by Paul R. Spitzzeri
With every development boom in Los Angeles during the last quarter or so of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th, commercial projects, whether these had to do with such businesses as agriculture, oil, movies or real estate, often were pursued with almost reckless abandon as capitalists chased their dreams of fabulous profits, speculative as these endeavors could be.
Government, however, generally struggled to keep up with the infrastructure and services needed for the hordes of new residents and workers that flocked to the region during these fevered growth periods. This included such vital elements as streets, sewers, adequate water supply and schools and, with this latter, it seemed like a perpetual battle to build enough campuses and provide enough classrooms and teachers to meet the incessant demand.
Insufficient space because of overcrowding was a perennial problem, leading schools to offer winter and spring graduating classes, split shifts of instruction, makeshift classrooms and other efforts to try and address the needs of rising numbers of students, especially as the pursuit of near full literacy with the onset of compulsory education was fully established during this era.
Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District spans 720 square miles with more than 900 schools serving around 650,000 pupils, this the second-largest number of any district in America, behind that of New York City. A century ago, the term was “Los Angeles City Schools” and the superintendent was the second woman to hold the job, his being Susan Miller Dorsey (1857-1946), a native of New York state and a Vassar College graduate who came to Los Angeles in 1882 when her pastor husband took a position at a Baptist Church. After a divorce, she taught at the city high school and rose to be superintendent in 1920 and served in that position through the remainder of the decade.
Not long after Dorsey’s tenure began, the Angel City underwent another massive boom and she and the district scrambled to keep up, though millions of dollars of bonds (the usual means for raising money for public works, such as water and flood control projects) were passed by voters. Flanking downtown were two new high school projects that opened at about the same time, Theodore Roosevelt in the highly diverse neighborhood of Boyle Heights and Belmont in what was long known as the Crown Hill section.
Emerging just west of the Bunker Hill area as Los Angeles prepared to enter its great Boom of the 1880s, Crown Hill was an early residential suburb that included the required streetcar line to get to it from downtown and a couple of posts here covered some of its history relative to the develop, the Los Angeles Improvement Company, and the Hotel Belmont, which was formerly the first location of Ellis Villa College and then burned at the end of 1887, during the boom’s peak. The hotel site became that of Belmont High School some thirty-five years later.
The Los Angeles Times of 28 June 1921 briefly reported that “an outlay of not to exceed $275,000 for the proposed Belmont High School” was included in a report of the district’s building committee that was, however, rejected. The Los Angeles Express of the same day expanded upon this by observing that an approved $9.5 million bond issue was disappointing in that just $2 million of these were sold, so that, while there was enough for improvements at the Los Angeles, Los Angeles Polytechnic and Jefferson high schools, the funds at Belmont, the site of which was at First Street and Loma Drive, and $100,000 to augment San Pedro High could not be undertaken.
The 8 April 1922 edition of the Hollywood Citizen contained an article noting that a $600,000 high school in that section was in the planning stages and dependent on the results of an early June school bond vote for $17.4 million and which was to include a revived Belmont project with it remarked that “the cost of this structure, it is planned, will be the same as that promised for Hollywood.” Moreover, stated building committee chair Irwin J. Muma, as paraphrased by the paper,
Both buildings . . . will be identical in architectural design and construction. Special features will include costly gymnasiums and auditoriums, the latter to have a seating capacity, each of 1800, and will be equipped completely for theatrical productions.
Each building also will have a cafeteria, costing approximately $30,000. Administrative offices, a library with a capacity for 20,000 books and 50 class rooms, or instructional units, will complete the interior arrangements.
In July, William W. Tritt, a city schools veteran and principal of the 30th Street Junior High School, now John Adams Middle School, was hired to take the reins at Belmont. Not quite two weeks later, the Citizen remarked that “to relieve congestion in the schools in the north end of Hollywood, and in the Los Angeles high schools, the new Belmont High School is to be constructed immediately.”
Architects were at work on the design and construction contracts were expected to be let out around the first of October. It was added that “if present plans are followed, the structure will cost approximately $500,000.” The paper quoted Superintendent Dorsey as stating that, “only those schools in the extreme north end of Hollywood will be affected by the new Belmont High School. The building will not be completed before another whole school year, so it is too early to attempt to state just how great the benefit will be to Hollywood schools.”
As the 1922-1923 school year commenced, it was repeated that those building contracts were anticipated to be issued within two months, while Roosevelt High was thought to be ready to accept students in mid-year and plans for Fremont and Beverly high schools were in the design stages. Meanwhile, a half-dozen elementary and two junior high schools were opened and board president Charles E. Seaman reported that the first month’s enrollment for the city’s schools was to be about 145,000 students, some 20,000 more than the prior year, while “the total enrollment for the year will reach 200,000,” with the number for 1921-1922 being 181,000.
The regional boom, which included Walter P. Temple’s establishment of the Town of Temple (Temple City) in the San Gabriel Valley, peaked in 1923, so the development of Belmont is notable in that context. Seaman added that, of $21 million in total district expenses, some $4 million was entailed in the work of architectural designs for campus projects, new and improved.
There were, of course, the inevitable delays, compounded evidently by a statement made by the Board of Education’s Business Manager William E. Record, who told the Times of 4 December 1922 that, “the number of school children in Los Angeles is so great that it seems that we cannot build schools fast enough to take care of them.” He cited the example of Le Conte Junior High in Hollywood, which opened just two months prior, but already was over capacity by 300 pupils, while many elementary schools had half-day schedules for two complements of students. As for Belmont, the plans were completed and under review for approval, with hope building would start early in 1923.
The 8 January edition of the Express reported that,
Another great city high school became a reality in Los Angeles today when announcement was made from the offices of the board of education that bids would be taken on January 10 for the construction of Belmont high school.
The new school, with an estimated cost of $600,000, will be built on the nine-acre tract owned by the board of education for some time, and once proposed as a new site for the Polytechnic.
Los Angeles Poly was, it was decided, to remain at its Washington Boulevard and Hope Street location (it is now the John F. Francis Polytechnic in Sun Valley in the eastern San Fernando Valley), but “Belmont high will relieve the congestion in both Polytechnic and Los Angeles high school, it is expected.” The paper added that the site was purchased for $100,000, although “since the time of purchase [it] has increased to several times its purchase price.”
In its coverage of the news, the Times of the 9th commented that “the school will accommodate approximately 2000 pupils who would otherwise attend the Los Angeles and Polytechnic High Schools” and that bonds totaling $4.5 million were sold to a consortium including the Guaranty Trust Company and Blythe, Witter and Company (the latter’s Dean Witter went on to found, in 1924, an investment firm that lasted for 75 years), with four other companies involved.
An architectural rendering of Belmont from the Times of the 28th showed the campus, designed by Board of Education architect Edgar H. Cline and said to be “one of the handsomest groups of school buildings in the city,” in the very popular Renaissance Revival style used extensively in Los Angeles during that era, including a campanile rising above the complex.
An accompanying map of Crown Hill showed the school location as well as areas where oil wells from the Los Angeles field discovered in the 1890s were to be removed, a new Pacific Electric subway station was where the Belmont Station Apartments are now and other aspects including downtown developments like the Central Library completed in 1926.
The Express of 24 February republished the drawing and a different map with references and images to the new Mission Square row of duplexes south of campus, cited as a new standard of housing in Los Angeles and projected to cost $1 million, as well as the existing Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home a couple of blocks to the southwest.
Work continued until the Express of 7 August reported that Roosevelt, which did not open in the middle of the 1922-1923 year as anticipated, and Belmont were ready to welcome students for the upcoming 1923-1924 year and that this meant “the over-crowding of the high schools already in operation and that were cramped last year to their capacity will be materially lessened.” It added, however, that Belmont “will be finished sufficiently by September 11 to conduct certain classes in the building with Tritt telling the paper “it is hoped all classes of the high school grades will be taken care of.”
The crowded conditions in Los Angeles city schools was reported on the 11 September edition of the Express, which observed that “nearly a quarter of a million boys and girls today started in the new school year,” this expected to be 25,000 more than the prior year. Notably, it added, “new buildings in every part of the city have been rushed to completion” and that “tents have also been ordered into service to take care of students, while partially finished buildings” were in progress. The following day’s Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News, which began publication about a month before, published a photo of just such a temporary structure.
The featured artifact for this post is the 26 June 1925 “Vacation Edition” of The Belmont Sentinel school newspaper, with a photo of Principal Tritt on the cover and a laudatory short piece by a student who wrote that the principal was “the school’s best friend” and “is chiefly responsible for its development in spirit and ideals.” Under the banner of “Happy Summer Vacation,” the paper informed students,
Today, with the presentation of semester grades, the Los Angeles schools close for a well-earned summer vacation. For ten weeks the Belmont teachers and student body will be scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico, all with the same aim—to have a good time.
Teachers informed their pupils of their summer plans, while the seniors were given plaudits for their presentation of Booth Tarkington’s play, Seventeen, though a photo, which was also published in the Illustrated Daily News of 19 June, shoed one character in blackface. Bits of humor, a digest of school happenings during the year, lists of school clubs and officers, a sports page, and the last page’s spot for signatures—this one has about 30—are also of note.
There is also a “Belmont As It Was—and Is” article that commented,
Just two years ago, some three hundred and twenty-five very frightened young ladies and gentlemen mounted the steps of Belmont and enrolled therein. Not however, the steps to which you are accustomed, but rather some rickety wooden ones.
It may be well to state at the point, that there were numerous other things in the same condition about the school. The auditorium had not as yet been completed . . . Likewise, the cafeteria was in the process of construction and for those who could not go home to dine it was necessary to patronize “Dick’s Lunch Stand.”
Belmont, at the end of its second year, had 1,400 students and 60 teachers compared to 500 pupils and 28 instructors in its first term in fall 1923. The current Senior B class was to be the first graduating one. As for the paper, which began as a semi-monthly sheet and evolved into a weekly, it was named by student Peggy Gorman and, to this day, the school nickname remains the Sentinels.
The rise in school spirit was also cited, while the unnamed author commented that “it will be interesting two, five, ten years hence to look back on those first two years and their contributions to Belmont’s development.” Imagine what these pioneer pupils would think about their school being 102 years old and the remarkable changes in the community, its demographics, the city and beyond!