Santo Cemetery was a reflection, not just of increased wealth allowing for memorializing family, friends and ranch workers, but of the mounting interest in aesthetics at the Homestead.

When the current boom began and with William Workman a partner in the second bank formed in Los Angeles, Hellman, Temple and Company, a radical remodeling took place including the razing of the wings and the addition of brick rooms at all four corners and a brick second-floor, with ornamentation greatly adding to the aesthetics of the house. It is said that Ezra F. Kysor, the first trained architect in Los Angeles, oversaw this work, which was completed in 1870.

Yesterday’s fifth part of this post mentioned the short thoroughfare, first known as Libertad (Freedom) Street and then renamed for the prominent Californio citizen and politician, Manuel Requena. The 3 May edition of the News reported that “Requena street is being rapidly opened from Alameda street to Los Angeles street” and this work necessitated “removing the adobe buildings on the latter street.” While most razing of these edifices were for the building of new ones, there were instances, as this account shows, in which destruction of adobe buildings was to allow for transportation improvements.

Also previously mentioned was that, as these structures were leveled, it was found useful to salvage as many of the adobe bricks as possible for repurposing. The 12 June issue of the News briefly observed that “the basin formerly forming the bed of Los Angeles Lake,” this apparently being a depression that was created from rain and wear of the dirt roads where Los Angeles and Aliso streets met, “has been filled with the ruins of the adobe buildings that have pulled down in opening Los Angeles street.” Whether this actually meant the Requena Street extension or expansion of Los Angeles to the south is unclear.

The Star of 2 August devoted some space in its columns to a “Retrospective and Prospective” essay about the continued development and growth of the City of the Angels, offering that,

We know of no place in the State which presents a better opportunity for the safe investment of the surplus capital of California and; in fact of the world, than Los Angeles county. The facilities here offered for the successful carrying on of the various manufacturing interests are unsurpassed. Fifteen years ago we had a “city of mud.” scarcely [sic] a brick building was to be seen within the corporate limits. The old adobes, however, are rapidly disappearing, and will soon be a feature of the past; and in their stead are arising commodious, handsome and expensive blocks of buildings that would compare favorably with those of more pretentious cities.

The reference to 1857 is notable because Jonathan Temple built the brick section at the south end of the Temple Block that was soon followed by the Market House, refashioned into city and county administrative quarters and the court house, in an adjacent open space. Abel Stearns, John Lanfranco and others also constructed brick buildings in the years shortly afterward and the trend continued with Pío Pico, Louis Mesmer and more in subsequent years as detailed in the earlier parts of this post.

The article ended with the listing of distinctive structures built within the last couple of years in the expanding commercial core of downtown, including the Downey Block, erected by the former governor; a block by his banking partner (and formerly associated with Workman and Temple), Isaias W. Hellman; the White House and Norton blocks; and the continuing remarking of the Temple Block by F.P.F. Temple.

The 25 September edition of the Star continued the boosting under the heading of “Something To Be Proud Of” in which it gushed,

When we look around our beautiful city and behold its thousands of splendid homes, its magnificent mercantile buildings, and its multitude of factories, workshops and temples of art and industry; its grand hotels and commodious public buildings; its spacious thoroughfares and miles of foliage shading the pedestrian; its suburban avenues, and unsurpassable drives, and think that a few years since it was but a Spanish settlement, with squalid buildings sheltering a people whose architectural ambition never towered above a one-story adobe; when, we say, we draw a contrast between the present Los Angeles and the old Los Angeles, we are lost in wonder and inspired with admiration.

Instead of just one forwarding and commission house for goods, this being that of Harris Newmark, there were five and the paper proudly noted that “within the past three years, 1,900 houses, many of a very superior order,” were built in the growing burg. Teams of wagons drawn by animals were superseded by “the iron horse of our advanced civilization,” though the local Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad would soon be taken over by the powerful Southern Pacific as it engineered, with local power players like F.P.F. Temple, a successful subsidy election as part of its mandated building of a line to Arizona through the region.

Working itself further into a lather, the Star celebrated the “busy hum of industry” including from the steam-powered machine, which was “heard tuning its musical notes to the progressive march of the place.” Out in the hinterlands, such as at the still largely-intact Rancho La Puente, “where nature lends her aid to the cultivators of the soil,” there were “valleys of perennial bloom, rich in all the wealth of the tropics, and pouring their teeming treasures ceaselessly into our laps.”

The paper insisted, however, that there was more to come. Greater Los Angeles was “in the spring-time” of its development and, within a few years, rail connections would tie the region to “all the outside world.” The Angel City “will loom up and expand beyond our present limits, and not only become a paradise of homes uncountable, but a centre of wealth and commerce such as will be the envy of our present more pretentious emporiums of trade.”

With respect to the “iron horse,” a short piece in the Star of 11 November, not quite a week after the subsidy vote, concerned the paper’s editor, George W. Barter, taking a stroll through town and, as the title queried, “What’s Going On?”:

Passing along Spring street, and observing that Mr. Temple was having another of those old adobes torn down, we accosted [attorney and judge Harvey S.K.] O’Melveny and asked him what it meant. He replied, Barter, old boy, that means Railroad, don’t you see? We saw.

In other words, the imminent work to build the main line from the north through Los Angeles and then east along the San Gabriel Valley with rights-of-way through Rancho La Puente on its way southeast to Yuma, a branch line from Florence (South Los Angeles) to Anaheim, and the transfer of the Los Angeles and San Pedro to the Southern Pacific portended much of what the above booster pieces concerned.

In early 1873, there was an interesting description of the Angel City from a correspondent denoted as “Viator” and who wrote “on the whole, I like Los Angeles” and noted that first impressions are usually borne out, while “time generally deepens and confirms them.” He (presumably, this was a male) added that “the almost boundless fertility and future wealth of this county are surely not half understood in other parts of the State, or at the East” because “if they were so the population would be double within three years.”

“Viator” had an interesting take on the population of a city he compared to St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in America when it was founded in the mid-16th century under Spain, stating “it seems that the complexion of the people is a shade darker than that of dwellers further north, but this fact by no means detracts from their comeliness.” He claimed to have seen hundreds of “the most perfect type of manhood” along with “some of the most exquisitely beautiful ladies that ever gladdened the eyes of man.” Estimating that the population was one-third Latino (the 1870 census recorded just over half of the county’s denizens were Anglo, the first time they constituted a majority), “Viator” added that “a stranger meets this, and wonders at first whether he has . . . arrived at Havana.”

His opening lines, though, are the most notable for this post:

The city itself is a strange mixture of the old and the new, of ancient low adobes and magnificent modern structures. The adobes are very different from those in the northern counties, being much lower, of a darker color, and having roofs generally almost flat, composed either of red tiles or brea. The flatness of the roofs reminds the traveler at once that he has got out of the country of heavy snows and rains, and entered upon a region of new climate peculiarities.

While there is no doubt that the English-language press was all too happy to promote its perception of modern civilization and denigrate that of the Mexican and Spanish periods, there were occasions when notions of progress with respect to adobe buildings were echoed in the Spanish-language press, though, importantly, not in a comparative sense. The 22 February 1873 edition of the recently launched La Crónica, with the prominent Californio Eulogio F. de Célis as proprietor and which, fifteen years later, had Thomas W. Temple, son of F.P.F., as owner, reported,

Se está derrumbando la casucha situada frente a la Corte. No fuera malo a continuara en toda esa linea hasta, incluir la casa de ciudad, que verdaderamente da a un extraño muy pobre idea de nuestra poblacion. The [adobe] shack in front of the Court is collapsing. It would not be bad to continue along that line until this includes the City Hall, which truly gives a stranger a very poor idea of ​​our population.

Returning to adobe construction and specifically the material used to cover roofs, the Star of 8 March ran a featured called “La Brea,” in which it was noted that “at several places in the county are to be found large and valuable deposits of asphaltum, or as we generally call it here brea; of these those of Rancho de la Brea [where the famous tar pits are] and the Cañada Brea [Brea Canyon in southeastern Los Angeles and northeastern Orange counties] are the most extensive.”

Beyond the tar pits seepages, the paper recorded that “smaller deposits occur at intervals between it and the city line,” this being where Hoover Street is today. The La Brea pits, however, came to the surface “as it were, in springs, and hardened upon exposure to the air,” though “it yields readily to slight heat” during colder weather, while “in the sun’s rays [it] softens to about the consistency of half molten glue.” The paper added that the asphaltum “is yet extensively used in this city in the manufacture of gas, in roofing adobe houses, and as material for covering sidewalks.”

As for Brea Canyon, the Star recorded that “the brea exists in large quantities, but as yet has been buy slightly worked.” William Workman and F.P.F. Temple then had ownership of land in this area and, perhaps, anticipated developing the brea for commercial purposes, while the canyon may well have been the source of the covering for the roofs of their houses and their neighbors. Other locales mentioned were the ranchos La Habra and Los Coyotes in the La Habra and Fullerton areas, and the San Fernando oil field in Santa Clarita, where Temple would very soon begin drilling operations along with others.

The account added that the only shipments of brea made to San Francisco were by Henry Hancock, longtime county surveyor and owner of Rancho La Brea and whose son, Allan, would become rich from the oil deposits found in this and the other areas where the tar seeps were located and mentioned in the article. While oil prospecting began at the San Fernando field in 1865, just a half-dozen years after the American oil industry was inaugurated in Pennsylvania, the major boom in the industry was not until just more than a quarter-century later and the region became a oil and gas producing powerhouse (though we now confront the mounting climate crisis challenges of fossil fuel mining, production and processing, and use.)

As mentioned above, descriptions of rural adobe houses are relatively rare, but the 19 October edition of the Star went into some detail about “A Los Angeles Sheep Rancho,” this being the Rancho Los Cerritos, which Jonathan Temple owned for more than two decades and then sold, at just 50 cents an acre for $14,000, when he decamped to San Francisco in 1866, just prior to the current boom. The ranch was run by Jotham Bixby, an experienced sheep rancher who made Los Cerritos a very successful endeavor, and, as to the house built by Temple, a Michigan newspaper reporter observed,

The rancho house is a white adobe, two stories high, and probably a hundred feet in length. From either end, long one story, flat roofed wings project at right angles [not unlike the Workman House prior to 1870], containing [the] kitchen, rooms for farm hands, carriage house, blacksmith shop, etc. These wings, together with the main building, enclose three sides of a courtyard, the fourth being protected by a high adobe fence, with a gateway in the centre. It was the most spacious adobe country house I have seen, and with its iron-barred windows had a quaint, and rather foreign look without, but within, the cosiness [sic] and comfort are all American.

After writing that Bixby was “a genuine down-east Yankee,” though so was Temple, just in a very different era locally, and that the ranch was run not unlike a Southern plantation and included “John Chinaman” as cook “not regarded as an unmixed blessing,” the journalist added that “the hall [is] running through the house upon a spacious two-story verandah, which stretches along the entire length of the mansion, and across either end.” Moreover, “from the upper verandah one may pass out upon the flat roofs mentioned above, from which a wide view meets the eye,” including the ocean, the harbor of San Pedro, Phineas Banning’s Wilmington and Santa Monica.

Lastly, the Los Angeles Herald, which debuted two months previously, of 5 December, had a cutting response to an editor from a newspaper in a nearby city (perhaps Anaheim?) who “bemoans the fact that the erection of a new hotel necessitates the destruction of adobe cottage” and rejoined that the colleague “must have an intense affection for everything venerable, and doubtless wears his grandfather’s pants, in preference to a new pair.”

We’ll return soon with part seven, so join us then!