Through the Viewfinder: The Baker Block in “Los Angeles, Cal. Main Street,” Isaiah W. Taber, ca. 1883, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

For some years after its 1871 completion, the most northern of the several buildings comprising the Temple Block and built by the brothers Jonathan and F.P.F. Temple was a popular location for taking photographs showing Main Street as it headed north toward the Plaza, the historic center of Spanish and Mexican Los Angeles.

Seven years later, the Baker Block, erected on the east side of the central thoroughfare, became a chosen spot for photographers to take images looking to the south. Of course, images taken from both buildings after 1878 included the other as they were among the most prominent of the commercial structures in the growing city—the Downey Block, St. Charles Hotel, and other structures are also usually included in these views.

This “Through the Viewfinder” post takes us to the early 1880s and a wonderful shot by Isaiah W. Taber, or someone in his employ, of San Francisco from the Temple Block and taking in these structures. We know that it is at least from fall 1882 because of the presence of the electric arc-light mast in front of the St. Charles Hotel and which provided the first electric street lighting in the city, following years of insufficient and inefficient gas lamps.

In addition to the several commercial buildings of note, including the aforementioned hotel and Downey Block, at the left, there are the Pico Building, built by ex-Governor Pío Pico and directly behind the mast pole and where the Hellman, Temple and Company and Farmers’ and Merchants’ banks were formerly situated; the Grand Central Hotel next to this; the Downey Building between the Grand Central and Baker and, up Main, the existing Masonic Lodge, Merced Theatre and Pico House hotel structures, among others.

At the lower right is the intersection of Main and Commercial streets, while a horse-drawn streetcar, which predominated until the introduction of cable and then electric lines, horse-drawn conveyances and a few pedestrians are also of note. In the distance are portions of the Elysian Hills and the towering San Gabriel Mountains. This post, however, focuses on the Baker Block, topped by its distinctive triple towers and situated at the southeast corner of Main and Aliso streets. The edifice was built by Robert S. Baker (1823-1894, many sources state he was born in 1826, but birth records show 3 September 1823 and this is correlated by his age in the 1850 census), who, however, built it on the land inherited by his wife, Arcadia Bandini Stearns Baker (1827-1912).

Arcadia (pronounced Are-Cah-Dee-ah) had some of the most remarkable experiences of any woman in Los Angeles during her long and eventful life. She was born in San Diego to Juan Bandini and María Dolores Estudillo (whose family was very prominent in that pueblo) and her father’s father, José, almost certainly descended from Italians who migrated to Spain, was a Spanish Navy captain before supporting Mexican independence. When she was 14, she married 43-year old Abel Stearns, a Massachusetts native who came to Los Angeles in 1829, a year after Jonathan Temple, and, like his fellow Bay State emigré, ran a store.

Arcadia and Abel resided in a rambling adobe house known as El Palacio (The Palace), while Abel, the same year of their wedding, acquired the Rancho Los Alamitos, which had an existing adobe house that is still standing within a gated housing tract on a hill in southeast Long Beach near Cal State Long Beach and which became a second home for the couple, who had no children. Over time, Stearns acquired several more ranchos in what is now southeastern Los Angeles and western and northwestern Orange counties, but the dual disasters of flood and drought during the Civil War decimated cattle and other livestock and prices plummeted.

Stearns, however, was saved by the organization of a land trust that handled sales of his once-vast holdings and provided him a significant amount of wealth before he died in 1871, with Arcadia inheriting a significant estate. Behind El Palacio, moreover, where Abel and Arcadia were widely known for the hospitality that marked the Californios as especially welcoming people, including to extranjeros (foreigners), Stearns’ Hall and the Arcadia Block was constructed, facing Los Angeles Street on the east.

These were also included in her ample real estate portfolio, along with a large portion of the northwestern section of the Rancho San Antonio, adjoining Los Angeles city limits on the southeast and which became known as the Rancho Laguna and the Eagle grist mill property north of the Plaza in what was then Sonoratown and is now Chinatown.

On 29 April 1875, Arcadia married Robert Symington Baker, who was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where the Bakers were early British-era settlers, and raised there and in nearby Warren, the youngest of the ten children of Luther, a Baptist minister who served for four decades in the tiny state’s main city and at New Bedford, Massachusetts, not far east, and Margaret Peggy Thompson. In his mid-twenties, Baker headed for Gold Rush California and landed at San Diego in March 1849, making him among one of the earliest of the Argonauts. He then went to San Francisco and became a partner with the brothers George and Joseph Cooke in the mercantile firm of Cooke, Baker and Company.

While it was not mentioned in his obituaries, Baker returned home and was enumerated with his parents in the 1850 federal census, taken in August, at their New Bedford, though it was perhaps a visit. According to biographies after he died, Baker had a store and warehouse at Marysville, north of Sacramento and then mined in Sierra County. After a few years, apparently for health reasons, he relocated south and developed a partnership with Edward F. Beale in raising cattle and sheep not far on the massive Rancho El Tejon (once part-owned by Jonathan Temple), with his post office in the “Sinks of Tejon” at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley.

This was still part of Los Angeles County and the earliest located local mention of him was in the first Spanish-language newspaper in the Angel City, El Clamor Público, where, not long before it was closed, the 1 October 1859 edition ran an advertisement in which Baker sought to buy sheep for breeding as he was staying at the Hotel Lafayette on Main Street basically across from the Stearns’ El Palacio. It is unclear how Baker received his title of “Colonel,” perhaps because of the influence of Beale and Baker’s pro-Union sentiments during the Civil War.

By 1865, the Sinks of Tejon was part of the new Kern County, but Baker had some Republican, or Union, Party involvement in Los Angeles County, including as a “Bolter” cadre of candidates for county elections, with Baker seeking a supervisor’s seat, though he was not successful in what appears to have been his only attempt at public office. That year, he was among the founders of the Los Angeles Pioneer Oil Company, which drilled the first well in the region at Pico Canyon near today’s Santa Clarita.

Notably, while his declared estate value in 1860 was $15,000 in personal property, likely entailed in his livestock inventory, his fortunes ballooned mightily in the following decade, so that his wealth was pegged, in the 1870 census, as $150,000 in real estate and $200,000 in personal property—evidently tied to the massive sheep boom that followed the substantial demise in cattle following the aforementioned floods and drought.

With this wealth, he came to Los Angeles and in early September 1872, as the area was undergoing its first boom period, starting in the late Sixties and continuing to 1875, Baker purchased from José del Carmen Sepúlveda and others the Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, comprising nearly 38,500 acres for $54,000.

Within a short time, Baker and Beale devised a townsite project called Truxtun, named for Beale’s son, and which was to involve a wharf at Santa Monica Bay and a railroad to and from Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Express of 26 May 1874 quoted from the Bakersfield Courier (many sources state that Baker was the founder of Bakersfield, but it was actually attorney Thomas Baker, no relation, who held that distinction) reporting that Baker passed through town and related progress on a railroad survey and negotiations for the monopoly-holding Pacific Mail Steamship company for service at the wharf.

Just a little more than a month prior, the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, with F.P.F. Temple as president, was formed with the intent of building a line from the Angel City to the Inyo County seat to transport processed silver bullion from booming mining towns, such as Cerro Gordo, where Temple had substantial financial investment. Temple was also president of the Centinela project, which aimed to set up a town and farm plots, as well as a railroad and wharf at Ballona Creek, south of the Truxtun site.

By 1875, a significant change took place when United States Senator from Nevada, John P. Jones not only took a majority of stock in the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, with Temple shifting to treasurer, and with Baker as a director with a reincorporation just after the New Year, but Jones purchased 75% of the San Vicente y Santa Monica ranch from Baker for just north of $162,000. The Truxtun concept quietly receded and Jones advanced the new seaside town of Santa Monica, insisting that a branch line of the LA&I be built there first, while Baker became an active partner in the new community’s development, including the well-known resort hotel, the Arcadia.

Another major investment made by Baker and Beale came in early April 1872 when, as reported by the Los Angeles Star of the 3rd, William Workman and Peregrine Fitzhugh filed a deed to more than 5,300 acres of the Rancho La Puente, owned by Workman for some three decades and situated in modern West Covina and Walnut and acquired by Fitzhugh, who then got into financial trouble after he bought the property in late 1868 and stocked it with sheep, “for certain valuable considerations and $1,” this dollar amount a legally required minimum for land transactions.

In spring 1874, Baker became a director of the new Los Angeles County Savings Bank, later the Los Angeles County Bank (which later took over the quarters of the failed Temple and Workman bank in the Temple Block) and of the Main Street and Agricultural (Exposition) Park horse-drawn streetcar railway. At the Rancho Laguna, Baker planted thousands of eucalyptus trees, not far from where Temple, Robert M. Widney and others launched the Forest Grove Association grove as the tree was looked to as a boon for fuel and construction. He was also a co-owner of the Los Angeles Express newspaper and also served as its president, while he was part of a group, including “Lucky” Baldwin that formed the unrealized California Coast Steamship Company, which planned to use the Santa Monica wharf.

A notable feature in the Express of 12 April 1875 titled “Suggestive Facts” quoted from the Bakersfield Courier, which reported,

In a list of names of the rich men of Los Angeles we note that of R.S. Baker, who is rated at $500,000. Mr. Baker came to Kern County fourteen years ago [it was actually sooner as noted above] with a small flock of sheep, and located on the Tejon Ranch, which he took in charge. Upon the settlement of his partnership with General Beale three years ago he found himself the possessor of thirty thousand sheep which he had improved to a high grade. Their product in wool alone made him a rich man, and with the proceeds he purchased a large Mexican land grant [the San Vicente y Santa Monica] in Los Angeles county, paying $65,000 [more than what was shown in the 1872 land filing record above]. He distributed his flocks upon it and ranked immediately among the wealthiest men in Southern California.

The account detailed the sale of what was said to be two-thirds, though it was three-quarters, of San Vicente y Santa Monica to Jones, with the dollar amount stated as a quarter million dollars, with the Courier adding that Baker “now takes the lead in management and ownership of the new harbor of Santa Monica . . . and the railroad leading from that place to Los Angeles city.”

Also pointed out, however, was that “many who have enjoyed the courteous hospitality of the Tejon will remember the story told by Mr. Baker of his misfortunes in business at the North, his purchase of 500 sheep with money loaned him by a friend, his herding them himself [his occupation in the 1860 census was “shepherd”], and his patient waiting for the great results which he has now obtained.” The account ended with the observation that “his friends in Kern county remember him with sincere interest and rejoice in his success.”

The most obvious manifestation of that success came with the Baker Block, the first hint of which was reported in the Express of 25 January 1877, despite the terrible state of the local, state and national economy during the “Long Depression” and just over a year after the failure of Temple and Workman, as the paper remarked,

Col. R.S. Baker intends commencing shortly the erection of a fine building, fronting on Main street, and extending from the Grand Central Hotel building [north] to the corner of Arcadia street . . . There is a visible activity in the matter of erecting buildings in this city. Many new buildings are also in contemplation, among others a new hotel on the property of Mrs. R.S. Baker, opposite Governor Downey’s residence on Main street.

With that, we’ll end here and return tomorrow with part two, so check back in for that!