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

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

As the year 1876 dawned, greater Los Angeles, after a long run of growth constituting its first boom, with the peak coming after a national depression took root in 1873, came to a sudden, striking bust. In late August 1875, the Bank of California, the state’s largest, failed as a Virginia City, Nevada silver mine stock bubble burst and the Angel City’s biggest casualty was the Temple and Workman bank, which failed on 13 January 1876 despite a sizable infusion of cash by a loan from Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, a San Francisco capitalist who walked away from that stock bubble with millions in profits from shares he sold (hence, his nickname.)

Despite the economic disaster, Los Angeles Mayor Prudent Beaudry, in his message on the state of the city published in the New year’s Day edition of the Los Angeles Herald, offered the hope that something could be done regarding the pitiful state of city hall and administrative quarters, housed for most of the last twenty-plus years in the Rocha Adobe, purchased from Jonathan Temple in 1853 and situated on the west side of Spring Street, between Temple and First streets.

While the building, behind which in an expansive yard was built the city and county jail, may have been acceptable for its civic purposes when the town had several thousand people, the population as about triple the size in 1875 as it had been twenty or so years prior and this post has cited a few examples of griping and growling in the press about its utter inadequacy and the chief executive, who refused to keep an office there, bluntly opined that

The inconvenient and disgraceful adobe huts which have hitherto done duty as public buildings are not only a libel on our civilization and inferior to the public buildings of any city in the State of our size and wealth, but they are positively unsafe depositories for the valuable public records which they contain . . . [and] the conclusion that the character of a people is shown by the style of their public edifices being at once drawn very much to our discredit.

The Los Angeles Express of 18 February contained another of the pieces of correspondence of the period describing the City of the Angels, this one by an unnamed scribe writing to a hometown newspaper in Ohio. The account noted the beauty of the area and stated that the city’s population was “some 12,000 or 13,000, half of French, Spanish, Mexicans and Chinese,” though some sources of the period suggest the residential tally was greater, as noted below.

In any case, it was added that “the place is built up with magnificent modern structures,” constructed of brick and wood, and, the correspondent continued,

But a great many of the ancient low adobes, built up with dried mud and something like asphaltum roofs, and which were looked at more or less as a curiosity by my father in 1849, are still standing their ground, and face at this day, some of the main streets of the city, and are chiefly inhabited by the lower class of Spanish and Mexican people.

Four days later, the Herald returned to a topic brought up in the last part of this post about the purported deleterious effects of adobe edifices on public health. A communication from the Los Angeles Medical Association, subscribed by its president, Robert H. Dalton, and secretary, Joseph P. Widney, the latter becoming a prominent local figure, called for the establishment of a “well organized and efficient Health Department . . . such as is established in other cities of like size and population.”

One of the paramount concerns for the group of physicians was “the mixed character of the population, with its attendant disregard of any systematic manner of life,” as well as narrow streets in irregular patterns and “the crowded adobe houses of the Chinese quarter,” this last concentrated on the Calle de los Negros, mentioned several times prior in this post, “and, indeed, of some other localities,” almost certainly including Sonoratown, north of the Plaza.

Also mentioned was “the constant and evident accumulation of filth” from substandard sewage disposal and, in an unusual take on what most observers called an ideal climate, the associated commented that “a climate so mild that the temperature of mid-Winter is not low enough to even temporarily hold in check the ill effects of the bad sanitary condition of the city.”

A transitional phase was in process whereby “the natural drainage of the surface” of streets was eliminated by grading, but not mitigated by the introduction of sewers. As sewage disposal programs were, however, underway, it was suggested that doctors serve as experts. Finally, the missive ended with the observation that its members adopted this approach

because they, in their daily rounds upon the streets and in the dwellings of the people, note many sources of disease which, under an efficient sanitary supervision, should not be allowed to exist.

Alonzo Waite, who long operated the Los Angeles News and was editor of the Los Nietos Courier sent the Express a detailed recollection of the Angel City when he first settled there in 1854 and found work as a printer for the Star, the only paper in town at the time. He observed that the town’s population was not above 3,000 persons, being “largely Mexican or native,” the last presumably meaning the Spanish-speaking Californios, if not indigenous people.

Waite added that “the settled area of the city was very limited—there being but a few adobe houses here and there on Main street, below where the Round House now stands,” this being south of 2nd Street. Moreover, “on street back [west] of Main and running parallel with it a few houses were to be encountered, principally on Spring street.”

As for business thoroughfares, there were Los Angeles and Commercial streets, which intersected a block east of Main, and there was “one adobe hotel,” the Bella Union, which “accommodated the travel to the place, and was all-sufficient.” There was just one brick building and “three or four wooden tenements” while “the balance were adobe houses.”

After noting monthly mail service by steamer, a 63-square foot postoffice, few businesses, and no Protestant church building, Waite then recorded that

In short, the town was then what many towns in Mexico are now—sleepy, and dreamily gliding along without caring a fig for the future . . . One can hardly realize the vast changes that have taken place in less than a quarter of a century . . . For years the country slept in its Rip Van Winkle unconsciousness; it did not retrograde, but it did not progress. The people were not ambitious; all their needs were supplied and calmly they drifted along without a thought for striving for greater things.

Waite identified the establishment of the first local railroad, the Los Angeles and San Pedro, completed in 1869 when the nation’s first transcontinental line was finished, as a benchmark moment for Los Angeles. Its opening “quickened the popular pulse, putting new life, as it were, into the sluggish veins of the people, and they partially awoke to a realization of the grand destiny that awaited them.”

That first boom arrived and “strangers began to arrive in large numbers, improvements of considerable importance were projected in the city, and the settlement of the country progressed rapidly.” By the writer’s accounting, the Angel City “boasts a population of 16,000 souls” and “stately buildings grace its streets which would do honor to the metropolitan city of the State,” that is, San Francisco, and he proudly noted the banks (absent, of course, Temple and Workman), gas-lit streets, fire department, the high school (opened in 1873), newspapers, business houses and more to show the rapid development of the region. He didn’t mention adobe buildings, but it seemed implied that their decrease was met by those “stately buildings.”

Incidentally, another published recollection of the Fifties was in the Express of 10 February, which recorded that merchant Mendel Meyer reminded the paper that, in the flood of 1857, though he might have mean 1855 (which was touched upon in the first part of this post,) the Los Angeles River overflowed its banks and its waters reached Los Angeles Street. Meyer was doing business in an adobe on that thoroughfare with the site occupied in 1876 by Hellman, Haas and Company, “and the river overspread the whole section of country to that place, sweeping away the adobe.” Moreover, “there was barely time to rescue the goods before the surging waters swept the edifice away.”

There were at least two articles that year about the removal or expected demolition in short order of adobe structures. The Express of 26 April reported that “many of the old adobes in Sonora[town] are rapidly going to decay” and opined “that [area] will form one of these days a most attractive portion of the city for [new] residences,” presumably of brick or wood.

The paper’s 7 July edition briefly noted that “the old adobe buildings, below Court [Street, and the Court House] . . . are being razed, and will be replaced by a fine two-story brick structure,” this was actually the three-story block of Edward N. McDonald, long a resident of Wilmington and who, in 1892, built another edifice across Main. A rare example of a renovation was noted by the Herald of 4 May, which reported that an adobe structure to the north of the Lafayette Hotel (once built of that material) and which was long empty, was “put in order” for use.

The 20 May issue of the paper included a notable description of Los Angeles from an unidentified journalist from the London Times, who wrote,

The population of Los Angeles consists of a large sprinkling of Mexicans, as they are generally termed, the descendants of the soldiers of the Spanish army, who occupied and laid out the city in 1781. Sonora, the old Spanish town, still exists, with its crooked and narrow streets and adobe tenements; but the Indian squaw, the former mistress of many of these, has, in a great measure, become a thing of the past. The blending of the two races together has produced a strong and intelligent people, who still retain much of the pride and laziness of their progenitors.

This backhanded compliment of sorts was followed by two examples, but rather than cite the names of, say, Pío Pico, Antonio Franco Coronel, Ygnacio Sepúlveda or others, the writer chose the bandits Tiburcio Vásquez and his lieutenant Clovedeo Chávez, neither of whom was from Los Angeles or environs, but who may have been included to stir the imagination of British readers regarding the romance of the region.

A signal achievement for greater Los Angeles came on 4 September, when the Southern Pacific’s railroad line from the north, as part of a road to Yuma, Arizona and, later, points further east, was celebrated. Following Mayor Beaudry to the rostrum was San Francisco’s chief executive, Andrew J. Bryant, a Gold Rush migrant from New Hampshire, offered an interesting commentary on his southern neighbor contrasting the buildings of yore with the progress of the present by noting that “looking back twenty-six years ago I see [in] your city a handful of adobe houses; to-day you are on the high road to prosperity.”

That high road, however, was not yet elevated enough to escape the effluvia emanating from a city lacking a sewer system and the Star of 24 November scored city officials by complaining that:

There are always more or less of our [City] Council who are controlled a good deal, if not owned, by half a dozen of our rich men, some of whom had just as leave live in an old adobe, eat jerked beef three times a day, and sleep on a raw hide, as to eat, sleep and live otherwise. These kind, as long as they live, will always squeal, and most noisily, too, at all projected improvements. They don’t want any new city or county buildings or new educational edifices . . .

A few weeks later, as Mayor Beaudry ended his two years as chief executive of the City of the Angels, his farewell address returned to the matter of those public buildings, as he bemoaned that “the same shabby adobes that have done service in the past are still occupied . . . they are a disgrace to our progress and should be replaced at an early day.” The city required, given its status among like communities, buildings “more suited to the purposes for which they are required.”

The poor state of the economy persisted into the 1880s and it was not until the great boom that followed a direct transcontinental railroad link, effected by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in late 1885, that another period of wholesale transformation brought down most of the remaining adobe structures in the city. Further interpretation of the pre-American period continue to emphasize the “sleepy” and indolent nature presumed to characterize that era, even among some of the early preservationists seeking to save what they could of its buildings, including adobe.

Today, however, there has been something of a resurgence of the use of adobe, particularly for houses, given that one scientific study in the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus notes that from about a quarter to about two-fifths of greenhouse gas emissions comes from the building industry. Moreover, with improved construction technologies, adobe structures are considered by advocates to be ideal for green building programs.

Rather than be viewed as archaic relic of inferior civilizations to the presumed superiority of Western ways, adobe edifices may well become increasingly necessary in a world in which about a third of all dwellings are made of earthen material, especially as accelerating climate change brings more of the sweltering summers we are experiencing this year and which will only increase in coming years and decades.