by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Among the prominent citizens of Los Angeles in the last half of the 19th century were German emigres Andrew H. Denker and Henry Hammel, though they are largely forgotten, though there are streets named for them. In Beverly Hills, there is a Hamel Drive and Road running north to south from 3rd Street to Gregory Way, north of Olympic Boulevard, though why the spelling is wrong and how the drive/road split developed appears to be a mystery. Just west of the University of Southern California, there is another north to south thoroughfare, Denker Avenue, starting from Jefferson Boulevard and, with several, often large, gaps along the way, ending at 228th Street in Torrance.
It is in this latter section that a photo from the Homestead’s collection sets us on the road to some history of these two figures, the image showing an automobile navigating the unpaved Denker Avenue, bordered by closely planted rows of eucalyptus trees, on 19 January 1927. As to why this photo was taken, it’s anyone’s guess, but why not take this opportunity to travel back a half-century before that and get into some of the history of its namesake and his brother-in-law and business partner.
Denker and Hammel had extensive business interests in hotels and land in Los Angeles. The latter was born in September 1832 at Darmstadt, south of Frankfurt in what was then the Grand Duchy of Hasse, not quite four decades before German unification. Denker was eight years younger and hailed from Braunschweig (Brunswick), southeast of Hamburg.
Hammel came to Los Angeles first, arriving about 1856 when he and Marcus Flashner became, that April, the lessees of the Bella Union Hotel, a landmark enterprise situated on the east side of Main Street and which began as a modest single-story adobe, though brick upper floors were later added. The Mexican-era adobe was built in 1835 by recent arrival Isaac Williams, who made it his home and store. After he took possession of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino in the early 1840s, the structure was rented and one its denizens was Pío Pico, who made it his residence when he the last governor of Mexican California.
Once the Americans seized Los Angeles in summer 1846, Marine Captain Archibald Gillespie occupied the edifice when he was military commander of the pueblo but he was soon evicted by a Californio revolted. In May 1849, Williams sold the structure to Benjamin D. Wilson and the Bella Union, with a restaurant and bar, opened soon after as the town’s first hotel. A second floor was added a few years later and there were a series of owners of the building and operators of the hotel, including Williams’ son-in-law, John Rains, before Hammel and Flashner took on the lease.
Later in 1856, Flashner and Hammel bought the edifice, having already engaged in a remodeling, including additions, with the two stating in an early advertisement in the Los Angeles Star that the Bella Union, with its refresh, was such that “strangers and gentlemen with their families will find it an agreeable home during the coming fruit season.” Also highlighted was that “the table will be supplied as heretofore with all the delicacies of the market.”
Two years later, in October 1858, soon after Hammel became an American citizen, the pair dissolved their business (Flashner owned a 35-acre city “donation lot” at what became Grand Avenue and Washington Boulevard and opened a public garden on part of it shortly before his death in 1859—this later became the well-known Washington Gardens and Chutes Park.) With Los Angeles’ economy in hard times, the two may have been experiencing financial troubles and deciding to sell out.
Hammel, however, remained at the Bella Union, working as a cook for proprietor, Dr. James B. Winston (who later lived near Mission San Gabriel where he farmed, while having mining interests at San Gabriel Canyon.) The clerk was Irish native John King, but, in May 1862, Hammel and King formed a partnership to take the lease from Winston.
The Star of the 31st remarked that,
This old established and popular establishment has changed proprietors, having been leased to Messrs. King and Hammel. These gentlemen are acquainted with the business, and well adapted to keep up the high reputation which the house has acquired as a first class hotel. The house has just been refitted and put in excellent condition . . . and visitors will find that, under the new management, the Bella Union will not forfeit the high reputation which it was heretofore enjoyed all over the State.
In an ad in the paper, Hammel and King assured readers that their enterprise would continue to be “THE BEST HOTEL IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA” including “large, airy rooms” or suites for families, “bills of fare [which] shall be inferior to none in the State,” stage service at curbside, and “the bar and billiard saloon shall receive the most strict attention,” so that “patrons shall find that this house will be carried on as a first-class Hotel ought to be.”
During the Civil War years, with Southern California more than southern in geography because of the high percentage of Confederate sympathizers living in the region, the Bella Union became a popular place for these supporters of the South to gather, which may indicate what Hammel’s political leanings were during that era.
There were other storms to weather, literally, in this period, including massive flooding in December 1861 and January 1862 and, while damage to the Bella Union was not reported, a vineyard that Hammel owned with Joseph Mesmer, a German from the Alsace-Lorraine section of France which was heavily contested between the French and Germans, was ravaged with the Star of 25 January reporting that “the dwelling house and cellars were washed away . . . and acres of land planted in vines, were annihilated.” Although large tanks of wine were salvaged, “the loss of these gentlemen is considerable.”
Hammel and King continued operation of the Bella Union through the war years, but, in early July 1865, during a wedding celebration, a long-standing and simmering feud between Robert Carlisle, another of Isaac Williams’ sons-in-law, and members of El Monte’s King family (no relation to John King) burst into a daytime gunfight in the hotel’s bar and billiard room that led to the deaths of Carlisle and one of the Kings and the near-fatal injury of another of the El Monte clan.
Around this time, Hammel embarked on another Bella Union Hotel project, with his partner being Andrew H. Denker, who came to Los Angeles, with the earliest reference to him being from February 1865 when he contributed to a Soldiers’ Aid Society of Los Angeles. This meant for Union Army troops, which is notable given Hammel’s ownership of the Bella Union, but, by summer 1866, the two were partners in a hotel of that name in Havilah, a mining boom town in what was then Tulare County, but soon became part of Kern County, in the southern end of the Sierra Nevada mountains, northeast of Bakersfield (much of the town was destroyed in a July 2024 wildfire).
In addition to running the hotel, the partners were involved in mining, one of their claims dubbed the Bella Union, and both served on the county Board of Supervisors. In 1867, they registered to vote in Kern County, with it noted that Denker was naturalized in July. At the beginning of 1869, Hammel returned to Los Angeles and leased, with another German named Henry Bremerman, from his former business partner, Mesmer, the latter’s United States Hotel. Later in the year, he married Marie Ruellan, a native of Paris, France and a recent immigrant who was also Mesmer’s niece.
Denker remained in Havilah operating the Bella Union Hotel and was enumerated there in the 1870 census, conducted in mid-June, though, within a month, he joined Hammel as his partner at the United States hotel. About this time, two of Denker’s brothers, Charles (1834-1906), who lived in New York City for some years, and Henry (1846-1922) came to California and settled in Kern County near Andrew. In May 1873 at the United States hotel, he married Marie Hammel’s sister, Louisa, and the couple remained at Havilah until fall 1874.
Mining still continued to be part of Denker’s business operations and the 16 August 1874 edition of the Los Angeles Express reported that at a mine near Havilah, in the Claraville district, he unearthed 30 tons of rock, from which some $3,600 in gold was extracted. After settling in Los Angeles later in the year, he joined the volunteer fire company, Confidence #2.
Both men also began acquiring real estate in greater Los Angeles, with Hammel obtaining property on the Rancho Santa Gertrudes, in the modern La Mirada area, through tax sales, and he and Denker, who had some land in Anaheim and in 1888 built the Hotel Del Campo there, foreclosing on a mortgage to pick up some property in the Beaudry Tract in the Angel City. They also joined Mesmer, Andres Briswalter, Christian Fluhr and others in a proposed gas works project.
Fluhr was the long-time proprietor of the Hotel Lafayette, the first hostelry of that name opening on Main Street in 1857, with his partners in 1862 being another German, Henry Dockweiler, whose later saloon under the Temple Block was well-known in town, and Frederick W. Koll. In 1877, he sold property at Spring and Third streets, once owned by Jonathan Temple, to Denker and Hammel for $10,000, but Fluhr got into some financial trouble, as Los Angeles went into an economic downturn from late 1875 and joining the national Long Depression that lasted most of the decade, after borrowing money from John Jones, using the Lafayette as collateral, and faced nearly $50,000 in debt when Jones’ widow, Doria, foreclosed in 1878.
That November, the Los Angeles Express reported that architects and builders, Buchanan and Herbert (who recently completed the nearby palatial Baker Block), were commissioned to undertake “a thorough overhauling and rejuvenation” of the Lafayette building, which included store fronts and a basement retail space. The paper added that the work unquestionably was undertaken because of Doria Jones’ assumption of ownership and concluded “at some time in the near future a hotel will probably be established in the building again.”
In mid-April 1879, the enterprise was reopened as the Cosmopolitan Hotel (San Francisco had a well-known hostelry by that name for many years) and the Los Angeles Herald of the 16th reported that “under the management of Messrs. Hammel & Denker, who understand their business in all its niceties, this elegant hotel cannot fail to become a popular resort” and it was added that Frederick Kohler was the head of the office.
In its edition of the 25th, the paper conducted “a hurried inspection” of the Cosmopolitan and informed readers,
Our energetic friend Denker has surpassed himself in the appointments of this Phoenix-like and attractive revival of the old Lafayette. It now has the largest, airiest and most perfect dining room of any hotel in the State outside of San Francisco. [In addition to a fine staircase, ladies’ entrance and parlor] aided by no end of sky-lights, the habitué of the Cosmopolitan can always rely on a sun-bath. This is much for the large class of people who come here to avail themselves of our genial climate. Many of our other hotels, by their location, bar out the garish sun who oxydizing and revivifying effects are so well appreciated by the consumptive or the man who curses a curtailed vitality.
This matter of the health-seeker coming to greater Los Angeles for its weather was increasingly becoming an emphasis and would only grow in importance in succeeding years, so that, while the economy was still slow as the Seventies came to an end, conditions would slowly improve as the Eighties dawned and the great boom that took place during William H. Workman’s mayoral tenure from 1886 to 1888 encouraged this kind of tourism at accelerated levels.
Moreover, Hammel and Denker continued their land acquisition in Los Angeles and elsewhere, including the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas (meaning “gathering of the waters”), located west of the city and was about 4,500 acres granted in 1838 to María Rita Valdez de Villa (women could own real property in the Mexican period, when American women could not). In 1854, the tract was sold to Benjamin D. Wilson and Henry Hancock, both of whom purchased large tracts of ranch lands from Californios who were in financial trouble, while Hancock was also a surveyor whose work on ranches was often questioned.
Hancock’s own economic problems led him to borrow money from William Workman, owner of the Homestead and half of the massive Rancho La Puente, and, in April 1862, Workman filed a notice of foreclosure. At the end of the year, he took possession of Hancock’s half of Rodeo de las Aguas, as well as a Los Angeles vineyard, and held it for several years. In the late Sixties, Edward A. Preuss, who migrated in 1868 from Louisville, Kentucky at age 18, and opened a drug store on Main Street, acquired much of the ranch and planned a town called Santa Maria.
As with so many of these schemes, Preuss’ Santa Maria project failed to materialize, but Hammel and Denker took the opportunity in the early 1880s to acquire much of Rodeo de las Aguas and launch their own townsite, Morocco. This occurred as the partners also spearheaded a plan for a massive hotel on Main Street at today’s Olympic Boulevard that was intended to take advantage of the great boom and the demand for tourists, especially during the winter season, looking for luxury accommodations, way beyond the duo’s Bella Union, Cosmopolitan and United States enterprises.
So, we’ll halt here and return tomorrow to take up the story from there, so be sure to check back with us then.