by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Continuing with our look at the non-political activities of Los Angeles City Treasurer William H. Workman during 1903, we follow on the heels of his sale of 50 acres in “The Flats,” the section of property he and his wife Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-uh) inherited from her father Andrew Boyle, who, in turn, purchased the land from the López, the settlers of what was long known as Paredon Blanco (White Bluff.)
The transaction, which led to the new San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad adding it to their holdings, including a depot near 1st Street, ended up being a financial lifeline to Workman, whose intensive investment in Boyle Heights, which he established nearly three decades before with banker Isaias W. Hellman and merchant John Lazzarovich, did not bring him the economic windfall that was anticipated, despite the Boom of the 1880s, which mostly took place during his mayoral term from 1886-1888.
But, the profit made from the deal allowed him to pay off a mortgage and Workman expressed, as noted in part one, great relief at the burden lifted from his 64-year old shoulders. Meanwhile, the year found him pressing forward with further real estate and other work connected to Boyle Heights—the 150th anniversary of which the museum is commemorating this year.
The 15 March edition of the Los Angeles Times reported that Workman and two other men submitted to the City Council an application for a group of three streetcar franchises that would first involve a line starting downtown at Hill and 7th streets, heading east on the latter thoroughfare, crossing over the Los Angeles River on an as-yet-to-be-built bridge, and then north on Boyle Avenue to Stephenson Avenue (now Whittier Boulevard). The second component would run east on Stephenson to city limits at Indiana Street, while the third was to run north from Stephenson at Euclid Street and terminate at 4th Street.
The idea, of course, was for these lines to assist in the development of future subdivisions in the sections of Boyle Heights through which they ran and the Times, in its issue of 3 April, under the heading of “‘Uncle Billy’s’ Angel,” reported that
City Treasurer Workman declares that his franchise application is backed by capital that is entirely independent of the Huntington-Hellman or Hook systems. He says the Southern Pacific has no part in the application, and that if a franchise is sold along Seventh Street and Stephenson Avenue that road will be constructed. “Uncle Billy” will not tell the name of this new franchise magnate, but he says he is able-bodied man with millions of money to back his venture. Verily the plot thickens.
As to aforementioned application in the names of Workman and the two others, he told the paper “that has no significance.” A couple of weeks later, the Los Angeles Express of the 18th noted that the Board of Public Works considered the application, stated to be the “Boyle avenue line” and which was to run from Boyle and Stephenson and go to Evergreen Cemetery (presumably using the Euclid route) and then to the city limits just a block or so east. From there a franchise would be sought with Los Angeles County for a line past the Odd Fellows, Calvary, and Beth Israel burying grounds.
When it came, however, to the line from Hill and 7th and crossing over the river to Boyle Heights, board chair and City Council member Frank U. Nofziger, a lumber company owner who apparently stood to make good money on streetcar rail tie construction and was said to be in the pocket of streetcar titan, Henry E. Huntington, bluntly told Workman that no line would be allowed over 7th.
When the latter argued that residents along the route preferred that thoroughfare, Nofziger rejoined that 6th Street would be preferable. Workman insisted that 7th was the desired route “and then Mr. Nofziger peremptorily shut off discussion and announced the postponement.” In June, the franchise ended up being sold, without competitive building, to Huntington’s Los Angeles Railway.
Despite this, Workman pushed ahead with development plans in areas south of Evergreen Cemetery, with the Times of 27 April observing in a Boyle Heights column that
A new residence tract is to be opened to the public today in the Fremont Heights tract of 100 lots, lying between First and Second streets, Evergreen avenue, and Dakota [Dacotah] street. City Treasurer Workman is responsible for the new home sites, and has customers already for several lots, who will built [sic] at once.
On the last day of October, the Los Angeles Record ran an advertisement for La Vista Heights, said to be the “healthiest part of the city” and in an “exceptionally fine location on the highlands.” It was added that “W.H. Workman has opened up a new tract . . . adjoining Boyle Heights,” though it soon became part of it, “and is now having the streets curbed and sidewalked,” these evidently being two new verbs.
The ad continued that “the advantages of this location are significant—best streetcar service in the city—two lines [these running along First and Fourth streets]—12 minutes to business center, two blocks from school [First Street Elementary].” It was claimed that La Vista Heights was “recommended by all physicians for its healthful location” because this was “free from fog and frost” and even “the tenderest plants grow unprotected.”
Further, it was posited that “as La Vista Heights is such a short distance to the business center, it should certainly appeal to the man who must get to work on time.” A special offer was made for lots at $400, with a 5% discount for those paying in cash, while a $50 down payment would allow for the balance to be paid in monthly installments of ten dollars, these moderate prices reflecting the property’s proximity to the cemetery. Workman’s office was situated on the second floor of the Douglas Building, built by Thomas Douglas Stimson with a distinctive curved front at the northwest corner of Spring and Second streets and which still stands.
The tract quickly was given a change in name to La Paloma Heights, with an ad in the Record of 14 November noting that those two car lines included one run by the Los Angeles Railway and another by the upstart Los Angeles Traction Company, formed in 1895 and which built the 4th Street line three years later as it quickly became a competitor of Huntington’s line. The company then was sold to the Southern Pacific, which assumed control of the Los Angeles Railway, as well, and the two were merged.
In discussing those early bird terms, Workman warned that
Prices will be advanced 10 per cent in a few weeks. My property has already proven its profit possibilities. You cannot invest upon any safer basis within any greater certainty of gain, for this Tract will be as a big a success as the Workman Park Tract is today. It is the one place where a man of moderate means can invest safely and profitably.
Workman Park was opened in 1896 surrounding the central and northern portions of Hollenbeck Park, most of which property was granted by Workman to the City in honor of his late friend, John E. Hollenbeck, though the park’s establishment was also important to the marketing and sale of the tract, as was usual with such amenities (Hollenbeck’s widow, Elizabeth Hatsfeldt did the same with the Hollenbeck Park Heights Tract at the southern end of the park.
Two weeks later, the Record ran another ad that asserted that La Paloma Heights “stands alone as being the safest and most profitable investment in Los Angeles” and reiterated its healthful location, access by streetcar, while inviting readers to taken the Traction Company Green Car Line out on 2 December to see the property. It was added, “don’t buy elsewhere until you have looked up this tract.”
Otherwise, Workman often advertised for other property during the year, sometimes for individual lots or houses and averred that “a conservative investor will buy NOW” and otherwise on a more general basis, such as when he repeated, in the Times of 25 September, that “Boyle Heights is recommended by physicians as being the healthiest part of the city,” or when he also described the east-side neighborhood as “picturesque” or having “a healthy home close-in” to downtown.
On a more personal level, the aging city official and real estate entrepreneur lost a couple of long-time Boyle Heights friends and associates and served as a pallbearer for both. Simon Gless, of French Basque heritage, was born in 1862 in the hotel operated by his mother, Marie Oxarart, in Copperopolis in the Gold Country east of Stockton, inherited a $750,000 estate, including the Rancho Encino, from his mother’s brother Gaston Oxarart after the latter’s death in 1886 (among witnesses for Gless’ executorship was Workman). He and his family, including wife Juanita Amestoy and three children, resided in a farmhouse built on what was a 50-acre part of the inheritance just a short distance north of Workman on Boyle Avenue just south of 1st Street.
Gless, however, was embroiled in legal disputes over the Oxarart estate, concerning a purported illegitimate son of Oxarart, challenges to the Rancho Encino and about legal fees of Gless’ attorney, Martin V. Biscailuz (married into the López/Lazzarovich family, father of future sheriff Eugene Biscailuz and whose life and career were marred by personal and professional problems), among others.
Gless looks to have suffered some significant financial reverses, but also contracted Bright’s disease, a kidney disorder, and died in late July, with his death record stating he died of dilation of the heart. The Times of 2 July reported on the funeral, which began at the Gless house and then continued at St. Mary’s Catholic Church at 4th and Chicago, with Simon’s remains then conveyed to the family vault in the mortuary chapel at the new Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles. A great-granddaughter is actor Sharon Gless.
George Cummings, like John Lazzarovich, hailed from the Balkans region of Europe and came to California during its famed Gold Rush. In the late 1850s, he acquired a large ranch near Tehachapi Pass, but soon moved to Los Angeles, where he married Sacramento López of Paredon Blanco. In 1889, he built the Cummings Block, one of the landmark structures of Boyle Heights.
Cummings died in a hotel fire at Kern City not far from his ranch and his funeral was conducted at St. Mary’s and interment taking place at Calvary. The Times of 12 December recorded that Cummings “had been a large property holder in the Boyle Heights district, where the family home was for many years” and this included the Mount Pleasant Tract, while it was added that “he built the Mount Pleasant Hotel,” in the Cummings Block, now an affordable housing complex.
Workman had a few other interesting personal mentions in the media during 1903, including his role in forming a Missouri State Society—there were many such state societies in greater Los Angeles due to the enormous numbers of immigrants here from all over the United States—as well as his oration, along with attorney Johnstone Jones, for the Club Cura Hidalgo at the Mexican Independence Day celebration held in Turner Hall on 16 September (a performer was 9-year old Fay Bainter, who went on to an illustrious acting career on stage and film, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in the 1938 Bette Davis vehicle, Jezebel). The Times of the following day commented,
“Uncle Billy” Workman said to his Spanish-American [note the European term used] friends . . . that out of some fifty such affairs that he had attended in the city of Los Angeles, he had never seen a larger, better looking or more enthusiastic audience than this year’s . . . W.H. Workman, who proved a prime favorite with the audience, spoke briefly . . .
Lastly, Workman, who would be a founder of the Los Angeles County Pioneer Society and became widely known in the Angel City for his recollections of its history given his many decades residing in town, provided for the Los Angeles Express of 19 December a published reminiscence called “Pioneers Who Have Made Los Angeles Great.”
He began by observing that, “when I came here in 1854 there were only about 2,800 or 3,000 inhabitants in the town” and about 400 of them were English speakers. He went on that “the rest were [Spanish-speaking] native Californians and Indians from the missions that had been established hereabouts by the Spanish friars years before.” There were a sprinkling of Europeans, including French and Germans, “but there was very little to indicate the fireat [great?] influx of population that came afterward and is increasing now with rapid strides.”
Workman went on to record that “everything east of Los Angeles street was in vineyards and orchards” stretching eastward to the river, while hardly anyone lived south of First Street, except for some people residing along Main Street in that vicinity. Moreover, “the Plaza was the center of the city around which the social and business life revolved,” though he added that “the business district ran from the Plaza south on Los Angeles, Main and Spring streets.”
The Americans, he stated, “were a progressive class of men,” while “there were a great many Californians also, like Don Pio Pico and others, who realized the duties devolving upon them as citizens in a growing municipality and who contributed their part of the building up of the town.” Los Angeles, however, “was quiet,” if not “sleepy” as many were wont to state, while Workman attributed the onset of the Civil War (he was a native of Missouri, so that might have explained his take) to slowing the town’s progress—though he did not mention the floods, droughts, insect infestations and disease of that era.
Citing such figures as Prudent Beaudry, Dr. John S. Griffin, and others, Workman then noted that, as Los Angeles grew in the postwar years, “I went to Boyle Heights,” as the newly married husband of Andrew Boyle’s daughter, “and purchased lands which I afterward sold for $100 an acre that are now bringing from $2,000 to $3,000 a lot,” while he amassed some 1,200 acres. On 9th Street, now James M. Wood Boulevard, between Figueroa and Bonnie Brae streets, he had 70 acres and also possessed 60 acres on San Pedro Street, between Washington and Adams, which he sold for $30 an acre. The last just sold, he mentioned, for $60,000.
Among the other “pioneers” mentioned by Workman were Thomas Garey; Mathew Keller; Benjamin D. Wilson; and William Wolfskill, though his uncle William Workman was merely listed in a large number of early residents at the conclusion of the piece. Returning to his real estate investments, the city treasurer observed that “I bought land at auction for $5 to $6 an acre, but I had to pay for the piping of water and to induce railroad building that would bring them into market and at Boyle Heights I expended a half million dollars in the development of the lands.”
He then related a story regarding a visit to his father-in-law by Griffin, who asked about the land to the east of the Boyle residence (still standing and occupied by Workman family members in 1903) and got the reply that they were owned by the city. Griffin, who with partners in 1873 established East Los Angeles (now Lincoln Heights) directly to the north, said, “Why, Boyle, if you don’t look out, a man will buy these lands and put a slaughter house right in front of your door.” Boyle and Workman then, in 1865, acquired 1,200 acres from the city “and that was the foundation of Boyle Heights.”
There was brief mention of ex-Governor Pico, of whom Workman related he “was a progressive kind of a man” including his construction of the still-standing Pico House off the southwestern corner of the Plaza. Other “public spirited men” were Ygnacio del Valle, Abel Stearns and Jonathan Temple, while the French natives Luis Sainsevaine and Luis Vignes were known for their orchards and vineyards. Antonio F. Coronel was cited as “a down-to-date, public spirited man” and a mayor as well as vineyardist. Also described as “another man who contributed much to the early growth of Los Angeles was Gen. Phineas Banning” and Workman went into some detail about the efforts in 1872 to secure the Southern Pacific Railroad’s lines in the region.
While the completion of the main rail line from the north in 1876 was a landmark, Workman recalled that “it was dull for four or five years after the road opened for traffic,” though omitted was the panic shortly before the included the failure of his uncle’s bank and William Workman’s suicide. He continued that “I attribute the growth of the town to the introduction of water on the dry lands” and “that brought about a better condition of affairs,” including “improved transportation facilities.” Lastly, he offered that, “it was the orange groves, the beauties of the climate and the delightful conditions of life that made Los Angeles what it is.”
This look at the multifold projects and events involving William H. Workman in 1903, as greater Los Angeles was in another major boom hopefully illustrated important aspects of the period and reflective of his remarkable life a half-century after his arrival in the Angel City. We’ll share more aspects, moreover, of Boyle Heights history as we commemorate its 150th anniversary through posts like these.