by Paul R. Spitzzeri
No one likely knew it when New Year’s Day 1875 arrived and greater Los Angeles was at the peak of its first boom, but there would be drastic changes by the end of that summer. The “good times” mentality was very much dominant and farmers likely rejoiced when that winter included some copious rainfall. What that meant, however, for adobe houses, especially those not well maintained, was another matter.
The 18 January edition of the Los Angeles Express reported that “the north wall of the row of adobes, adjoining the Catholic Church, is melting under the storm” and a big portion “crumbled into the adjoining lot, which is flooded with water.” This looks to refer to the structure built next to the Plaza Church in the early 1840s by Charles Baric and later owned by Venancia Sotelo Dominugez and then Andrés Pico and mentioned here previously.
Also affected was the “Cottage Photograph Gallery,” recently sold by Alfred Addis, father of the remarkable poet and writer Yda Addis, to Williams and Smith and said to be on the corner of Turner Street “and on the same lot,” though the little thoroughfare to the south was called Hayes Alley and later Republic Street. In any case, it was said to be “nearly afloat on one end,” while a postscript noted that “the whole room at the north end of the adobe has fallen in.”
The next day’s issue of the Los Angeles Star, however, had a more colorful way to put it and appeared to be rooting for these adobe structures to fail as part of the general attitude of the time:
An old adobe building, which stood opposite the Pico [House] and has been threatening to fall for the last twenty years, yielded gracefully to the inevitable, and looks now as limp and utterly squashed as Mrs. Sairy Gamp [a character in Charles Dickens’ 1840s novel, Martin Chuzzlewit] after her fifteenth drink of gin.
The paper added that the structure “has gone in,” that is, collapsed, or partially so, and claimed that “the neighbors are anxious to see the building next door to it,” this containing the Cottage gallery, “go the same way.” A tangential piece of news was also treated with levity as the paper reported that the janitor of the Temple Block, convinced that water rushing down Temple Street from the east would overwhelm the building, valiantly wielded a shovel to divert the fluid from surmounting the curb and spilling into the basement. While lauded for his energy and effort, the unidentified figure was also said to be so worked up that “a whole dictionary of Spanish expletives could have been made up from his objurgations [reprimands].”
It was a very common practice at the time and prior to build wood second stories onto adobe buildings, but the Express of 19 February reported that ex-Governor Pío Pico, builder of the aforementioned Pico House and the Pico Building further south on Main, both acclaimed for advancing the architectural progress of the Angel City, wanted to “build a second story frame upon the adobe walls standing on the Southwest side of the Plaza” through a petition to the Common (City) Council, apparently next to the hostelry, but this, with no explanation, was denied.
Under a month later, the Los Angeles Herald of 10 March briefly observed that “the old adobe house at the Southeast corner of the Plaza has been unroofed, preparatary [sic] to making some much needed repairs,” this showing that many adobe buildings were maintained, even as a great number of them were demolished during that period. This looks to be site, though, where the city’s Fire House #1, known typically as the Plaza Fire House, was finished in 1884 and remains standing today as part of the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.
Speaking of public buildings, mention has been made previously in this post concerning the city hall and court house and their glaring deficiencies as expressed by the press. The Express of 11 May editorialized on this subject and suggested that “there is perhaps no one question of local import upon which public opinion is undivided as in regard to the urgent necessity of erecting public buildings in this city suited to our wants and consistent in style with the civilization of our epoch.”
The court house, approaching 15 years after it was moved to the remodeled two-story Market House built of brick by Jonathan Temple in 1859, was deemed “a barrack without either the accommodation, the appearance, or the security which such an edifice should combine.” Moreover, “the precious archives of the county, which could never be replaced if destroyed, are in constant danger,” though why was not explained. Offices for county personnel were “cramped and insufficient” and some officers “are without accommodation in the building.” Only the District Court, on the second floor where Temple originally built a theatre, “has convenient and respectable quarters.”
Across Spring Street and slightly south was the Rocha Adobe, which Temple sold to the city and county in 1853 for administrative quarters and the court house and, in the rear yard of which was the two-story city and council jail. The Express spared no scorn for the structure:
But when we leave the County and turn to the City building, there is a still more humiliating picture. The city is absolutely without a room fit for a gentleman to enter. The Council Chamber is not much of an improvement on the black hole of Calcutta [a notorious dungeon in a fort in British-controlled India], and the abandoned office of the Mayor [Prudent Beaudry refused to work there] would be intolerable to an Esquimau [Eskimo]. The City Marshal’s office , which is also that of the Zanjero [superintendent of water ditches] and City Clerk, is a den; and the County [and City] Jail, which so consistently forms the perspective of the unsightly adobe on the street, is a tumble-down rat hole, unfit for a dog kennel.
The paper claimed that the denizens of “this opulent and thriving city and county” no longer wished “to be the subject of humiliating criticism on account of the wretched character of our public buildings.” For those who advocated maintaining the status quo on the argument that it saved money, the Express rejoined that such an attitude “urges us to fly in the face of civilization.”
There was no reason, the editorial ended, to keep the disgraceful situation going any longer as “we are amply able to erect structures commensurate with our wealth and importance” and, the faster this was realized by officials, “the sooner will they conform to the universal desire of the public.” The Supervisors informally discussed the topic and it was reported that there was interest “in a practical plan to erect an edifice that will serve both the city and county,” though it was unclear if the Common Council had the same interest. In fact, nothing was pursued with this issue until the next boom, in the late 1880s most of which occurred during the administration of Mayor William H. Workman.
Perhaps because of the radical turn of events in late August and afterwards that brought an end to the boom, the Express, in its number of 16 December, brought up the city hall topic again at the end of the year, but with much less comment. Still, it expressed its view that the need was urgent and an argument that “we have not the money on hand” to build a new and proper structure was akin to “the prosperous individual who would prefer to live in a hovel, because he could not put up a decent house without placing a slight mortgage on it.”
With more colorful verbiage, the paper went on to suggest that,
The decencies of life are as applicable to communities as to individuals, and it is scandalous for the opulent city of Los Angeles to conduct her official business in a dark, dreary, unwholesome one-story adobe, as it would be for a well-to-do merchant to hive his family in a tumble-down hovel at the outskirts of “Sonora[town].”
For Independence Day, the Herald of 6 July, the paper expressed pride in how Angelenos celebrated the American national holiday, even if Los Angeles was “absolutely unknown when the revolutionary conflict shook the tottering thrones, yet civilization has given her a high place in the history of California.” The paper lionized the fact that “our enterprising citizens have laid the foundation of a future great city,” a notable point when considering that, despite the economic malaise soon to come and which stretched well into the Eighties, future booms followed through on those foundational elements.
Adding that these “city makers” of the era, including the likes of F.P.F. Temple, John G. Downey, Pío Pico, Isaias W. Hellman, Phineas Banning and others, “have based the hope of the city on the intelligence and education of the rising generation,” the paper continued,
The adobe is giving way before the palatial mansion; the Indian hut is superseded by the live city; the desert trail is crossed by the iron rails, and the screaming locomotive wakes the echoes in the mountain vales. And this is not all. The schools are implanting in the youthful mind the ambition to grasp at something higher—a desire for a nobler, better life. With an educated population, Los Angeles will become better and brighter; enterprising energy will be created and the masses improved politically, socially and morally.
While there was the continuing rush to raze the “ancient” adobe buildings in Los Angeles (the 4 August edition of the Herald reported on the adobe dining room of the Lafayette Hotel was about to be removed for a two-story addition that was proudly noted to be “the largest hotel South of San Francisco”), not every area in the region was moving to do so.
The 9 November issue of the paper published a report from Riverside, founded a few years prior and becoming the capital of a new citrus empire, with the Washington navel planted there just two years before by Eliza Tibbets. The correspondent observed that “house building is progressing with us—large adobes and small wooden structures” and it was added, perhaps as the actual order, that “roomy residences of wood and smaller ones of adobe are putting in an appearance . . . all being built with an eye to comfort more than architecture.”
Despite this, it was assured that visitors “cannot truly call our houses monotonous, as they show an originality of design and individuality of taste which is really refreshing to behold.” Rather than finding one house looking so much like the one before and the one to follow with “the same architecture, carpets and furniture in the hall” so that a guest might stumble into the wrong dwelling and not know it until an unfamiliar face was espied, and even if the edifices were not “elegant in appearance and proportion” to an architect, Riverside residents could “point to something better—the growth and beauty of our trees and shrubs.” Finally, it was averred that houses could not be made so handsome “as to eclipse our health-giving climate and beauty-giving soil.”
In fact, about this time, Riverside was the new hometown of Christopher Columbus Miller, a transplant in 1874 from Wisconsin and a civil engineer who was hired to survey irrigation canals in the new burg. Miller acquired a city block and, after sending for his wife Emma and their four children, embarked on a structure that had an adobe first floor and wooden second level. Completed in July 1876, as America celebrated its centennial, the Glenwood Cottage was both home for the Millers and a hotel to boot. Four years later, one of the children Frank, bought the structure and for more than a half-century he nurtured what became the famous Mission Inn.
Lastly, another frequent target of those in Los Angeles who excoriated adobe structures but did so with the combined racist bias against the Chinese was the Calle de los Negros, southeast of the Plaza and which became the city’s first Chinatown from about the late Sixties. The 14 November edition of the Herald featured a brief but pointed commentary about delays in expanding Los Angeles Street northward from Arcadia Street:
The City Fathers are perhaps blamed unnecessarily, but we can not condemn the public wish to get rid of the unsightly adobes of Chinatown. We wish to see, in a very few months, Los Angeles street opened out to its full width. Then we will have another great thoroughfare, and we will have got rid of a squalid and notorious portion of the town, Negro alley.
This, like the new public buildings, would, however, have to wait until the next boom. Meantime, join us tomorrow for the concluding ninth part of this blog as we move into 1876.