Through the Viewfinder With a Photo of the Natick House Hotel, Los Angeles, 15 August 1926

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

The history of hotels in Los Angeles goes back to the Bella Union, which was built on the east side of Calle Principal, or Main Street, in 1835 as the adobe residence of Isaac Williams, later owner of the Chino ranch in San Bernardino County, but which, by 1850, was refashioned, albeit primitively, as a hostelry and was owned for a time by Williams’ son-in-law, John Rains, and had a second story of adobe added prior to 1857. Later, it was known as the Clarendon and the St. Charles and was of three levels with the adobe sections removed and the building constructed of red brick.

Other early caravansaries included the Lafayette and the United States, also located on Main Street, while an enormous advance was made with the 1870 completion of the Pico House, built by ex-Governor Don Pío Pico, on the east side of Main and the south side of the Plaza, which he hoped to help keep viable and thriving as the Angel City was expanding to the south. The Pico never achieved that aim and the collapse of the region’s first boom after a half-dozen years was followed by several years of economic malaise.

By 1883, however, the financial situation in Los Angeles was improving and that year the Natick House opened in the Barnard Block at the southwest corner of Main and First streets. Almost immediately, the hostelry became the leading one in town with the year 1885 showing that it led the top ten hotels in the city in registered guests with not too far shy of 12,000. Running behind were the United States (9,900), Grand Central (9,697) and St. Charles (9,294), with the Pico House at sixth place at 8,130. The Natick anticipated by a few years the great Boom of the Eighties, which helped, with its loads of transplants and tourists, to keep the place full.

The Natick remained a top-tier hotel through the end of the 19th century, along with other establishments like the Hollenbeck, though new generations of larger and more luxurious places included the Van Nuys (1897) and the Alexandria (1905), as two notable examples in the transition from one century to the next. For more than a quarter-century, the Natick, which had a third floor added, was operated by Henry A. Hart and, following his 1892 death, sons George and Dwight, though the latter recognized that the Natick was increasingly out of style and scope with the business.

As the Nineteenth Century came to an end, the younger Harts took possession of the Rosslyn Hotel and the adjacent Lexington. In 1914, the siblings built a new Rosslyn at the northwest corner of Main and 5th and almost a decade later constructed an annex across the former thoroughfare. With their increased attention to what was then one of the largest hotels in the world, the Harts unloaded the Natick (the building was still owned by the Bernard family) in 1916, with Cincinnati hotelier M.E. Thoma taking over the remaining eight years of the lease.

A decade later, when the featured photo, dated 15 August 1926, of the Natick was taken, it had long been a lodging house for a clientele very much different from that of decades before. The Thomas lease, ending in 1924, was followed by one taken on by Charles T. Servais, who’d kept boarding houses in Los Angeles for around a decade and had been in trouble with authorities at least twice regarding gambling and the conspicuous presence of guns, but he seems to have been able to avoid controversy during close to a quarter-century of operating the Natick.

Press references to the hotel during the period just before and after the taking of the snapshot, which was taken from the northeast corner of Main and First (where City Hall South was built in the early 1950s) and takes in most of the structure, were usually reminiscent about the “good old days” when the Natick was a premiere hostelry or remarking on the relentless march of progress, which included the latest massive boom which peaked in 1923 (a year when Walter P. Temple was embarked on development projects downtown and in the San Gabriel Valley cities of Alhambra, El Monte and San Gabriel, as well as his own Town of Temple.)

Don Ryan in the 13 January 1925 edition of the Los Angeles Record and his “Hiram the Rube” column sketched out “A Main Street Pastel” in which he observed that,

Main street never fails of entertainment. It is a perpetual carnival. The [northwest] corner of First and Main, where the drug store window flaunts its genial hail, is directly across from the Yokohama Specie bank [the northeast corner behind where the photographer for the featured image stood] . Through the window, behind brass lattice-work, one can see small, deft, teethy [sic] men of olive hue making entries in heavy black pointed characters.

Across on the other corner is the old Natick House with its newsstands on which gay magazine covers flare like banners of colored cloths. Down the street a way is the Coney Island sideshow with a banner in view on which the spider boy crawls eerily. Main street is a continuous sideshow.

While Ryan found diligent Japanese bank employees to be entertaining or part of a carnival went unexplained, unless the idea of any people of color in his view of the “sideshow” was inherently amusing. It bears noting that, from that corner of Main and 1st eastward on the latter thoroughfare, Little Tokyo was long well established as the center of the Angel City’s Japanese community. In fact, the earliest located press reference to it is from a June 1907 article in the Los Angeles Record that decried “the real yellow peril” among the 3,000 or so residents of that section.

Marquis Busby, a Times theatre critic, commented on “Time Turns Backward” in the 14 November 1926 edition of the paper, when he asked readers, “do you remember when Main street was the gay white way of Los Angeles?” meaning by this that it was on the thoroughfare that the earliest venues for drama were situated. Looking back to the early days of the century, Busby remarked,

Main street from the Natick House at First, to the Burbank Theater at Sixth, would be a bright thoroughfare. The penny arcades and tawdry movie houses of today would not be there, and the dingy buildings now standing would be brave and new . . .

Main street has faded now . . . for all the world like a stately old grand dame who has to take in washing in her later years.

Another local columnist, Frederick F. Runyon of the Pasadena Post, noted in his “Our City Comment & Discussion” of 9 July 1926 that, in 1884, when the hostelry was new, an unnamed Pasadena business man arrived in the Angel City and told his story to Runyon, who wrote, “A young man sat in a lounging chair in front of the Natick House in Los Angeles. That metropolis was but a struggling city. The Natick House was quite the leading hotel.”

Continuing that he was at a loss about what his next steps were after coming up from Lake Elsinore, Runyon recorded that a man asked what the young gent was up to and got the glum answer of “nothing.” The gent then asked if he had been to Pasadena, then about a decade old and having struggled because of the aforementioned economic downturn and, when the simple answer of no was uttered, the reply was “well, it’s a likely place.” Runyon noted that his subject arrived in the Crown City and immediately exclaimed, “this is the place for me.”

Lee Shippey in his long-running Los Angeles Times feature, twice remarked on the hotel, in 1928 editions of his “Lee Side O’L.A.” column. On 19 September, he wrote about surviving “country hotels” as distinguished from the massive modern ones, of which he indicated there were a dozen, such as the Rosslyn. The “country” cousins, however, included the Nadeau, situated on Spring and First, and the Natick, and, regarding the latter, Shippey remarked,

Passing the Natick House the other day we glanced in and stopped enthralled. It seemed to us we had stepped back twenty years . . . The men who sat about the lobby, looking out and fondling their banded cigars, did not look like traveling salesmen [the kind Shippey said occupied the modern hostelries] . . . In one corner two were busy writing letters. In another a group were swapping stories. Tilted back in a chair, one fat man was industriously using a toothpick with an earnestness which suggested chicken or corn on the cob. Everyone seemed perfectly at ease, comfortable, not on parade.

For Thanksgiving, in the Times of 28 November, Shippey wrote about a stroll by the hotel with E.L. Young, assistant to the vice-president of the Pacific Electric Railway, who remarked to the columnist that “twenty-five years ago you could get a fine turkey dinner there for 25 cents, and pass your plate back for seconds on turkey, pie, oyster stuffing or anything else you wished more of.”

Reminiscing further, Young told Shippey, “I cannot pass the Natick House now without longing to go in, throw down two bits and tell them to fill me up for a week.” He continued that, given that the hotel did not appear to have changed much since the earliest years of the century, “it should perform the same, too.” The railway official then concluded, “but now one need only recall those days at the Natick House and then go order a turkey dinner, with all the extras, at the Biltmore, to realize how far Los Angeles has come in a quarter of a century.”

Another notable recollection concerned artist Gardner Symons, who was a widely-known plein air painter and an early artist-resident at Laguna Beach in Orange County. The 4 March 1928 issue of the Times featured Symons, who was exhibiting at the Stendhal Galleries, which operated from 1911 to 2017 and, from 1921 to 1954, was in the Ambassador. It was pointed out in the piece that,

To Symonds California is an old story for he came here first in 1896 with his young friend William Wendt [another renowned painter] . . . [In journeying from Santa Barbara] they camped twice, the second time by the Los Angeles River in Griffith Park. The journey took two days and they arrived in town after nightfall, sneaking into the Natick House, so coated with dust they feared to brave the aristocratic Hollenbeck Hotel.

As for the Los Angeles Record of 9 September 1926, in its “”Member When?” feature, it asked readers it they recalled that “there was a regular every Saturday night band concert on the roof of a porch that extended over the sidewalk in front of the Natick House on First street.” This would appear to have been the same covered entrance shown in the highlighted photo.

The gradual decline of the hotel, however, included at least three fires during the last half of the Roaring Twenties, including one early in the morning of 22 April 1926 that started in a pharmacy on the first floor and the Times of that day reported that, “the Natick House, the rendezvous of many notables of the 80’s and 90’s, was a scene of confusion as weary transients, roused from their beds by squads of firemen and police, groped along smoke-filled halls clinging to their few possessions.”

The paper reported that fifteen guests and three firefighters were injured in the blaze, with the addition that “three cripples, sleeping on the second floor, would have been overcome with smoke and perhaps suffocated if it hadn’t been for the quick work of the rescuers in rousing them.” The lobby was crammed with the “transients and regulars” who waited with their belongings until the all-clear was given to return to their rooms. The Record of the same day opined that “one of the city’s historic landmarks nearly perished” in the conflagration.

The 10 August 1929 edition of that paper reported on a fire that was started in a trash chute (it was later stated that a guest tossed a light match in it) and caused $1,000 in damage, while adding that, in 1927, a drug addict poured gasoline throughout the hotel, set it ablaze and then “ran amuck among the fleeing guests.” In 1915, moreover, the Natick “was partially wrecked by a bomb, killing three persons.”

With regard to progress sweeping through the city (it hardly need be said that historic preservation was all but unknown, at least in town), the 7 December 1925 edition of the Times observed, in a headline, that “Progress Routs Pioneers,” specifically the imminent demolition of a building at the northwest corner of Main and 1st, where Ryan observed that “perpetual carnival, and where a cigar-making business was to be evicted for the coming City Hall. The two owners and their pair of assistants had all worked there for forty years or more and co-owner H.E. Martens reflected,

I guess this is the swan song . . . Tom Rowan, later mayor of Los Angeles, ran a bakery in the corner store of the old Natick House across the way. A short distance from us was the city’s first saloon. The Natick House at that time drew the elite of the city and the saloon was the scene of many a historic gathering.

Among the cigar-store’s customers was William H. Workman, another former chief executive of the city and the father of current president of the City Council, Boyle Workman. Martens was further quoted at the end of the article as stating, “But I guess the old times have passed on. Those days had it on the present age in one respect. They were not so wild or woolly. A crime was a relative rare occurrence.” If the owner, however, had been in the City of the Angels in the early Seventies or sooner, he would have found that the town was more a den of deviltry than when he settled there.

In the late 1920s, there was active talk of the sale of the Natick House building for the construction of a state building, it being one of eight sites considered. Servais, however, continued operating the hotel, through the Depression and into the World War Two years, and then handed the reins to his namesake son.

Finally, in March 1950, the 67-year old structure was knocked down for a parking lot, with the senior Servais telling the Los Angeles Mirror of the 11th that, “elderly people still show up occasionally, talking wistfully of their honeymoons and trying to conceal their shock at finding the once splendid old hostelry on the edge of Skid Row.” One women asked if she could buy a souvenir; in fact, part of a balcony was purchased and placed at La Golondrina, the venerable Mexican restaurant on Olvera Street that just recently closed.

The Times of the 16th had a brief editorial on the demolition on the 16th, remarking that,

George Washington never slept there, but Teddy Roosevelt is said to have signed the register, and many a ghost of bygone days will shed a tear when the old Natick House goes under the wrecker’s hammer. It will make room for a parking lot, an ironic fate, since the hostelry saw its best days before the noisy advent of the horseless carriage. Progress must be served, and the Natick is no architectural jewel, but we hope they will put a brass plate on the sidewalk, or something, so posterity will know that Caruso [Enrico, the famed opera singer] warmed up his matchless tenor on the site.

Today, the site is part of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department and there is no brass plate or other indication of what occupied the property for close to seventy years through some of the most consequential aspects of the Angel City’s history.