by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It was a beautiful day in Compton where the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum hosted the second annual Adobe Day event, featuring historic sites with adobe houses from all over greater Los Angeles. The Homestead was neighbors with Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach and the Soto-Sánchez Adobe in Montebello, as we shared information about the Workman House and La Casa Nueva while also displaying photos, dating from the 1870s to 1920s, from our collection of adobe structures throughout our region.
Last year’s Adobe Day inspired a multi-part post here on “The Rise and Fall of Adobe Abodes” and this year’s edition is the motivation for this offering on one of the images exhibited today, a press photo showing the Rocha Adobe, which stood, for about six-and-a-half decades, on the west side of Spring Street, between 1st and Temple streets, where now the Grand Park is located across from City Hall.
In fact, the photo was issued by International Newsreel Photo on 27 April 1928 for the opening of the new civic quarters with a caption reading,
Acorn from which mighty oak grew, Here’s first city hall of Los Angeles, Which was located on Spring street, opposite the site of the new city hall, as it looked in 1880.
Depicted is part of a single-story adobe building with a horse-drawn carriage parked out front and ten men standing in front of and in a pair of doorways of the edifice. Atop the portico at the left are two signs for the Pryke & Co. railroad ticket office and Ben E. Ward’s real estate and insurance business with the number 31 being the address. On the walls on either side of the doorway, in which a man stands, are displays for Ward’s business and, presumably, that of Pryke.
At the right is (and there is a small sign on the door frame to that effect) number 33 and signage for two more enterprises, Jonathan D. Dunlap’s general commission business for real estate, and the auction and real estate company of Andrew W. Potts and Nick A. Covarrubias. While it is not true that the building was the first city hall—there being other administrative quarters prior to this one—the 1880 date has often been cited for the photo.
Yet, we can actually pinpoint the date of the photo to April or May 1886—more on that subsequently. As to the adobe structure, it was apparently built in 1820 and was the residence of Antonio José Rocha (1790-1837), a native of Lisbon, Portugal who was one of a group of deserters who jumped ship at Monterey in 1815 and then came south as the Spanish period of California was in its last days.
Rocha and his wife María Josefa Alvarado raised their four children in the house, while he received a land grant in 1828 for the Rancho La Brea, a 4,439-acre tract west of the pueblo which included the tar pits reserved for Angelenos to use and which was regranted in 1840 when Señora Rocha’s brother, Juan Bautista Alvarado (who gave John Rowland the grant to Rancho La Puente two years later) was governor of the Mexican department of Alta California.
As was generally the case, the Rochas lived in town while operating their ranch for cattle grazing. After the American seizure of California in 1846-1847 and subsequent statehood in September 1850, Congress passed a land claims act that required grantees of ranchos during the Spanish and Mexican periods to prove ownership to a commission, followed by automatic appeals, in successful cases, to federal courts. The expense of having required new surveys, legal representation and other costs led many grantees into financial distress.
The Rocha family ended up selling La Brea for $20,000 to Henry Hancock, who was both a lawyer and surveyor representing them with the claim, and a prior post here on Hancock discusses some of the history of the rancho from that point. It may also be that the family’s economic hardship led them to sell their Los Angeles residence to the wealthy merchant Jonathan Temple. When this was and what his plans were have not been located, but, in 1853, for $3,000 he sold the property to the city and county for administrative quarters, as well as for the large backyard to contain a new jail, the first floor of which, for city prisoners, was made of adobe.
Because another prior post has discussed some of that history, as well, we’re going to jump forward thirty years to 1883, with there being frequent calls for the city and county to spend the money to provide for an adequate city hall, county court house (this moved from the Rocha Adobe in 1861 to Temple’s former Market House across Spring) and jail. When it finally looked as if the other two were going to happen at long last, the city sold its interest on 3 August to Louis Phillips, a wealthy Jewish rancher in Spadra, now southwest Pomona, for $14,400. The county followed on 11 October by selling its stake for $45,500, with that money placed into a court house and jail fund.
By this time, the long economic malaise, part of a nationwide Long Recession that also included a regional downturn during which the Temple and Workman bank failed seven years prior, that stunted local growth eased. Phillips, who had a business block on Main Street, undoubtedly calculated that the Rocha Adobe and jail property would be part of an expanding downtown business district, though it would be more than three years before he acted to develop the property. In the meantime, the jail continued to be used while the Chief of Police occupied No. 31 into 1885 at which time it became a real estate office and the City Council clerk used No. 33 until spring 1886.
It was at the end of 1885 that the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad completed a transcontinental railroad line to the San Bernardino area and, as it continued to build track through to Los Angeles, the region underwent the great Boom of the Eighties, which peaked in 1887 and 1888 during the term of William H. Workman as mayor of Los Angeles. The explosion in development included major transformations of downtown, including the removal of what the Los Angeles Herald of 10 July 1886 called “repulsive adobes” for modern brick structures for the betterment of the burgeoning city.
There were several reports during that year of adobe edifices being torn down and replaced by new structures, including on Upper Main Street in the Sonoratown area north of the Plaza. When a fire broke out in an adobe house on Los Angeles Street in Chinatown, on what was the 15th anniversary of the horrific Chinese Massacre of 24 October 1871, this was heralded as a means for removing other older buildings and extending that thoroughfare north as part of what we now call urban renewal. The Los Angeles Times of 27 October 1886 exulted that,
Los Angeles has passed her adobe age and is now in the midst of her wooden and brick age.
Two months earlier, in its 15 August edition, a headline in that paper, not quite five years old but soon to be the Angel City’s biggest media booster, called Los Angeles “The Fair Queen of the Southern Coast” and “The Modern Paradise” as it emphasized the city’s evolution “From the Sleepy Adobe Hamlet to the Magnificent Modern City of To-day.”
With the move of the police chief and council clerk to other quarters, Phillips leased numbers 31 and 33 for commercial purposes and here’s where we are able to pretty precisely date this photo. Ben E. Ward (1856-1907), a native of Connecticut, came to this area from San José and settled in Pasadena where he was in the real estate business (he was later the city and county assessor and had a high reputation before his early death while in the latter office). After a stint in San Francisco, he came back down to Los Angeles and the 11 April 1886 edition of the Times reported,
Ben E. Ward, who has returned to semi-trop[ical California] for a permanent residence, makes his bow to the public in a double-column advertisement this morning. He has established an office at No. 31 North Spring street (old city and county building) and will devote himself to real estate and insurance [a sign in the photo is for the Caledonian Insurance Company].
Richard J. Pryke, meanwhile, opened railroad ticket office at Number 31 at the end of April, but was only in that space for under a month, as the 23 May edition of the Times recorded that he relocated to a Main Street address recently occupied by Gardner’s candy store. This is how we can narrow down the date of the photograph with fair precision.
Andrew W. Potts (1831-1893), a Pennsylvania native who migrated with his family to Iowa and then was a Gold Rush ’49er to California, came to Los Angeles in 1861. He worked for Tomlinson and Company at San Pedro and Phineas Banning in Wilmington at their respective port shipping businesses before becoming the agent for the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad when it was opened in 1869. He served as county clerk for fifteen years, through 1884, and was involved in Phillips’ transaction with the county for the Rocha Adobe purchase.
Nicolás A. Covarrubias (1839-1924) was born in Santa Barbara, where his family’s adobe house still stands, and he became widely known, as many Californios were, for his love for and facility with horses. He served four terms as Santa Barbara County Sheriff and then came to the Angel City, where he operated a well-known stable. The partnership between the two men was short-lived, with the earliest ad for their occupancy of No. 33 being from 23 April and the last published on 21 August.
Jonathan D. Dunlap (1827-1904) was from New Hampshire and was also a gold seeker after his Army service during the Mexican-American War. His military service seems to have served him well because Dunlap was the assistant census marshal in this region for the 1870 census and many of the sheets used for research are in his hand and he then served as a deputy federal marshal for the Southern California district. He also had extensive mining interests and one of his unusual duties as marshal was to stock local mountain streams for trout, which enhanced recreational use of the San Gabriel Mountains. He resigned his federal job early in February 1886 and turned to the business that he ran in No. 33, with its first ad being the last day of April.
With Pryke leaving in short order for new diggings and the Potts and Covarrubias enterprise ending after four months, Dunlap and Ward remained at the two addresses until the end of 1886, by which time the Rocha Adobe was to be demolished. The jail vacated its quarters of more than three decades on the first day of December when the new facility was finished nearby on New High Street, which ran behind the Rocha property.
The Times of the 2nd reported that at 3:45 p.m. the prior day, fourteen peace officers marched 56 prisoners, handcuffed in pairs, to the new jail and observed that “all went without trouble, and all were pleased at the change,” given the fact that prisoners went to “comfortable quarters” happy to leave the “wretched old ones.” By the end of the month, a wrecking crew was at work leveling the jail, including its adobe first floor, and the Rocha Adobe. The Times of the 29th remarked,
The old adobe row at the corner of Franklin and Spring streets—a building which has not played an unimportant part in the history of Los Angeles—is in the hands of the despoilers, and will soon be among the hasbeens [sic]. In its place the huge and imposing Phillips block will shortly begin to rise.
The following day’s Los Angeles Tribune provided the concise update that “the last act of the old jail is positively the last appearance of an adobe building on Spring street.” When 1887 dawned, the Times commented, “the old Spring adobe is almost level with the ground,” while the New Year’s edition of the Los Angeles Herald approvingly noted that “the old jail and the unsightly adobe shanties in front of it, on Spring street, have been swept out of existence” adding that “the front walls of the rookery [a term often used for slums] were thrown down yesterday morning.”
The Tribune of the 7th provided a lengthy encomium that included a part of the headline proclaiming “The Only Adobe Remaining On Spring Street Gone.” It informed readers that,
The only adobe remaining upon Spring street, the last relic of the Spanish domination in the center of the city, is gone. The old county jail-building upon the corner of Spring and Franklin has been leveled to the earth; the jail-yard is littered with a mass of flat red-tiles and massive rough-hewn timbers, and the ground is being cleared to make room for a handsome brick business structure upon that important corner. It dates far back in the vista of the vanished years, and was for a long time that last house in the northern part of the city.
After recording that, in the pre-American days, the site of the Nadeau Hotel, at the southwest corner of Spring and 1st, just to the south, was the scene of revelries in which “warm wine inflamed hot southern blood” and led, it was claimed, to a killing every summer night, the account noted that, among a crime wave, the Rocha was purchased in 1853, though the amount paid to Temple “was deemed exceedingly exorbitant and, in fact, almost caused a riot at the time it was consummated.”
Sheriff James R. Barton, who was killed in January 1857, along with a small posse, as he sought bandits and murderers in the southern part of the county, now Orange County, was the first officer to take up quarters in the Rocha. Notably, the Tribune wrote that the jail was considered “the safest between San Francisco and the City of Mexico [Mexico City] and people came many miles to gaze in awe and wonder upon its massive walls.”
Yet, despite the paper claiming no on escaped from the hoosegow, 1850s accounts mentioned that city prisoners sometimes clawed openings through the adobe walls to escape, though the county lock-up on the second floor was much more impregnable. Also mentioned were occasional mobs breaking into the jail for lynching in which they “visited speedy justice upon the head of some red-handed assassin” and it vividly described how these chaotic breaches were conducted—in fact, the detail deserves divulging in a future post here.
The article ended with the remarks that,
Up to one year ago the adobe was the city police station, as well as the county jail . . . then the police were moved to their more commodious quarters on Second street, and but a few short weeks ago the county removed its squadron of the miserables to the pretentious structure upon the New High-street hill . . . and as soon as the prisoners were removed the work of leveling the old walls began. Now the old adobe [and the jail] have vanished from the land forever, and a handsome business block will blot out all trace of them.
The Phillips Block was of such proportions and comparative magnificence that, seeing photos of it, it is hard to believe what was on the site prior. More relevant for the prevailing opinion of the time, though, is the Tribune‘s concluding comment that, “the effacement of this old landmark is but another evidence of the change which rapid growth is making in the city.”
The disappearance of adobe buildings was, in effect, all but complete in Los Angeles during the boom, with a few exceptions, mainly in Sonoratown, north of the Plaza.