by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Last Sunday, as part of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, we featured, as part of the program, journalist and collector Edmon Rodman, who shared artifacts that he has gathered over about the last decade related to Jews in that community, whose founders included William H. Workman, nephew of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, John Lazzarovich, and Jewish merchant Isaias W. Hellman.
This blog has featured some of the prominent Jewish residents of 19th century Los Angeles, such as Hellman, his cousin Samuel Hellman, Adolph Portugal, Emil Harris, Solomon Lazard and others, while the first Jew to live in the Angel City, tailor Jacob Frankfort, arrived in late 1841 with the Rowland and Workman Expedition. The vanguard of Jewish migrants who came to the area a decade or so later included those name above and more and this post highlights some of the history of Henry Wartenberg, who, late in life, lived in the Boyle Heights area.
In our library is a copy of a little book called Los Angeles Jewry in 1870, published by Norton B. Stern, who contributed greatly to the understanding of the Angel City’s Jewish community in the 19th century and this seems a good time and opportunity to utilize it because it focuses on an address given in July 1870 by Wartenberg as he completed service as president of the city’s Hebrew Benevolent Society.
In an introduction, Stern remarked that Wartenberg was “virtually unchronicled and unsung” compared to other prominent people even though “he was at that time the outstanding Jewish leader in the city, and very likely the most popular and best known Los Angeles civic and fraternal leader of the Jewish community.” Like most of the city’s earliest Jewish residents, Wartenberg was Polish, though his hometown of Kepno, in the southwestern portion of that nation, was under Prussian rule and known as Kempen when he was born there in June 1830.
Apparently, nothing is known of his youth or how he came to choose Los Angeles as his new home in 1857, arriving here with younger brother Louis (who went on to be a prominent resident of Anaheim, a German community founded that year). He quickly became partners with Wolf Kalisher (1826-1889), possibly also from Kepno and who may have been the instigator of a chain migration process that brought the Wartenberg brothers to the Angel City.
In any case, Kalisher and Warternberg were partners in a general store, tannery and in real estate for more than two decades. Characteristically, the first located mention of the latter in Los Angeles press was in the Star of 3 September 1859, when he was elected secretary of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, among the most important organizations in the Jewish community.
In 1860, the federal census recorded the two men in the household comprising the store, which was situated in the two-story adobe building at Aliso and Los Angeles streets constructed by Alexander Bell. The next household included Kalisher’s brother, Moses, who was a third partner in the enterprise for a short time, as well as Louis, listed as a peddler and who, as noted above, soon moved to Anaheim.
Two years later, an Internal Revenue ledger recording income that was taxed for the support of the Union Army during the Civil War showed that had a modest amount of money earned with the store and it should be noted that the local economy was in rough shape after heavy flooding the prior winter and a coming drought, along with general malaise during the early Sixties.
In 1864, when a mining frenzy took hold in Los Angeles, including local efforts in San Gabriel Canyon and the San Gabriel Mountains, as well as San Bernardino County desert areas, along with the Colorado River bordering Arizona, Wartenberg was a founder of the grandly named Marquis Lafayette Copper and Silver Mining Company, along with Robert S. Baker, later a founder of Santa Monica and builder of the Baker Block in downtown Los Angeles, and Portugal, to work claims on Santa Catalina Island (William Workman and his son-in-law F.P.F. Temple also had interests there.)
Wartenberg appears to have been a Republican or was at least a Union supporter as, in at the beginning of 1865 as the Civil War neared its end, he was part of a committee of nearly 40, including Kalisher, James R. Toberman, J.J. Warner, Henry D. Barrows, Prudent Beaudry, Henry Hancock and other prominent Republican Angelenos, to establish a Soldiers’ Aid Society to work with the United States Sanitary Commission “for the relief of the sick and wounded soldiers.”
For Jews, service for their fellows and the community at large, was and is considered a duty and responsibility, so it was hardly a surprise that Warternberg was not just involved with the Hebrew Benevolent Society, of which he was elected president in 1864 and served until summer 1870, as noted above, and the Congregation B’Nai B’rith, but he was also a trustee of the Los Angeles branch of the Universal Israelite Alliance when it was established in 1869. He was also a trustee of Lodge 8 of the A.J.O.K.S.B., also known as the Kesher Shel Barzel and which was a Jewish benevolent and protective order.
Wartenberg was also very active in Masonic fraternal organizations. This included Lodge 42 of the Free and Associated Masons, of which he was elected a junior warden in 1869, but he was especially invested in the International Order of Odd Fellows, which got its name from the description of its early British members by those who didn’t understand or appreciate its esoteric rites.
The first American chapter was formed in Baltimore in 1819 and Lodge 35 in Los Angeles was organized in 1855, with its first Noble Grand, or chapter leader, being Morris Goodman, one of the first eight Jews in the city, served on the first Common (City) Council and was a merchant in the Bell Block. Wartenberg rose to the Noble Grand position in 1866 and also hoped to establish other local lodges during his many years of involvement as an Odd Fellow.
Also in 1866, Wartenberg appeared in the Great Register of Voters for Los Angeles County, with his registration taking place on 21 July. The listing showed that the 37-year-old merchant was from Prussia, while it was also recorded that he became a naturalized American citizen on 9 January 1861 through the federal District Court in the Angel City.
Warternberg’s stature in the community was such that he was often called upon to fulfill a variety of civic and legal roles. In July 1864, Isaac Hyman appointed him to be his attorney-in-fact, basically serving as a legal representative in lieu of hiring a lawyer, to hire Refugio Botello to handle Hyman’s interests on the Lugo family’s Rancho San Antonio. At the start of 1868, Wartenberg served on a coroner’s jury, comprised by law of six men, to hear evidence concerning a suspicious death and make recommendations for possible criminal referral.
In November 1863, in the first of several instances, Wartenberg was appointed to the county grand jury, being one of nine Anglos and six Latinos, to serve on the body, which examined and investigated criminal indictments brought by the district attorney and decided whether to recommend or not whether the cases were to be continued in the courts.
There were a baker’s dozen number of indictments presented to the grand jury, including four for murder, three for felony assaults and the remainder for grand larceny or robbery. A crime wave rattled so many people in Los Angeles County that a vigilance committee formed and a mob stormed the county jail and lynched several prisoners including three for whom Wartenberg and the other grand jury members returned indictments.
In November 1865, he was on another grand jury, with William H. Workman as the foreman, but with only one Latino, while the rest were white, including Isaac Hyman and other Jews such as Solomon Lazard and Samuel Prager. When Sheriff Tomas Sánchez brought together a new grand jury pool early the following year, Wartenberg returned to it, along with Workman and a more diverse group including ten Latinos and almost twenty Anglos. Summer 1866 included him on a selected grand jury, with Workman again as foreman, and one Latino, as before.
Kalisher and Wartenberg occasionally loaned money and sometimes had to resort to the courts to secure a judgment to claim those monies plus interest, while they also amassed real estate, including in the future Orange County, as well as at Wilmington, where they acquired lots from the town’s developer, Phineas Banning, and on the Rancho San Antonio, where they received lands after foreclosing on a loan made to the late William Wolfskill and Abel Stearns, both early Anglo residents in Los Angeles.
The partners’ store suffered a serious setback on 13 June 1867, as reported by the next day’s issue of the Los Angeles News:
The most destructive fire that ever took place in this city, occurred on the morning of the 13th inst. About 3 o’clock A.M., Mr. Henry Wartenberg, who occupied a sleeping apartment at the rear of his store (Kalisher & Co.,) in Bell’s Block on Los Angeles street, was aroused by the light and fire; springing out of bed he made an effort to stay the flames but was forced to fly [flee] without even dressing himself . . .
The conflagration was such that, despite neighbors and others rushing to the scene to help, “it was impossible to save anything from the store; the flames spread rapidly” and then destroyed the adjacent store of Isaac Schlesinger and reached a third store. Here, the paper recorded, “it was only by the almost superhuman efforts of the citizens that the devouring element was gotten under control.”
For a time, however, the blaze was considered out of control and panic ensued, so that everyone on the east side of Los Angeles down to Commercial Street and beyond “hurried their stocks of goods into the middle of the street, until the street was literally filled with the contents of the various stores and shops,” most of which were either built of wood or were adobe structures with wood roofs and other components.
It was sunrise before the flames were finally extinguished and, of the total loss of $64,000, close to two-third was from the Kalisher and Company store and about a quarter from Schlessinger’s business, while building owner Alexander Bell lost $5,000. It was noted that it was fortunate that there were no winds at the time, but the paper concluded, “this fire should prove a warning to our citizens to secure the necessary apparatus for extinguishing fires, immediately. Delay is dangerous. Let them heed the lesson.”
In fact, it was another two years before action was taken. In November 1869, a group of citizens gathered at the saloon owned by William Buffum to discuss forming Los Angeles’ first organized fire company, comprised of volunteers (a professional department was another 15 years away). Wartenberg took the position of chair and was one of 13 men to sign a roll as the inaugural members, who then elected him as president.
Quickly more than two dozen other Angelenos signed up and pledged to pay monthly dues of twenty-five cents. The endeavor, however, did not find its footing and two more years elapsed before Volunteer Fire Company Number One was launched and became the Angel City’s first sustained company of volunteer firefighters.
Politically, Wartenberg was not particularly active in his first decade or so in Los Angeles, though there was an interesting situation in 1865 as Phineas Banning launched a campaign for a seat in the California Senate and, as a notice in the Wilmington Journal, which he owned, of 17 June, stated, “a rumor has been circulated that no German adopted citizen would support” him.
Consequently, some 75 persons signed a statement that the “report [w]as false and untrue” and that they, “irrespective of party” pledged to vote for the “Port Admiral.” Of the signatories, many were German or Polish Jews including Marks Levy, Herman Jacoby, Isaac Blumenthal, Ephrain Greenbaum, Louis Mesmer, Samuel Meyer, Maurice Kremer, Elias Laventhal, Michael Goldwater (whose grandson was 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater) and Wartenberg. Banning, a staunch Union supporter who lobbied for a strong Army presence, and made money on the deal, during the Civil War, was a Republican.
In June 1868, a special election was held to fill two open seats on the Common (City) Council and Wartenberg threw his hat in the ring, though he finished third. In the regular December canvas, however, for the remaining seats on an open basis, Wartenberg finished fifth out of 25 candidates (including Elijah H. Workman, William H.’s older brother) and secured one of the spots.
With this, we’ll halt and return tomorrow with part two of our look at the life and work of Henry Wartenberg, so be sure to check back with us then!