by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The old saw of “you can’t make money without spending money” takes on a different connotation when it comes to the proverbial “money pit.” This can sometimes be literal, say, as in the significant upfront infusion of capital in drilling for oil, or the building of a large and expensive house, in which maintenance becomes an increasingly bigger concern, or in real estate development, where the outlays are significant at the outset and the hope is that leases, purchases, rentals and rising values will pay off.
For Walter P. Temple, in the throes of the greater Los Angeles boom of the Roaring Twenties, all three were taking place simultaneously. Whereas the construction of his La Casa Nueva at the Homestead was purely about spending large sums of money to build a remarkably ornamented and substantial dwelling to live in and enjoy, his work in oil and real estate was highly speculative because of the inherent risk in plowing large amounts funds into projects in the hope of ample returns.
With oil, this risk was also predicated on the geology of a well site and the expectations that a pool of crude was waiting to be exploited and extracted. Temple, the beneficiary of an incredible stroke of luck when his son, in spring 1914, found oil on their Montebello-area ranch and the result was a string of producers in the late Teens and early Twenties that brought them substantial wealth, went on his own as a producer, but to only marginal success, while the shallow Montebello field began to decline in yields after several years.
In 1919, when his finances and fortunes were at their pinnacle, Temple took large amounts of his cash and invested in real estate, focusing initially on Alhambra, where he and his family resided and which was growing by leaps and bounds. Over the next several years, he added projects in El Monte, Los Angeles and San Gabriel, building commercial buildings, including movie theaters, post offices and stores, all of which would provide steady lease and rental income.
Then, in late May 1923, came the announcement of the formation of the Town of Temple (rechristened Temple City five years later), an effort far larger than anything else Temple undertook in the real estate realm. The 285-acre tract, emerging from the ashes of a previous subdivision called Sunny Slope Acres, involved a correspondingly bigger capital infusion from him and his partners, business manager Milton Kauffman, attorney George H. Woodruff and friend and Alhambra rancher Sylvester Dupuy.
When the town was established, greater Los Angeles was at the peak of its latest boom and, while lot sales were healthy in the early stages of the Town of Temple enterprise and some houses and commercial structures were built, while a city park, extension of the Pacific Electric streetcar line from Alhambra and other infrastructure added, warning signs soon emerged. This included too much speculation on lots, as buyers looked for a quick rise in value and then sought to sell and cash out. The presumed boon of the Red Car extension was belied by declining overall ridership as more people turned to automobile travel. The unintended consequences of the 1925 Mattoon Act, which was to allow for infrastructure improvements by property tax levies, but which made adjoining owners of land pay for the delinquencies of neighbors, also spelled trouble for places like the Town of Temple.
Moreover, Temple’s increasingly precipitous financial position became more clear, for the reasons outlined above, as income declined while spending ascended. This led to the issuance of bonds by the Temple Townsite Company for the Town of Temple as well as for other real estate projects handled by the Temple Estate Company, principally the construction in downtown Alhambra of the Edison Building. While these brought fresh infusions of cash, they also involved interest payments over the long term and this had the effect of delaying what was increasingly inevitable in terms of a stark economic reckoning.
The featured artifacts from the Museum’s artifact collection for this post is a cover letter from company auditor Charles W. Tandy and “Statement of the Cash Received & Disbursed” sent to Temple by the Townsite Company on this day in 1926 and covering the week from the 15th to the 22nd. There are a dozen transactions recorded, including receipts of just over $1,100 and payments of just shy of $800. Among the former are trust deed payments of town lot owners, an interest payment on the trust deed of another, and a small tax payment from a fifth.
The two largest amounts concern collections for other tracts outside of the townsite and, why these were part of the company’s portfolio is an interesting question. Collections from Mission Manor, a subdivision that was established earlier in the year at the corner of Valley Boulevard and Del Mar in San Gabriel, totaled $160, but exactly how Temple and the Townsite Company were involved is not yet known. An amount of $817, more than 70% of the income for the week, came from Bradbury Park, another San Gabriel tract, situated north of Las Tunas Drive and along Bradbury Drive and Santa Anita Avenue. This one we can trace to Temple because the Pasadena Star-News of 2 October 1922 briefly reported:
Walter Temple plans to open a forty-acre subdivision to be known as Bradbury Park, on Las Tunas drive. Milton Kauffman, on Temple’s behalf, has submitted the drawings and plans to the City Board of Trustees and asked that suggestion[s] be made after a study of the project. Santa Anita street, as projected [north] through the tract, is to be sixty feet wide.
When Bradbury Park was placed on the market two months later, however, it had a new owner, Gurdon C. Harris, a Minnesota native who owned a telephone company in Tulare in the San Joaquin Valley of central California and who’d recently resettled in this area. Harris aggressively marketed the subdivision, in which there is a Gurdon Avenue between Bradbury Drive and Santa Anita Avenue, over the next couple of months and it may be that Temple sold the 40 acres, subject to a trust deed to Harris, and took collections applied to the Townsite Company.
It could also be that the reason for selling the tract, which Temple also did for 37 acres he owned at Valley and Garfield Avenue in Alhambra and likely considered subdividing, was for his reconceived plans to take on the Town of Temple project. As for Mission Manor, the situation could very well have been the same; in other words, Temple planned a small subdivision there, decided to sell it subject to a trust deed and then received those collections applied to the Townsite Company.
It is worth noting that, in the statement, there were four accounts, including one for Mission Manor, while most of the received funds went to the Townsite’s general account at National City Bank in Los Angeles, housed in a building in which Temple was part of a syndicate that built the edifice at 8th and Spring streets. This was across 8th from the Great Republic Life Building, also constructed by Temple and partners, and where the Townsite Company headquarters was situated, while the Mission Manor sales agents also had an office there.
To add to the somewhat tangled ties, Boyd W. Doyle, who was from Michigan and worked as a commission merchant in Detroit and food broker in Los Angeles before getting into real estate, was involved in both Bradbury Park and Mission Manor (as well as the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, the William Penn Hotel in Whittier and tracts in Pasadena, Pomona and Reseda). Doyle was also the buyer from Temple of the aforementioned 37-acre parcel in Alhambra and appears in a public notice for a declaration of trust for Harris for Bradbury Park, with the Security Trust and Savings Bank of Los Angeles as the trust institution.
So, as noted above, Walter Temple looks to have planned small subdivisions in several locations in Alhambra and San Gabriel and then reconsidered his aims, especially when the Sunny Slope Acres site became available, and turned to the Town of Temple project by spring 1923. As to the disbursements on the statement, they involved a trade acceptance (a fixed amount drawn on a buyer from a seller and accepted by the former), rent to Milton Kauffman (perhaps for the Townsite Company office’s rent?), interest to the California Trust Company, which issued the Townsite Company bonds, interest on a $5,000 note issued by Clyde M. Church, vice-president of the Security Trust and Savings Bank, and reimbursement to Company employee Charles W. Tandy.
While the situation on the cusp of a dramatic downturn, media reports regarding the Town of Temple in May 1926 include an effort to plan for the next Tournament of Roses parade entry, with the Pasadena Star-News of the 11th reporting,
Everybody in the town of Temple will plant pansies between now and the end of the year, if the Womans Club of the town can put the effort over.
The object is to have a sufficient supply of the blooms on hand to decorate a float . . . The pansy was chosen as part of a floral scheme being worked through the women of the various communities participating.
Three days later, the paper noted that “nearly every city in Southern California has its flower” with it added that “Temple has the pansy, San Bernardino the orange blossom, Burbank the Matilija poppy, Glendale the California poppy . . . Pasadena’s flower is the rose, and this is generally known as the rose city of California.” The Woman’s Club of Temple City, however, changed its position in 1944, when it had a contest that led to the winning entry of “Temple City, Home of Camellias.” Two years later, the first Camellia Festival was held there.
Throughout May, the Star-News ran articles on an effort to build a new South Santa Anita School, which served the Town of Temple and portions of west Arcadia. Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Mark Keppel (for whom an Alhambra high school is named) presented information on expansion plans as the school was overburdened, with some classes having up to 50 students and there being no kindergarten component.
By mid-month, a proposal was to float a bond issue of up to $95,000, following a meeting before area taxpayers at which Keppel spoke on the question, principal Loraine Sherer provided statistics on the school and its growth and displays included renderings, by Alhambra architects David S. Quintin and Thomas L. Kerr, of the proposed campus. Sherer noted that enrollment jumped from 110 a half-dozen years prior to 260, even as a $15,000 bond issue made some modest improvements, while it was added that the 1924-1925 school year was when the Town of Temple became part of the district. Keppel, citing expected broad growth in the region, advised locals to plan for more students than some thought.
The South Santa Anita School board voted to hold a bond election on 11 June, seeking $100,000, which was within range, given it had $23,000 in existing liabilities, of its $128,000 bonding capacity. In its edition of 25 May, the Pasadena paper published a rendering of the proposed school, in the ubiquitous Spanish Colonial Revival style, and contrasted it with a photo of existing Mission Revival structure, adding that the new building would have a capacity of 500 students, almost double the existing student body.
With nine new classrooms and the present auditorium repurposed for a kindergarten, the plans were said to be greeted by “an enthusiastic reception” in a meeting held at the Temple Chamber of Commerce. While the new auditorium was used for the graduation ceremonies of June 1927, the school building portion was dedicated in September for the onset of the 1927-1928 year. The school was renamed Longden Elementary School about two decades later.
Other local news of interest during May 1926 was the appointment of a new deputy sheriff, Glenn C. Losey, working out of the Temple station (and occasional mention of his work in arresting alleged criminals), an effort to establish a post in Temple and South Santa Anita of the American Legion (formed after the First World War), and concerns about highway planning through the area that threatened to limit access on Baldwin Avenue.
In fact, the Townsite Company letterhead features a large regional map of “The Arrow Highway through the San Gabriel Valley” as proposed by the county Regional Planning Commission. The road project was not carried through as envisioned, although Live Oak Avenue, from the original Town of Temple western boundary of Encinita Avenue, connects eastward with Arrow Highway in Irwindale.
A notable press feature appeared in the 9 May edition of the Los Angeles Times under the heading of “Temple Forges Into Limelight” and with a collage of photographs showing the existing South Santa Anita School; the new Community Church; Temple (City) Park; the Temple National Bank building still with us at the northeast corner of Las Tunas Drive and Temple City Boulevard and of which Walter Temple was a founding director; a view of a “residence street;
and a “Temple Poultry Ranch.” A headline above these touted that the “Town Reflects Rising Tide of Realty Interest Throughout San Gabriel Valley.”
The byline was for “An Observer,” with an editor’s note that “this is one of a series of articles concerning the progress of local community projects as seen by a staff writer,” but it reads more as an advertisement by boosters than an objective report. In any case, the piece assured readers that,
A community development program of great magnitude is under way in the town of Temple, in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley, according to reports from the Chamber of Commerce there. Only a few short years ago, the report says, Temple was a bit of unimproved territory in the suburbs of a great city [Los Angeles, of course].
Without trees or improvements of any kind in 1923, today finds Temple a thriving community with a well-organized group of business men who are taking an active interest in civic affairs.
Touted were a $85,000 water system (service was and remains, for part of the city, the Sunny Slope Water Company of east Pasadena), street work involving $80,000, curbs and sidewalks of another $70,000, the $15,000 bank, the community church built at a cost of $30,000, and commercial structures valued at $400,000 in the small downtown section. The Arrow Highway “passes through the heart of the little city” and traffic on the road projected to link Los Angeles and San Bernardino “will be of great benefit to Temple.”
The article remarked that, as with other towns in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys promoting the “small farm” concept, “Temple is the seat of a great poultry-raising and small-farms community.” In fact, promotional photographs issued by the Townsite Company showed a poultry pen and houses in the yard of a house to demonstrate the viability of the idea of raising animals and growing fruits and vegetables for significant food self-sufficiency. The Chamber claimed that “the future is assured,” including because of the streetcar line, concluding that “it is expected that soon Temple will become another thriving suburb of Los Angeles.”
The curb, street and sidewalk improvements, along with street lighting and others, were part of the recently passed Mattoon Act, but its provisions on delinquent assessments being absorbed by neighbors proved to be a significant problem. Moreover, the general real estate market in the region was on the decline from the peak reached when the Town of Temple was founded three years prior. As Walter Temple took on more debt through the bonds, continued large-scale spending and received decreasing income from his oil and real estate enterprises, despite restructuring plans devised by his attorney and business partner Woodruff, matters worsened considerably by decade’s end.
Then came the Great Depression, emanating from a stock market crash in October 1929. Within a half-year, Temple, who’d already sold large amounts of business property, and his associates sold their diminished-value interests in Temple City and he leased the Homestead and resettled in Ensenada, Baja California, México. As the Depression worsened amid waves of bank failures, he lost the Homestead to foreclosure in July 1932. Temple City, however, continued on and found renewal after World War II, with incorporation taking place in 1960, and it remains a highly desirable suburban community more than a century after its founding.