Boyle Heights History Blog

"The Buddhist Temple of Los Angeles": Rafu Bukkyokai/Higashi Honganji in Boyle Heights

2012-02-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

An essential component to any community is its religious life. In the early years of Boyle Heights, religious structures were almost certainly all Christian, but, by the first part of the 20th century, as the neighborhood's population diversified, so did its religious buildings.

This post shows a postcard from 1913 depicting "The Buddhist Temple of Los Angeles." The cover has what seems to be an Arts and Crafts influenced design with flowering vines and a building evoking Japanese elements, specifically the joinery above the column (Japanese influences had a major impact on the Arts and Crafts movement, which was in full flower in these years.)

At the center and lower portion of the front are three images of the temple, including an interior view of the pews, the altar, and an exterior shot of the building. The lettering in the box at the bottom is a clear reflection of Arts and Crafts style, as well.

On the reverse of the card is a short inscription in ink, reading: "Visiting by Miss A. Lindsey & myself from Los Angeles. Aug. 1913. Met Japanese priest." There is no address or stamps, so the card was likely placed in a scrapbook, in which other mementos of a trip to Los Angeles were probably placed. For many tourists, a visit to such places as the temple, or the old Chinatown where Union Station now is, or to a remaining adobe house or a local mission, was a way to experience something "exotic" about Los Angeles, whether or not the experience was any deeper beneath the surface than the chance to meet a "Japanese priest."

The temple was first sited, in 1904, on East Fourth Street in downtown Los Angeles. Three years later, it moved to Little Tokyo at a space on San Julian Street. Then, in 1911, it relocated to the Boyle Heights location at 209 S. Savannah Street (at 2nd Street.) At the time of the card's 1913 purchase, the facility was known as the Rafu Bukkyokai or "The Buddhist Mission of Los Angeles." Eight years later, in 1921, there was change to the institution, which became the Higashi Honganji Temple. Then, five years after that, in 1926, the temple moved again, to 118 North Mott Street, where it remained for a half-century. In 1976, as the demographics of Boyle Heights had changed dramatically after World War II and the Japanese-American community slowly grew smaller in the community, the temple moved back to Little Tokyo at its current site at 3rd Street and Central Avenue.

For more on the temple and its history, see the Higashi Honganji Web site at: http://hhbt-la.org/.

Contribution from Paul R. Spitzzeri, Assistant Director, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry. The postcard comes from the museum's artifact collection.

A 1920s Boyle Heights Artifact: 1921 Walker & Todd Ford Dealer Ink Blotter

2012-01-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

This is a small little item that no one (or very nearly) uses anymore: an ink blotter. These were just to wipe excessive ink on when people used the old ink pens with steel nibs on them, before fountain and ball-point pens came into being.

Frequently, blotters were an opportunity for businesses to advertise their good, product or service. In this case it was for an authorized Ford Motor Car dealer, Walker and Todd, at their Boyle Heights location. In fact, the blotter was issued to announce that the firm was moving from temporary quarters at 3569 Stephenson Avenue to 2907-15 Stephenson. Note, too, the old exchange system phone number: BOYLE 2353.

Finally, there is the great image of what appears to be a 1921 Model T Touring car with, of course, a convertible top! Easily the most famous automobile of its era, the Model T was produced from 1909 to 1927 and was, basically, the first mass-production car that was affordable to the "masses."

Known everywhere as the "Tin Lizzie" and the "Flivver," the Model T controlled, by 1921, a staggering 60% of the entire American new car market and over 15 million of the cars were produced in its eighteen-year run! It has been said that Ford's cost-control methods applied to the paint and that he stated that a buyer could have any color they wanted, as long as it was black.

The 1921 touring car, being a larger sedan with three doors and seating five, and which had imitation leather upholstery, a 4-cylinder engine producing 22.5 horsepower, sold for about $415. Today, a touring car, fully restored, can set you back $15-20,000.

If anyone is wondering where Stephenson Avenue is, don't bother consulting a Thomas Guide or checking Google or Yahoo maps online, because Stephenson was changed later to Whittier Boulevard, when that road was extending from the east into Los Angeles.

The temporary location was at what is the southeast corner of Whittier Boulevard and Esperanza Street, south of the 60 Freeway, north of Interstate 5 and west of Indiana Street, the eastern boundary of the city limits of Los Angeles. The new location was about six blocks to the west, between Camulos and Euclid and just north of the 60. Today, there is a shopping center where the Walker and Todd dealership once stood on the south side of Whittier.

Contributed by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Assistant Director, Workman and Temple Homestead Museum, City of Industry. The blotter comes from the museum's artifact collection.

Santa Fe Coast Lines Hospital

2011-12-05T11:15:00.001-08:00

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, one of the main rail empires in America's railroading history, built a hospital for company employees in 1904-05 at 610-630 St. Louis Street in Boyle Heights. The facility, known as the Santa Fe Coast Lines Hospital, was razed and rebuilt in 1924.

The hospital was opened under the auspices of the Santa Fe Coast Lines Hospital Association, which emanated from an earlier model started in New Mexico in 1891 as the Atlantic and Pacific Hospital Association. After the Santa Fe acquired the Atlantic and Pacific rail line in 1897, it took the existing association and renamed it, the Santa Fe Pacific Hospital Association the following year. In 1904, another merger occurred with the Southern California Railway's hospital association, which included employees from the San Francisco and San Joaquin line.

The railroad used a dues system from its employees to keep the association self-supporting and, eventually, operating with a surplus. In 19th-century America, there were a number of associations and funds that provided services to members on a dues-paying basis, including burial expenses and financial support for injured or laid-off workers.

While the Santa Fe operated an emergency care facility at Needles (others were later added at Winslow, Arizona, Barstow and San Bernardino, while a full-care hospital was built at San Francisco), after which patients requiring longer-term care were sent to Los Angeles and cared for at the Sisters of Charity Hospital (see the 7 November 2011 post on that facility), the need (!) for a more comprehensive hospital became more pressing by the turn of the century, especially as the growth of the association through consolidation meant that care was extended to railroad workers from Albuquerque to San Diego to Los Angeles to San Francisco and points in between.

After a dozen years after accumulating the funds and five years after buying the property, situated on a little less than four acres just off the southeast corner of Hollenbeck Park, for $5,500, the Association completed, in December 1905, its Boyle Heights facility. The construction and equippng of the Mission Revival-style hospital, equipped with 150 beds, totaled just under $150,000 and the architect was Charles Whittlesey. The parcel's size also allowed for the creation of a park and gardens for patients to enjoy which convalescing. Almost ten years later, in early 1914, an annex was completed at a cost of $22,000.

As was the case with employees' work assignments, there was, however, racial and ethnic segregation at the hospital. A 1915 account noted that, "one section of the building is devoted to Mexicans, who receive the same tender care as do their English speaking co-laborers. They have attractive quarters with a pleasing outlook, and there usually is a full quota around the table in their private dining-room. " Another strange aspect was that patients diagnosed with tuberculosis were not just quarantined, but lived outside in tents, albeit ones that had lighting and heat.

About a dozen years after its 1920s reconstruction, the facility was renamed Linda Vista Community Hospital and used that name from 1937. By 1980, the Santa Fe Railroad decided that it was time to get out of the business of providing direct health care to its employees and sold the facility to a private company. The 1980s brought a transformation in Medicare reimbursements and the hospital suffered a decline in business, closing the emergency room by the end of the decade and then closing in 1991.

The site was slated for a variety of potential uses, including a new hospital, a rehab facility, a charter school, a senior care facility, and residential lofts, but designation on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as the City of Los Angeles's roster of historic-cultural monuments, in 2006 prevented its demolition. The facility does, however, get plenty of use, with 100 or more films and television shows shot there, but, as it ages and crumbles, the uses tend to be more of the horror film variety. And, of course, as an abandoned older structure, tales of hauntings are legion and such programs as the Travel Channel's "Ghost Adventures" have claimed the place is infested with spirits.

For an interesting Los Angeles Times article on the site, check: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/04/local/la-me-hospital4-2010apr04

The photo above is a cabinet card photograph of the first hospital, taken probably shortly after its construction in 1905, and is courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry, California. This post is contributed by the museum's Assistant Director, Paul R. Spitzzeri.

The Los Angeles Orphans' Asylum

2011-11-07T12:15:00.000-08:00

In 1856, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, a society of apostolic life for Roman Catholic nuns founded by St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac in 1633 to serve the poor, took possession of the Los Angeles house of Benjamin D. Wilson, early mayor of Los Angeles, later state senator, prominent San Gabriel Valley rancher, and namesake of Mount Wilson, because Wilson was moving to his Lake Vineyard ranch in present-day San Marino.

The Daughters, also commonly known as the Sisters of Charity and "God's Geese" because of their wing-like bonnets or wimples, then opened an orphans' home, also known as the Institución Caratitiva, in the Wilson residence, quickly adding a second structure the following year. These structures were at the corner of Alameda and Macy streets (Macy now being Cesar Chavez Avenue.) Interestingly, the Wilson house was a frame one brought to Los Angeles in sections by New York via ship around Cape Horn. Included with the 9-acre parcel was a vineyard of some 6,000 vines and a 300-tree orchard. A school for girls also was run on the property.

The Daughters were requested for the specific purpose of creating an orphanage by Bishop Thaddeus Amat of the diocese of Monterey, which included Los Angeles. Based in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the Daughters began their work in Gold Rush California, starting in 1852 in San Francisco. Then, the society sent Sister Scholastica Logsden and Ann Gillen from Maryland, as well as three women from Spain: Angelita Mombrado, Clara de Cisneros, and Francesca Fernandez. Sister Scholastica, who joined the order in 1839, helped found orphanages in New York City and Natchez, Mississippi during the ensuing decade.

Leaving New York in October 1855, the five women, traveling with Bishop Amat, took a 25-day trip to San Francisco and were received by the sisters there, remaining for several weeks before journeying down the coast to Los Angeles, where they arrived in early January of the following year. They stayed briefly with prominent Californio Ignacio del Valle until their new home was established. Sister Scholastica was the leader of the Los Angeles contingent and became a well-known and highly-regarded figure in the city.

Notably, after she died in 1901, a paean to her was penned by Boyle Heights founder William H. Workman and published by the Historical Society of Southern California and the Pioneers of Los Angeles County. Sister Scholastica, who died at age 88, was from Maryland and was well-known to James de Barth Shorb, whose family estate there was called "San Marino." Shorb married a daughter of Benjamin D. Wilson, which would appear to explain why Wilson's home was taken over by the Daughters for the first asylum.

In 1858, the Daughters proved to be so highly-regarded, that they were asked to create a hospital, which was operated first in a county-rented adobe (the county also provided some funding for the care of patients) just north of the Plaza Church owned by Casildo Aguilar, a prominent Californio politician, and which was under the supervision of Sister Ann Gillen for almost a quarter century. For the first decade, the hospital was adjacent to the orphanage until an 8-acre site was found on the northeast edge of town and a two-story brick infirmary built there. The hospital later became St. Vincent's.

Despite the best efforts of Sister Scholastica and the other Daughters, the orphanage suffered from a common chronic condition of many Los Angeles institutions in those years: a lack of sufficient funds. Orphans' fairs and other benefits and events were held to raise money for the asylum, and there were occasional small appropriations by the state, but it was very often tough slogging.

In 1869, the orphanage, which initially was restricted to girls but by then included boys, was incorporated as the "Los Angeles Orphan Asylum" (and the hospital as the "Los Angeles Infirmary"). Part of the reason for incorporating was to provide a stable management structure for the institutions, but a significant aspect was the question of ownership of the property. Specifically, there was disagreement about whether Bishop Amat should be considered the owner, as head of the diocese, or the Daughters, as managers of the facility.

As the population of the city surged during the later 1880s, the famed "Boom of the Eighties" being in full swing, the Daughters sought a new site. In 1889, to honor Sister Scholastica's fiftieth year as a Daughter of Charity, a fund was established that initially collected $3,000 for a new home for the asylum. A new site, purchased for $12,000, was located at Boyle Avenue and what is now Whittier Boulevard, where, in early 1890 the cornerstone was laid. The following year, on Thanksgiving 1891, the imposing Romanesque-style structure was finished at a cost of $150,000 and over 400 orphans were moved to the new facility.

The snapshot photograph above is of the Boyle Heights asylum, taken in September 1925. For over sixty years the facility served thousands of orphaned children in Los Angeles. Concerns over structural integrity came about in the early 1930s when construction crews blasting the hillside next to the asylum for the extension of Sixth Street weakened the massive structure's foundations. While the building was used for classes during the day, children and staff slept at the basement at St. Vincent's Hospital in the evenings.

The damage to the building, as well as the notorious freeway construction projects that controversially carved through much of Boyle Heights, led the Daughters to abandon the site and move the facility to Rosemead in the San Gabriel Valley. From 1953, the facility has operated as Maryvale, but has been reconfigured as a residential home for girls from ages six to seventeen. There are also adjunct facilities in El Monte and Duarte.

For more information, see http://www.maryvale-ca.org/about-us and http://www.daughtersofcharity.com/who/OurHeritage/Pages/LosAngeles.aspx.

A very good 1997 overview by Cecilia Rasmussen in her much-missed column, "Then and Now", from the Los Angeles Times is here: http://articles.latimes.com/1997-06-29/local/me-8160_1_los-angeles-river.

An excellent article on the history of the Daughters of Charity in Los Angeles is from Michael Engh's notable book, Frontier Faiths, and the excerpted piece can be viewed here: http://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1137&context=vhj.

The photograph is courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry. Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, the museum's Assistant Director.

Rare Boyle Heights Map: Valencia Tract

2011-09-28T18:04:00.000-07:00

In April 2010, a post was dedicated to some historic photos of the Queen Anne-style residence of Robert Wirsching and his wife, Carlota Valencia, which still stands on Brittannia Street in Boyle Heights.

Recently, the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum in City of Industry acquired a rare 1902 tract map of the area around the Wirsching house. While Wirsching originally subdivided land he purchased some years before as "the Wirsching Subdivisions," he then went and created a ten-lot resubdivision denoted as "the Valencia Tract," that being his wife's maiden name.

The Valencia Tract is an area 323 feet north of Brooklyn Avenue (Cesar Chavez Avenue), which is at the bottom of the document and covering 200 feet of frontage each of Brittania Street to the east and San Benito Street to the west with the depth between the two streets being 260 feet.

The map was drawn by city surveyor and chief engineer, J. A. Bernal, and is dated 20 September 1902. Interestingly, while the controversial carving up of Boyle Heights in the post-World War II era meant that Interstate 5 and 10 sliced through the southwest corner of the land just below the Valencia Tract, the ten lots comprising the tract remained intact.

Notably, lots 8 and 10, both fronting San Benito and each measuring 40 feet wide and 120 feet deep (4800 square feet), have the names of two Wirsching sons, Robert and Carl. The rest of the lots, while having some markings (for example, two or three foot easements in a couple of them), do not have names of owners or intended owners.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Assistant Director, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.

Volunteers of America and the Maud Booth Home in Boyle Heights

2011-07-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

Back in spring 2010, this blog featured a post (see http://boyleheightshistoryblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/historic-houses-of-boyle-heights-joseph.html) on the 1882 house of Joseph M. Workman, cousin of Boyle Heights founder William H. Workman.

By 1895, however, Joseph Workman lost the house, located at 451 South Boyle Avenue, to foreclosure and the home was occupied by others, including saddler Allan Ball and his family in the 1900 census and Edward Magee and family who moved from Hanford in the San Joaquin Valley to reside in the house.

Meantime, across the street, on an East 5th Street address, George Chaffey, Jr., his wife Anna McCord and two sons, Andrew and John, lived in a large mansion overlooking Hollenbeck Park. Chaffey was born in 1848 at Brockville, Ontario, Canada to a shipbuilding (and namesake) father. He left school at the age of 13 to apprentice as a marine engineer and was known as a ship designer. In 1881, Chaffey came to California to visit his father, who had settled a few years previously in the new agricultural townsite of Riverside. By the end of the year 1886, George and his brother William established their own colonies at Etiwanda, Upland and (naturally named for their home province) Ontario. Using advanced hydroelectric systems powered by water from the San Gabriel Mountains, the Chaffeys created irrigation projects that allowed these communities to become citrus-growing centers for decades to come. The brothers also endowed a college that bears their name today and there is a public high school that is named for them, as well. By 1886, the Chaffey brothers relocated to Australia to work on irrigation projects and new colonies, but after over a decade "down under," George returned to California.

Upon coming back, Chaffey embarked on another irrigation project with the California Development Company to direct water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley of southeastern California. The contract was signed in 1900, shortly after Chaffey bought the Boyle Heights house on East Fifth mentioned above, and the project delivered its first water supply the following year. Subsequently, Chaffey became a banker and, in connection with his son, Andrew, opened an amazing twenty-five banks in the first two decades of the twentieth century, including the powerful California Bank. Chaffey even bought an Inyo County ranch and created the town of Manzanar in 1910 (three decades later, many Japanese-American residents of Boyle Heights and others were interned at a relocation camp there during World War II.) He continued actively working until his 80s and died in San Diego in 1932.

As to 451 South Boyle, George's son Andrew acquired the old Joseph Workman property and built a $9,000 Craftsman-style residence there in 1904. Their occupation of the house was, however, brief, as Andrew, his wife Maud and their two daughters joined George and Anna Chaffey in a new residence on Wilshire Boulevard east of Western. The early 1900s, in fact, saw a mass exodus of well-heeled residents of Boyle Heights to the newly-developing tonier neighborhoods of west Los Angeles. Later, Andrew and family relocated further west to the new wealthy enclave of Brentwood where the 1930 census reported their house to be worth $600,000.

Meantime, the Andrew Chaffey house was purchased by an organization called Volunteers of America. Founded by Ballington Booth, son of the creator of the Salvation Army, and his wife Maud, the VOA was established in 1896 to work with poor and disdvantaged Americans. Later that year, the association opened its first Los Angeles location near today's City Hall. A children's home was established a decade later in south Los Angeles, but as the work of the VOA grew, a new home for low-wage earning women was in the works. Through the efforts of local banker Newman Essick, who was on the VOA advisory board, the Chaffey residence was acquired and renovated. On 25 April 1913, the "Volunteers of America Working Girls' Home" opened with a public reception and receiving hours. The above real photo postcard shows the home at about the time of its opening.

The facility was established to serve up to forty women who earned less than $10 a week and, according to a Los Angeles Times article, provided them "ordinary comforts and wholsome [sic] food at a nominal figure to young women compelled to work on limited salaries." Rates were established at $3.50 to $4.00 a week for room, means, washing and sewing accomodations, although the Times article noted that "young women out of employment or tempoearily embarassed through sickness or lack of funds will be received." It also noted that "special attention will be given to young girls coming to Los Angeles from the surrounding towns in search of employment, who are without relatives or friends in the city."

By 1917, however, the Volunteers of America had changed the facility to the "Maud B. Booth Home for Boys and Girls." Notably, the first Booth Home was established just before the earthquake and fire in San Francisco and served to house thirty-three children displaced by that disaster. Later, there was a boys home on Vermont Avenue west of downtown, while, at some date prior to 1917, the Boyle Heights "Working Girls" facility had changed to a girls' home. A house and lot adjacent to the former Chaffey residence property became available, however, and was acquired by the VOA. With two large residences on almost three acres of land, the organization was able to shutter the Vermont Avenue facility and move the boys over to the newly expanded Boyle Heights site. Consequently, by the end of 1917, there was room for fifty boys, forty girls, and twenty infants and toddlers at the Booth Home, although there were then seventy-five children being cared for there. Interestingly, the VOA was careful to distinguish between their "home" philosophy and the institutions that typically served orphaned, disadvantaged, or delinquent children. Rather most came from households where parents were separated, divorced, or unable to work because of illness or disability.

The VOA planned for improvements over the years and, in the early 1920s, planned for a two-story annex to the facility in order to serve fifty additional dependents, improving the capacity to over 150. This annex was to include dormitories, a commissary, an auditorium for 300, offices and staff quarters and was to be constructed between the two existing residences.

The Maud Booth Home for Children was the updated name of the facility in the 1930s and it continued to function for both boys and girls through the 1950s, before becoming a boys-only home. By the time the Times ran a feature about the complex in 1957, the number of children served had dropped to only thirty, of which but eight were girls. The decline in clientele and difficulties in securing adequate public funding continued to affect the home. In October 1964, the fifty-eight year old facility closed its doors at 451 South Boyle.

Some three decades later, however, another organization working with the disadvantaged in Boyle Heights came to the site. PUENTE (People United to Enrich the Neighborhood Through Education) was founded by Sister Jennie Lechtenberg, a long-time teacher in Boyle Heights, as an educational institution for children and adults through the PUENTE Learning Center. With the old Workman/Chaffey/Booth Home property acquired by future Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, PUENTE moved from an East First Street location to ten portable trailers on the site. In 1995, a 40,000 square-foot complex was dedicated and named for Riordan, and has been serving the Boyle Heights community ever since (the organization also has a South-Central Los Angeles branch.)

It seems an appropriate, if uninteded, irony that the word PUENTE applies to the founder of Boyle Heights, William H. Workman, who came to California in 1854 and settled with his family on the ranch of his namesake uncle, William Workman. The name of the ranch: La Puente. Moreover, William Workman's son, Joseph, who owned 800 acres of the Rancho La Puente (now the unincorporated community of Bassett) built the first house at 451 South Boyle in 1882.

Contribution from Paul R. Spitzzeri, Assistant Director, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry. Thanks also to Joseph Workman descendants Mark Evans and Douglas Neilson for their help.

The Los Angeles County Crematory Cemetery

2011-05-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

It is little understood but, at 1st and Lorena streets at the southeast corner of the original grounds of Evergreen Cemetery, which is operated by a private company and has been since 1877, there is a separate parcel operating as the Los Angeles County Crematory Cemetery and which has served indigent residents interred at the expense of the county. It also was utilized until the 1922 opening of the Chinese Cemetery in East Los Angeles as the final resting place for Chinese-Americans (which proved controversial when the remains of Chinese-Americans were found outside the bounds of the cemetery during the construction of the Metro Gold Line extension through the area several years ago.)

Operating at an East First Street address, with a dedicated entrance created there in 1920, replacing access that was previously through Evergreen, the facility was created at the time Evergreen was organized and included five acres dedicated as a "potter's field" for indigent residents who were buried at public expense. The City of Los Angeles was the owner of the property from 1879. The Los Angeles Cemetery Association, owners of Evergreen, operated the county burial ground by contract, with the first interments occurring in 1880. In 1896, however, the county assumed direct control of the site and operations. In February 1917, this parcel, expanded to ten acres, was officially deeded over by the city to the county for $40,000. By 1922, there were over 13,000 persons interred in the cemetery, according to a county report. Thereafter, cremation became the only method of disposing of the remains of indigent persons whose remains were held by Los Angeles County.

It is also noteworthy that housing began to spring up around the cemetery during the 1920s, as the population continued to expand (and explode) in the region, so beautifying the grounds was done to accomodate the new neighbors. By late in the decade, the facility included a chapel, crematorium, garage, ash house, and two residences, one for the caretaker. In the 1960s, the county earmarked five acres as surplus property and it was sold to Evregreen's owners, the Los Angeles Cemetery Association. The county crematory/cemetery is officially 3.9 acres (though it is a bit of a mystery as to what happened to the one acre not included in that total and the five acres sold to the LACA.) Fascinatingly, Evergreen put a susbtantial level of dirt fill over existing graves in the five acres it acquired from the county cemetery and began expanding its operations with new burials from the mid-1960s. In 1993, the LACA, after 116 years in operation, sold Evergreen to International Funeral Home, Inc.

Above are photographs of some rare documents from the collection of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum and dating from March 1896 and March 1898 that consist of two "Reports of Interments" from the latter, providing the date, names of deceased, age, sex, and name of the undertaker or person who ordered the grave site. The third item is a "Statement of Interments in County Cemetery for Month of March 1896" and lists the deceased's name, date of interment, the name of the undertaker.

The March 1896 statement involves sixteen persons interred in the county burial ground between the 2nd and 31st of that month. Only two were female, two were infants not identified as to gender, and the rest were male. In one case, that of Duane Whittaker, he was interred on the 7th, but either a mistake was made or someone claimed the body, because, five days later, the report stated "disinterment [of] the body of Duane Whittaker from the County to the Evergreen Semetery [sic] work done by the Sup. of Evergreen Semetery." Notably, one of those buried in the county section was an E. G. Graves! Also included in the document was the list of performing undertakers or, in seven cases, directly from the county hospital, as well as which received fees of $4.00 or $6.00 from the county.

The March 1898 report covers (!) twenty-two people and represented an advancement in bureaucracy, in that it was on a preprinted form, rather than the completely handwritten one of two years prior. Issued from the office of cemetery superintendent S. C. Fifield, the two-page document included the ages of the deceased, ranging from the "infant twins of C.W. Junerige" and "unknown infant" to 85-year old Henry Kathor. Only five of the persons were female and two were Chinese, including 50-year old Ah Fong and 51-year old We Chung. Seven of the dead were infants or small children, one was a 9-year old, six were in their thirties and three were older than 70. There was even one man named George Suess, who was likely not, however, a doctor. Interestingly, the column preprinted as "Undertaker" was changed to "grave order by," although it is not known the three persons listed, D. C. Barber, T. J. Stewart and George W. Campbell, were undertakers or county or city officials.

These documents are a window into the early history of Evergreen Cemetery and its lesser-known "sister," as well as that of Boyle Heights.

For more information, check:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&CRid=2162011.

http://www.metro.net/projects_studies/eastside/images/ee_hlac_report_exec.pdf

Contribution from Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.

Evergreen Cemetery: The First Corporate Cemetery in Los Angeles

2011-05-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Although settled in 1781, the pueblo of Los Angeles did not have its own cemetery until the establishment of the Plaza Church. Prior to that, the denizens of the sparsely populated hamlet, were interred at Mission San Gabriel, ten miles east. The first recorded burial "in the cemetery of the church in the pueblo" was in January 1820, while the Plaza Church was under construction. For almost a quarter century, the plot to the south of the church was the final resting place for Angelenos. In recent months, however, a major controversy has arisen at the site as crews working on a newly-opened Mexican-American cultural center and museum discovered the remains of native aboriginal Indians (Gabrieliños) and others on the site and museum officials heavily criticized for their secrecy and insensitivity in dealing (or, rather, not dealing) with the situation.

By 1837, a movement gathered in Los Angeles to move the cemetery, because it was deemed too small, while others expressed concern that the burial ground "is very injurious to the health" of the residents of the pueblo. Finally, in 1844, a site was chosen north of the town at the base of the hills now part of Elysian Park. On All-Souls Day, 2 November, the cemetery was dedicated and blessed, though full consecration as Calvary Cemetery did not occur until 1866. Calvary remained in operation until a new, larger site was secured on the fringes of what is now East Los Angeles and which opened in 1896, though the old Calvary continued to exist for decades and is now the site of Cathedral High School (nickname: the Phantoms!)

During the American invasion of 1846-47, a fort, Fort Moore, was established on the hill overlooking the Plaza. An explosion of gunpowder killed four soldiers and it was said the men were buried within the confines of the fort. This seems to have been why a non-Catholic cemetery was later established on the hill, after the military abandoned and removed the fort. This burying place was often called "Fort Moore Cemetery" or "The Protestant Cemetery" and its earliest use is at the end of 1853.

The following year, 1854, the Hebrew Benevolent Society established a Jewish cemetery, north of town and west of Calvary, towards the Angelino Heights area. There was also a cemetery that operated very briefly near the Staples Center, close to Figueroa between 8th and 9th streets, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, but it appeared to have only been in use for about three years.

Finally, in the mid-1870s, another movement developed to close the Fort Moore Hill cemetery and create a new burial ground. In June 1877, the Los Angeles Evening Express announced the news that Evergreen Cemetery had been founded on seventy acres at the eastern limits of the city in the newly-created Boyle Heights neighborhood. Tellingly, the writer of the article commented that private enterprise stepped in to create the cemetery because of city inaction in dealing with the cemetery on Fort Moore Hill. The founders of the Los Angeles Cemetery Association included Albert H. Judson as president; Isaac W. Lord as secretary; Edward F. Spence as treasurer and trustees Victor Ponet, Irvine Dunsmoor and Fred Dohs.

Judson was an attorney and real estate developer, Lord was also heavily invested in real estate and was the developer of Lordsburg, now La Verne, and Spence was a prominent banker and real estate investor who later went on to be mayor of Los Angeles in the 1880s. Among the trustees, Dohs was a musician, barber and real estate investor, as well as a noted breeder of horses, Dunsmoor was owner of the Dollar Store, and Ponet was a well-known undertaker, coffin manufacturer and dealer in picture molding and frames (Ponet Terrace is a subdivision in Los Feliz on land owned by him.)

The City of Los Angeles, however, was hardly receptive initially to the Evergreen plan and passed an ordinance later in June prohibiting any burials except those in the established cemeteries at Fort Moore Hill, Calvary and the Jewish facility. A committee was appointed, however, to inquire into a site for a new burial ground and a 120-acre site just north of the Jewish cemetery, in what is Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium today, was proposed, having already been city-owned. Clearly, some closed-door negotiations followed, because, in late August, the city reversed course and granted permission for Evergreen to proceed. In return, the Los Angeles Cemetery Association agreed to reserve five acres at the new facility as a "potters field" for poor residents buried at public expense. This latter section operated until 1917 when it was sold to the county.

In 1880, a few years after the creation of Evergreen, the cemetery was given some attention in an illustrated history of Los Angeles County (usually referred to as Thompson and West's history, part of a series covering California counties.) By then, it was reported, there were more than 4,000 trees on the site, which was laid out by county surveyor E. T. Wright, and the grounds were deemed "already attractive in appearance and promising to become more so every year." An ornate gate at the main entrance, broad walks bordered by cypress trees, a hedge border around the entire cemetery, and water pumped from an on-site well eighty feet in depth by a Halliday windmill, were highlighted. Also of note was that, among the lots obtained by some of the town's more prominent residents, there was a granite shaft built on his lot by John E. Hollenbeck of Boyle Heights that cost the substantial sum of $6,000. At the time, about three hundred persons had been interred at the three-year old cemetery.

In the latter half of the 1880s, a major land boom (the "boom of the Eighties") erupted and subsided and, after a depression and drought in the 1890s, the population of Los Angeles continued to accelerate rapidly as the 20th-century dawned. The Los Angeles Cemetery Association, owners of Evergreen, issued a pamphlet in 1901 that vividly portrayed the facility to prospective buyers of lots.

By that time, the new president of the association was J. M. Elliott, president of the First National Bank of Los Angeles, whose predecessor was Edward F. Spence. Ponet had moved into the role of vice-president. Directors included Dohs, Lord and William D. Stephens, a migrant to Los Angeles in the great boom of 1887 and who was a prominent grocer. Stephens later was a director of the Chamber of Commerce, Board of Water Commissioners, and Board of Education and served for two weeks as interim mayor of the city after the resignation of Arthur Harper in 1909. Stephens then served as a Congressional representative and was appointed California lieutenant governor and then governor in 1916 when Hiram Johnson resigned to serve in the United States Senate. He went on to win election to a full term serving until 1922. He died at the Santa Fe Hospital in Boyle Heights in 1944, but, ironically, is buried at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery.

Meanwhile, the superintendent was Captain Lester G. Loomis, who had been briefly (one month)chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1888. A native of Illinois, Loomis came to California as a boy and arrived in Los Angeles in 1887, working as a plasterer before joining the police force on the advice of banker and city council president L. N. Breed, another Boyle Heights notable. It was said that, while still new on the job, Loomis stopped the driver of a speeding buggy, who turned out to be Boyle Heights founder and Los Angeles mayor William H. Workman. Fed up with the rough-and-tumble (and corrupt) world of policing, Loomis decided to resign and became Evergreen superintendent in 1889, a position he held for fifteen years. Loomis and his wife Grace lived on a residence on the grounds, but he resigned in 1904 and later owned a 77-acre ranch in the San Gabriel Mountains near Acton.

The pamphlet gives much information about Evergreen, including recently-built facilities such as the Chapel and crematory, designed by Arthur B. Benton (best known for his work on Riverside's Mission Inn). The landscaping, a lake/reservoir, the monuments and markers, and other features were covered in detail.

Of interest is an alphabetical list of plot-owners, some comprising many of the well-known figures of the day in Los Angeles, including the Bixby family (owners of much of present Long Beach and other areas of southern California); oilman Charles Canfield, partner of Edward Doheny in the first oil well opened in the city back in 1892; Jose Estudillo, of an old Californio family; banker and former officer of Evergreen, J. M. Elliott; former governor Henry Gage; former mayor Henry T. Hazard; the Hollenbecks; founding cemetery president Judson; the Kerckhoff family; attorney Bradner Lee; Boyle Heights founder John Lazzarovich; developer Isaac Lankershim; cemetery founder Lord; capitalist William Lacy; Ponet, the vice-president of Evergreen; A. E. Pomeroy, developer of Pismo Beach and La Puente; San Gabriel Valley rancher and horse breeder L. J. Rose; prominent attorney and judge Albert M. Stephens; former district attorney and mayor Cameron E. Thom; former banker and mayor James R. Toberman; Joseph Wolfskill; and Boyle Heights founder, former mayor, and city treasurer William H. Workman and his family.

Of course, there were many everyday citizens, including unidentified indigents who were interred in the potter's field, who were buried there, as well, including substantial numbers of Chinese-Americans whose graves were startlingly discovered during the construction of the Metrolink Gold Line several years ago.

Curiously, the pamphlet had this to say about the future of the cemetery:

Los Angeles, though making great strides in its growth, has not enlarged in many years toward the east, nor does it seem at all likely that property situated beyond the cemetery will in the near future be selected for building purposes. Notwithstanding the nearness of the cemetery to the city, a comparison of its surroundings to the east with the western part of Los Angeles, will convince anyone that its permanency is not in doubt. It is an unexplained but well known fact that cities when enlarging almost invariably settle on one direction, and the part thus determined is rarely changed.

Naturally, the Association was dead (!) wrong in its confident predictions about the "one direction" development of Los Angeles, but it was correct about the survivability (!) of the cemetery. 134 years after its founding, Evergreen still serves Los Angeles and is a notable
historical landmark in Boyle Heights and the broader city and region.

The first image is from the 1880 Thompson and West history of Los Angeles County; the rest are from the 1901 pamphlet on Evergreen Cemetery.

Some sources:

"Evergreen Cemetery, Los Angeles," Los Angeles Cemetery Association, 1901, courtesy of Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

History of Los Angeles County, California, Thompson and West, 1880 [reprinted by Howell North, 1959].

Illustrated History of Los Angeles County California, Lewis Publishing Company, 1889.

Edwin H. Carpenter, Early Cemeteries of the City of Los Angeles, Dawson's Book Shop, 1973.

Captain Loomis and the Loomis Ranch: http://www.loomisranch.org/.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum. City of Industry.

Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: Hollenbeck Park

2011-03-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

Easily the most photographed and publicized part of Boyle Heights from the 1890s onward was Hollenbeck Park, a twenty-one acre City of Los Angeles park created in 1892. Following national and international trends, the city actively embarked on a park development program starting in the 188os. Hollenbeck followed such early parks as Central (created as a public square in 1866 and known since 1918 as Pershing Square); Westlake (renamed MacArthur after the World War II general in 1942); Eastlake (first East Los Angeles before that community's name changed to Lincoln Heights and, from 1917, known as Lincoln); and Elysian (1886--miraculously, no name change as of yet!)

Indeed, Boyle Heights founder William H. Workman took an active interest in improving the growing city's parklands while mayor of Los Angeles in 1887-88, during which time a new city charter was drafted and a parks department and commission were created. In the 1890s, Workman was a member and chair of the parks commission and, during that tenure, Hollenbeck Park was added to the system of city parks (a few later, at the end of 1896, came the massive 3,000-acre Griffith Park.) In fact, Workman donated two-thirds of the property, with the remainder coming from Elizabeth Hatsfeldt Hollenbeck, and the two gave this gift to the city in honor of Mrs. Hollenbeck's husband, John.

In the space of a decade (1875-1885), John Hollenbeck, a native of Ohio and raised in Illinois who came with his German-born wife to Los Angeles after many years in Nicaragua, became an influential and well-known figure in the city, amassing a broad portfolio in banking and real estate. He was president of the Commercial Bank of Los Angeles and a founder of the First National Bank of Los Angeles. His real estate empire included 3,500 acres of Rancho La Puente in modern Covina and West Covina in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, a prominent hotel and business block in downtown Los Angeles, and his home and estate in Boyle Heights. In 1880, Hollenbeck worked with former California governor John G. Downey, nurseryman Ozro W. Childs and others to convince the state to buy a section (or 160 acres) of land southwest of downtown, which had been used as an agricultural exposition grounds and was known then as Agricultural Park. Later, the site became Exposition Park.

Because of health problems stemming from his years in tropical Central America, Hollenbeck died in his fifties in 1885. In addition to donating some land for the park, Elizabeth Hollenbeck willed the couple's home and surrounding grounds across Boyle Avenue for a senior citizens' home, dedicated in 1896 and now known as Hollenbeck Palms. After her death in 1918, Mrs. Hollenbeck was interred with her husband at Evergreen Cemetery at the east end of Boyle Heights.

The above photo, from the Homestead Museum Collection, was taken during the 1920s and seems to have been shot from the landmark wooden bridge that spanned the park at 6th Street and which was, in 1968, dedicated a Los Angeles city historic landmark and then promptly destroyed. Much of the lake is captured as well as five canoes and a boathouse on the shoreline at the right. Beautiful trees of several varieties lined the lake and, far to the north, are the faint outlines of mountains (perhaps the Verdugos above Glendale or the San Gabriels.) As with all photos posted on this blog, clicking on the image provides a larger view.

One of the more controversial results of the post-World War II transformation of the city was the massive and program of freeway construction that, in Boyle Heights, bore through large sections of the working class neighborhood. The Interstate 5/Interstate 10 corridor was built right over the southern portion of the park and lake and much has been said and written about the consequences of this work in an area that has been economically and politically disadvantaged. This result is readily observed at Hollenbeck Park today, although the Boyle Heights community continues to use and support its park in its own way much as their forebears did in preceding decades.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry.

Occidental College: Born in Boyle Heights!

2011-01-11T12:33:00.000-08:00

As Los Angeles experienced its first large-scale development boom, known as the "Boom of the Eighties", between 1886 and 1888, Boyle Heights was part of the hysteria. Though founded by William H. Workman, Isaias W. Hellman and John Lazzarovich in 1875, the community stagnated for a decade following the collapse of the city's first growth spurt during the first half of the Seventies. The economic downturn from 1876 and afterward was hastened by the collapse of the bank co-owned by Workman's uncle and namesake, San Gabriel Valley rancher William Workman, and Workman's son-in-law, F. P. F. Temple.

The completion of the Santa Fe Railroad line to Los Angeles in 1885 was a major factor in unleashing the "Boom of the Eighties." As new residents poured into the city, Boyle Heights experienced an explosion of the construction of residences, commercial structures and even an institution of higher learning.

On 20 April 1887, a group of clery and laypersons from the city's Presbyterian population received its articles of incorporation from the State of California for "The Occidental University of Los Angeles, California." The site chosen for the school was at the southern end of Boyle Heights off Rowan Street (named, incidentally, for banker, county treasurer, county supervisor and Los Angeles mayor Thomas E. Rowan.) On 20 September, the cornerstone was laid for the sole college structure and construction commenced.

A year later, in October 1888, instruction began for the first crop of Oxy students, composed of twenty-seven men and thirteen women, who paid $50 tuition per year. Five years later, the college celebrated the matriculation of its first graduates: Maud E. Bell and Martha J. Thompson. Another landmark occurred in 1895 when Oxy played its first football game against arch-rival Pomona College, a contest won by the Tigers, 16-0.

By then, however, the development boom turned into a spectacular bust. Los Angeles not only receded into recession, it followed the rest of the United States into an extended depression for most of the 1890s. Locally, the misery was compounded by a devastating series of droughts during the decade.

Finally, the college experienced its own major disaster. On 13 January 1896, a fire destroyed the sole structure at the institution, which then moved temporarily to 7th and Hill streets in downtown Los Angeles. A new campus was built and occupied in 1898 at Highland Park. The photo above, courtesy of the Workman and Temple Family Homestad Museum, was taken in March 1900 at the site on Pasadena Avenue (now Figueroa Street) near Avenues 51 and 52. After over a decade there, another move was made, this time to Eagle Rock, where the current campus was situated in 1912.

As for the Boyle Heights location, it later became, in 1912, Rowan Avenue Elementary School at 600 S. Rowan Avenue, a short distance south of the Pomona Freeway (SR60). Next year, the school will celebrate its centennial. Meanwhile, there is a plaque commemorating the site as the first location of Occidental College.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum.

Boyle Heights and the Mexican-American War

2010-12-17T12:40:00.000-08:00

America's first war of imperialism, the Mexican-American War, reached Los Angeles in August 1846 when forces led by Commodore Robert F. Stockton (for whom the Central Valley city is named) quietly entered on the afternoon of the 12th and took possession of the town. Stockton remained in Los Angeles until September 3 when he departed by ship for the north and left a garrison of soldiers behind, led by Captain Archibald Gillespie. Gillespie immediately instituted a series of oppressive regulations, such as that all shops were to be closed by sundown, that no two persons could be seen congregating together in public, and that all liquor sales were to be approved by him. Within days, Californios formed a resistance movement and then besieged Gillespie and his guard at an adobe building known as "Government House" on Main Street, just south of the Plaza.

In the midst of this revolt, some Americans and Europeans, alarmed at the situation, left their homes and ranches and took refuge on September 26 at the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, some thirty miles east of Los Angeles. These men included Benjamin D. Wilson (a future mayor of Los Angeles and state senator and for whom Mount Wilson is named); future sheriff David W. Alexander; co-owner of Rancho La Puente, John Rowland; brothers Isaac and Evan Callahan; Michael White; and a few others. The Chino ranch had been granted in 1841 to Antonio María Lugo, a prominent Californio and owner of the Rancho San Antonio (now Bell Gardens and surrounding areas), but Lugo turned the ranch over to his son-in-law, Pennsylvania native Isaac (Don Julián) Williams. According to Wilson, who came to Los Angeles in 1841 with a party of migrants, travelers and others often known as the Rowland and Workman Expedition, Williams assured the Americans and Europeans who came to his ranch that he had plenty of ammunition. When, however, these men arrived, Williams told them that Californios had just left having seized his weapons and ammunition. Wilson counseled his compatriots that they leave Chino and make their way to other refuges in the mountains or back in Los Angeles. As he expressed it,

the majority of them being new in the county had a very contemptible opinion of the Californians' courage and fighting qualities, and seemed to be of the erroneous opinion that a few shots would suffice to scare away any number of them that should come to attack us . . . I remarked that I hoped that they had not underrated the natives.

That evening, a force of what Wilson believed to be eighty to 100 men surrounded Williams' residence. Included in the contingent were several of Williams' Lugo brothers-in-law. One American, Isaac Callahan, volunteered to venture out and determine the size and strength of the group and was shot and wounded in the arm. After Wilson offered the opinion that a night-time break was a desirable option, he was shouted down.

The next day, the 27th, the Californios wasted no time in setting fire to the roof, which, in the typical fashion on the day, was made of brush coated with asphaltum (or brea, hence the use of Brea Canyon and the La Brea tar pits for this material to keep out the elements.) As the house burned, Cerbúlo Varela, commander of the besieging force, approached and quickly arranged a surrender, organizing a march to Los Angeles. A mile in to the movement west toward town, the group was halted by a disturbance at the rear, where, Wilson stated, there was an effort by some Californios to line up and execute the Americans. Varela quickly placed himself in the middle of the scene and ordered that nothing be done to the prisoners. According to Wilson, Varela's actions "made him worthy of our admiration and respect." In later years, Varela "became very much dissipated and really a vagabond," and, whenever he was arrested for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, Americans would band together to pay his fines and keep him from jail in gratitude for his actions at Chino.

Wilson then went on to state that "we all arrived that evening [September 27] on the Mesa south of town, now known as Boyle Heights, without any further occurrence, except the suffering and groans of my poor wounded men." Indeed, in the few exchanges of gunfire at the siege in Chino, Carlos Ballesteros, whom Wilson described as "among my best friends" was killed while charging the house (this was perhaps why some of the Californios wanted to execute the American and European prisoners.) As to those captured, four men were injured, two badly according to Wilson.

More notably, Wilson continued, "In 'Boyle Heights' we were all placed in a small adobe room." Unfortunately, he did not identify where this structure was. At the time, there were two families who owned what was then known as Paredon Blanco (or White Bluff, because of the bluff overlooking the Los Angeles River), these being the López and Rubio families. At any rate, a priest entered the room and volunteered to take confession, which led some of the prisoners to believe they were to be executed. The father, however, assured them that he was only there to minister to anyone's spiritual needs.

Soon, General José María Flores, commander of the general revolt against the Americans, came to the building and asked Wilson to take a letter to Captain Gillespie and warning the impetuous officer that an attack was imminent and would be devastating to the Americans. Instead, Flores offered to allow Gillespie to surrender, march his forces to San Pedro and take ship away from the area. He also induced Wilson to include in the letter his own assessment of the situation, which Wilson stated was to the advantage of the Californios. Gillespie immediately accepted Flores' terms, surrendered his arms, and marched the next day to San Pedro.

As for the prisoners, continued Wilson, "myself and associated were all marched into town" and held at a building on Main Street. Flores offered to release the men if they agreed to be peaceable and not take up arms against the Californios, but Wilson would not agree to the provision that this condition exist until the war between the United States and Mexico was over. Consequently, the men were held longer and Wilson claimed that Flores and Englishman Henry Dalton, who were brothers-in-law, concocted a plan to send the prisoners to Mexico. As a result, William Workman, co-owner of Rancho La Puente with Rowland, worked with Californios such as Ignacio Palomares, co-owner of Rancho San José, north of Chino in what is now the Pomona area, to attack Flores' headquarters and seized the general. Wilson went on that "Workman rushed into our prison bringing us the glad tidings that Flores was a prisoner, and in irons and his and Dalton's plot broken." Workman's nephew, William Henry, would, almost thirty years later in 1875, subdivide Paredon Blanco which he inherited through his wife from Andrew A. Boyle and create the community of Boyle Heights.

Palomares assumed command of the Californio forces, according to Wilson, and took the prisoners to Mission San Gabriel. An arrangement was made with Flores, who was allowed to resume his generalship, provided that Wilson and his compatriots were to be treated as prisoners of war and kept in the area. They were then taken back to the same structure in Los Angeles, where they'd been held, and kept there "with more kindness and allowed greater liberty. In early November, as Commodore Stockton prepared to recapture Los Angeles, the prisoners were taken to the Rancho Los Cerritos in today's Long Beach and which was owned by prominent merchant Jonathan Temple. Stockton, however, was deceived into thinking that the defending Californio force was much larger than it was as he prepared to land at San Pedro and he sailed to San Diego to get a larger invading force together.

The prisoners were again moved back to their Los Angeles prison and remained there until early January 1847 when Stockton's American force, augmented by a contingent led by General Stephen W. Kearney, marched by land from San Diego to Los Angeles. Andrés Pico, brother of California's recently-departed governor, Pío, and hero of a Californio victory against Kearney near San Diego, informed the prisoners that they were being released because of the impending battle, which took place over two days on January 8th and 9th. Wilson observed the battle of the 8th, which took place on the west bank of the San Gabriel River, now the Rio Hondo, from atop the Puente Hills between what is now Whittier and Hacienda Heights. It has been suggested that, after the Battle of La Mesa, on the 9th, the retreating Californios stopped at Paredon Blanco, while other sources suggest that the defeated soldiers went up the Arroyo Seco through modern Highland Park and into what became Pasadena before dispersing.

On the 10th, the Americans entered Los Angeles and, three days after that, Andrés Pico and John C. Frémont signed a treaty of surrender at Cahuenga Pass that effectively ended the Mexican-American War in California. Boyle Heights had a small, but significant, role in the events of that war in the region.

Benjamin D. Wilson's account, from an 1877 interview, was published by Powell Publishing Company of Los Angeles in 1929 as an appendix in the book Pathfinders by Robert G. Cleland. There is also some coverage of the Chino prisoners in Neal Harlow's California Conquered, published by the University of California Press in 1989.

The above photographs, taken in June 2010, show the site of the Rancho Santa Ana del Chino adobe house, now the site of Boys Republic, a private, non-sectarian school and treatment community for troubled youth in Chino Hills, and the California State Historic Landmark plaque for the the adobe, with the plaque (mentioning the Battle of Chino) located at a fire department training center adjacent to Boys Republic.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Workman Family Papers

2010-11-10T12:43:00.000-08:00

The Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University, holds the Workman Family Papers, an archival collection of importance to all persons interested in the history of Boyle Heights. William H. Workman was the chief developer of Boyle Heights in the late nineteenth century, and the records of his development figure prominently in the collection. Other Workmans important in the holdings include William H. Workman’s wife, Maria E. (1847-1933); their daughter Mary Julia Workman (1871-1964), a major Roman Catholic social activist in Los Angeles; her sister-in-law, Margaret K. Workman (1902-1987), prominent Democrat and social work leader; and her son, Judge David A. Workman. If you wish to learn more about the Workman Family Papers, consult the on-line guide to the collection:

William H. Hannon Library

Post contributed by William C. Stalls, Manuscripts Curator, Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University

Photo Courtesy of Department of Archives and Special Collections
William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University

Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The Robert and Carlota Wirsching House

2010-04-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

Still standing at 539 Brittania Street, although stuccoed and significantly altered, the Robert and Carlota Wirsching House is one of the older houses of Boyle Heights that dates to the late 19th-century. Like many houses, the Queen Anne-style structure has an interesting story relating to its original owners.

Carlota Valencia was born on 29 December 1851 on the Rancho Los Feliz in today's Glendale area. Her mother was a member of the Feliz family, which received the rancho as one of the first Spanish land grants back in 1784. In 1870, she was living in Los Angeles with a brother, Ramon, who was a tin smith. A decade later, she was residing on Aliso Street in the home of saloon keeper Norbert Des Autels. Because she was unusually well educated for Latina women of the period, Carlota was a longtime teacher in the town's schools. Until, that is, she met the man who became her husband.

Robert E. Wirsching was from the duchy of Saxe-Meiningen in Germany, where he was born on 15 February 1846. At the age of six, perhaps due to the turmoil of revolutionary politics in Europe, his family migrated to the United States and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. Wirsching's father, Martin, was a painter, a trade that Robert took up in his teens, although he also developed an interest in photography. In 1870, young Wirsching was in nearby Milford, and worked as a painter for carriage maker Samuel Beecher.

Within a few years, however, as Los Angeles was at the peak of its first growth boom, Wirsching relocated to the growing town, arriving in 1875. He went to work for a carriage maker before forming a partnership with Englishman Samuel Rees in business on Los Angeles Street that did blacksmith work and wagon making before branching out into the manufacture of agricultural implements. The company was a great success, particularly as the Los Angeles area underwent an enormous period of growth after the late 1880s.

Rees, in fact, was an early investor in land at Brooklyn Heights and Boyle Heights and built his home at 632 Brittania, just a block or so from Wirsching. Rees served on the Los Angeles City Council in 1891 and 1892 and was instrumental in persuading the council to accept Hollenbeck Park into the developing city parks system.

As for Wirsching, he, too, went into politics and was Rees' predecessor as the councilman for the Ninth Ward during 1889-90. He followed this with terms on the fire (1893-94) and police (1895-96) commissions, before securing election as Supervisor for the second district in the county, serving in this office from 1896 to 1900. He did intend to seek reelection, but a falling-out with the Republican Party leadership led to the withdrawal of his nomination. Later, however, Wirsching was appointed to the Board of Public Utilities, which oversaw what is now the Department of Water and Power. He remained a member of the board until his death in 1921.

Robert and Carlota Wirsching were married in July 1880 and had four children: Rose, Robert, Carl and Ernest. The family lived at their Boyle Heights home until sometime in the 1910s when they relocated to a residence on West 27th Street near Grand Avenue in South Los Angeles. Mrs. Wirsching remained in that home until the 1930s and died at ninety years of age in early 1942.

The photos of the Wirsching house are from the collection of the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum, City of Industry. The portrait of Robert Wirsching comes from James M. Guinn's Los Angeles and Its Environs (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1915), Volume II, page 267.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager
Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The Joseph M. Workman House

2010-03-16T11:09:00.000-07:00

As has been stated previously on this blog, Boyle Heights was developed in the 1870s and afterward with an eye to attracting well-to-do residents of Los Angeles. Boyle Avenue, in particular, had a number of large, well-appointed "Victorian" houses built among it, many of which survive. In some cases, some of the early houses became part of institutions, such as the senior homes for Jewish and Japanese Angelenos, and the older structures once on the properties were razed. This was the case with the Joseph M. Workman House, which once stood at 451 (originally 235) South Boyle.

Joseph Workman was a first cousin of Boyle Heights founder William H. Workman. He was born José Manuel Workman in Taos, New Mexico, about 1832 to British native William Workman and Taos-born Nicolasa Urioste. When Joseph was nine years old, his family hastily left New Mexico for Los Angeles because his father was accused of being in complicity with the Republic of Texas and its aims to annex, by force, significant portions of New Mexico. Using the Old Spanish (which was neither) Trail, the family arrived in Los Angeles at the end of 1841. The following year, the Workmans settled on the Rancho La Puente, in the eastern San Gabriel Valley twenty miles from Los Angeles.

Joseph, however, was sent back to the eastern United States to go to school and, by 1847, resided in Baltimore with his father's sister. A few years later, he was in Boonville, Missouri, staying with his father's brother, David Workman, and his cousins, including William H. When the David Workman family migrated by wagon to California in 1854 to live with William Workman, Joseph traveled with them and was reunited with his family for the first time in well over a decade.

Then in his early twenties, Joseph was sent to the southern San Joaquin Valley to help manage a ranch used by his father and brother-in-law, F. P. F. Temple, when cattle were sent to the gold fields from Los Angeles County. He remained there for some fifteen years and married Josephine M. Belt, a Stockton native. In 1870, he returned to Rancho La Puente and was given 800 acres by his father, on which Joseph raised sheep and farmed. According to an 1889 biographical sketch, "in 1881, desiring better advantages than the country offered for educating their children, Mr. and Mrs. Workman decided to lease their ranch and remove to the city. Buying a large lot, 162 x 300 feet, on Boyle avenue (Boyle Heights), they erected their present fine residence."

The lot was purchased from Joseph's cousin, William H. Workman and his wife Maria Boyle, for $800 and, by January 1882, Joseph hired the architectural firm of Kysor and Morgan to build "a neat two-story residence." Ezra Kysor, the first trained architect to practice in Los Angeles, was well-known for his designs of the Pico House hotel, St. Vibiana's Cathedral, and the Boyle Heights home of William H. Perry, now at the Heritage Square Museum complex in Highland Park. Kysor also designed a remodel of the home of Joseph's father, now at the Homestead Museum in City of Industry. By fall 1882, contractors McAulay and Chisholm were building the home, the external dimensions of which were 36x32, meaning the home was somewhere in the 2,200 square feet range. The cost of the house was $4,000, a considerable sum for the time. The 1889 Illustrated History of Los Angeles County referred to the home as "one of the most picturesque and beautiful homes in this part of the State."

Joseph and his family lived in the structure for about a decade or so. There was a significant real estate boom in the late 1880s, followed by a bust. The national economy went into depression after 1893. Meanwhile, Joseph took out loans with a Los Angeles bank and was unable to repay them. In 1895, foreclosure proceedings were initiated and that year the family left the Boyle Heights house. Joseph lived in several locations in the city before passing away in March 1901 at the home of a daughter in south Los Angeles. He did, however, return to Boyle Heights in that he was interred at Evergreen Cemetery.

Concerning the house, it is not known when it was torn down. The property is now the International Institute of Los Angeles, which was founded by the YWCA and which has been on the site since the 1920s.

Now, if we can only figure out whether that dog on the sidewalk in front of the house actually stayed still for the photograph because it was alive or stuffed!

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager
Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The William H. Workman House

2010-02-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

Last month's post concerned the 1858 brick home of Andrew Boyle, namesake of Boyle Heights. After Boyle's death in 1871, the house passed on to his daughter, Maria (pronounced Mariah) and her husband, William Henry Workman. Four years later, Workman subdivided much of the Boyle property and created the community of Boyle Heights.

As the Workman family grew to include seven children, a new house was built very close to the older Boyle residence and was completed in 1887. This Queen Anne Victorian was part of the very popular style that was sweeping the United States. The home, as can be seen in the photograph, was a large one with the parlor, formal dining room, substantial second-floor bedrooms and other features typically found in the Queen Anne style house. A unique feature was that the wood frame wing which the Workmans added to the older Boyle House was removed from the latter and reattached to the former! It can be seen at the back of the house on the right.

It turned out that, at the time the house was built, times were very good for Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, and for the Workmans. The completion of a direct transcontinental railroad line to the city in 1885 opened the floodgates of immigration. Tens of thousands of new residents, mainly from the Midwest and the East, poured into the city. Boyle Heights, with its proximity to downtown and views, proved to be a desirable place for the well-to-do to live. Boyle Avenue and other neighborhood streets were soon filled with large "Victorian" homes, some of which are still standing. In the case of the Workman residence, it remained in existence a relatively short time--about forty years or so.

When the Workman family did what many wealthier families did by the 1920s and move to the Westside in newer neighborhoods like Hancock Park or Beverly Hills, their Boyle Heights property was sold to be part of the Jewish Home for the Aging. Unlike the Boyle house which was kept, the Workman home was torn down. Today, the site is part of the Keiro Senior HealthCare retirement facility for Japanese-Americans (a Los Angeles Times article about Boyle Heights and the Keiro facility, with brief mention of Andrew Boyle just appeared on Monday, 22 February—the day this post was drafted!) (See LA Times article here)The address for the Workman home was 357 South Boyle Avenue, at the northwest corner of the intersection of that thoroughfare with Fourth Street. The image below is a lithograph of the "Vineyard, Orange Orchard and Park of W. H. Workman, Boyle Heights" with an inset of the Boyle house that appeared in the History of Los Angeles County California, originally published by Thompson and West in 1880.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager
Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Historic Photos of Boyle Heights: The Andrew Boyle House

2010-01-20T15:01:00.000-08:00

Long before there was a Boyle Heights, the area was occupied by the Lopez and Rubio families who had adobe houses there. Perhaps someone descended from those families has photographs and the history of those important early settlers and their homes to share on this blog.

Meantime, in 1858, Irish native Andrew Boyle, recently arrived in Los Angeles from San Francisco, purchased land in the "flats" along the east bank of the Los Angeles River and up on the bluffs above. He then constructed a brick residence (see the photo below), in which he lived for the remaining thirteen years of his life. Boyle was a shoe merchant but also manufactured wine from grapevines long established on the land which he sold under the label of Paredon

Boyle's home was remodeled sometime around 1867 (see the drawing below by Harriet Morton Holmes for the 1935 book The City That Grew by Boyle Workman) to accomodate his daughter and her new husband, saddler William Henry Workman. This wood frame addition in the Gothic Revival style was built to the south side (left side of the drawing) of the brick home and was used by the couple until Andrew Boyle died in 1871, leaving the house and land to his daughter and son-in-law. William and Maria Workman occupied the home for another fifteen or so years, but as their family grew, the Boyle house became too small.

To the south, then, about 1885 a Queen Anne-style house was constructed and the Gothic Revival portion of the Boyle house was moved and incorporated into the new home. More about the 1880s home in the next post, but the Boyle house continued to be used by the Workman family over the years. In 1910, William H. Workman, Jr., who was active in real estate and banking, dramatically remodeled the old Boyle house (see below), including the addition of a second floor and exterior renovations that turned the structure into an Italianate villa.

By the 1920s, however, William H. Workman, Sr. had died and his children and widow moved to the west side of Los Angeles. The Boyle house was sold to the Jewish Home for the Aging, which owned this portion of the Boyle/Workman estate until 1974. Five acres, including the Boyle house, were then sold to the Keiro Senior HealthCare organization, which has now served the Japanese-American community on the site for over thirty years.

Due, it was reported, to earthquake damage from the 1994 Northridge shaker, the Boyle House, long used as office space, was razed shortly afterward. The care facility, however, bears the same address the house once had: 325 South Boyle Avenue.

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Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager

Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Isaias W. Hellman: A Partner in the Founding of Boyle Heights

2009-12-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

Hanukkah begins on December 12, so this seems an appropriate time for this post, because the history of Jewish people in Boyle Heights is an essential part of the community's legacy, especially in the years between the First World War and just after World War II. Few people have known, however, that a Jewish man was one of the three founders of Boyle Heights back in 1875.

He was Isaias W. Hellman, whose involvement in finance and business was of great influence in California and the Pacific Coast. This remarkable man was born in 1842 in Reckendorf, Bavaria and emigrated at the age of 17 with a brother to Los Angeles, where two cousins had a store. After working in that business for six years, Hellman opened his own store in 1865. As successful as he was as a merchant, it was a small safe that he kept in the storeroom that directed his future. Hellman began to offer Los Angeles residents the opportunity to store their gold and valuables free of charge. This led to his establishing lines of credit with these depositors while he made use of the money--essetially, Hellman was a banker without a bank.

In 1868, he decided, as Los Angeles was undergoing its first development and growth spurt, to make banking a formal proposition. Two of his customers, William Workman (uncle of Boyle Heights' founder) and F. P. F. Temple, San Gabriel Valley ranchers and farmers, joined the enterprise of Hellman, Temple and Company, the second bank in Los Angeles. This bank lasted less than three years, however, because of fundamental managing differences between Hellman and Temple. Hellman, in fact, reputedly said that Temple's only qualifications in a borrower was that "he must be poor!" After dissolving the partnership, Hellman joined ex-Governor John G. Downey in forming Farmers and Merchants Bank, which became a powerful financial institution in Los Angeles and survived until 1956.

Along the way, Hellman also delved deeply into real estate, including his investment in land that became part of Boyle Heights. The detail (to zoom in, click on the map) above from a circa 1870 map shows some of Hellman's lands (see Block 71) before Boyle Heights was created about five years later.

Hellman's power and influence in banking and real estate expanded during boom times and he survived busts with careful management and substantial cash reserves. One notable involvement was his avid support for the creation of the University of Southern California, which was then affiliated with the Methodist Church. He also was involved in many Jewish charities and was a supporter of the University of California.

In 1890, he became the majority owner of San Francisco's struggling Nevada Bank and moved to that city to revive its fortunes and further develop his own. Three years later, he created the Union Trust Company to provide mortgages, rent collection and general investment services. Later, Hellman was a shareholder in streetcar lines in San Francisco and Los Angeles, including the latter's Pacific Electric Railway. In 1905, Hellman's Nevada National Bank merged with Wells Fargo and made him the most powerful banker in California and the West Coast.

Still, as a Jew, Hellman had to tread a fine line in terms of his public persona as anti-Semitism was still very strong at the time. In 1920, Hellman, aged 77, died of pneumonia in San Francisco, having lived from humble beginnings in a German village through sixty years in California that saw him amass a fortune of between $10 and $20 million.

As a community that has been instrumental for immigrants, Boyle Heights should be known, among many things, for having a founder that exemplifies the migrant's experience.

Note: The above map was reproduced in the book, Maps of Los Angeles by W. W. Robinson (published by Dawson's Bookshop in 1966.) A recent biography of Hellman, Towers of Gold, by his great-great-granddaughter, Frances Dinkelspiel, was published by St. Martin's Press in 2008.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

John Lazzarevitch: A Partner in the Founding of Boyle Heights

2009-10-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

In the 8 April 1875 edition of the Los Angeles Evening Express, a small article, seen to the left, announced the subdivision of Boyle Heights by founder William H. Workman and his two partners, Isaias W. Hellman (see next month's post on him) and John Lazzarevitch. This latter, in fact, had a direct connection to the Lopez family, the settlers from the 1830s of Paredon Blanco, the area that became Boyle Heights.

Lazzarevitch was born in about 1830 in Dalmatia, along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, in what was then Austria, later Yugoslavia and now the Republic of Croatia. It is not known when he came to the United States or to Los Angeles, although he was living in the town by 1866. Four years later, he was a grocer in town and had two sons, John and Stephen by his late wife Angelica Grivich.

An employee for a time in the Lazzarevitch store was Juan Jesus Lopez, son of Geronimo and grandson of Esteban, who built a Paredon Blanco adobe as early as 1837. Juan Jesus who later was well-known as foreman of the massive Rancho El Tejon in Kern County, worked in the store in 1867 and this may be how John Lazzarevitch came to know Maria Juana (Juanita) Lopez, a cousin of Juan Jesus.

Juanita was the daughter of Jose Francisco "Chico" Lopez and María del Rosario Ramona Almenárez and was almost fifteen years Lazzarevitch's junior, being born in February 1844. At age sixteen she married William Crossman Warren, who was born about 1836 on a farm in southwestern Michigan and may have lived in Wisconsin before migrating to California. In the 1860 census, taken in June, Warren was the deputy of City Marshal Thomas Trafford and was living with Trafford. Then, came his December marriage to Juanita Lopez. The couple had three daughters, born between 1865 and 1870. The eldest, Ida, was the mother of famed Los Angeles County Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz, who served in the office from the 1930s until the late 1950s.

In 1870, Warren was the City Marshal of the town but a dispute emerged between him and one of his deputies, Joseph F. Dye, over a reward that the latter claimed was stolen by the former. During the argument in the street in broad daylight, Warren pulled out a gun and fired first, leading Dye to respond in kind. Warren was killed, being the only Marshal or Police Chief ever to die in the line of duty, and Dye tried and acquitted on murder charges based on self-defense. Dye later went on to other acts of violence and was, in 1891, gunned down in, of course, the street in Los Angeles.

Juanita Lopez, a little more than a year after her husband's death, married Lazzarevitch in January 1872 and, by 1880 when the couple lived on Aliso Street, they had three children, William, Anne, and Rosa, born between 1873 and 1879 with only the son appearing to have lived to adulthood, while also raising the Warren girls and Lazzarevitch's sons from his first marriage. Two households up on the 1880 census was Juanita's sister and brother-in-law, Sacramenta and George Cummings (who, like Lazzarevitch, was born in the Austrian Empire), the latter of whom built the Cummings Block, which still stands at the northwest corner of Boyle Avenue and First Street.

As the daughter of Chico Lopez, Juanita had an interest in the Paredon Blanco land and this must be how Lazzarevitch came to be a partner in the Boyle Heights subdivision. It is not known at this time how involved Lazzarevitch was in the management of the community, it seeming that Workman and Hellman were more directly involved. Lazzarevitch appears to have lived quietly and seems to have died either in the 1890s or the 1900s In the 1900 census, Juanita was living with her daughter, Ella Warren Bacigalupi at her home on 103 S. Boyle Avenue in Boyle Heights, but was not listed as a widow although her husband was not there or found anywhere in Los Angeles listings. Also living in the household, incidentally, was 17-year old Eugene Biscailuz, then a stationery store salesman and still some years away from joining the Sheriff's Department. In 1910, Juanita was still with the Bacigalupi family, who had moved to what is now the Koreatown area of Los Angeles near Pico Boulevard and Normandie Avenue. Ten years later, she was with her older daughter, Ida Hunter, in the same general area and appears to have lived with her until Juanita's death in 1930.

John Lazzarevitch may have been something of a silent partner in the Boyle Heights subdivision, but his connections to the Lopez family, previous settlers of Paredon Blanco, are also an interesting part of the community's early history.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

William Henry Workman: Founder of Boyle Heights

2009-09-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

As Paredon Blanco, the area that became Boyle Heights, passed from ownership by the Lopez and Rubio families to Irish immigrant Andrew Boyle, the change to the landscape was minimal. Boyle tended the vineyards that had been there before him and built a brick house, but little changed until Los Angeles began to experience its first growth boom in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In comparison to later booms, this was small, but it was a hint of things to come. One of those involved in developing the town in those years was Boyle's son-in-law, William Henry Workman.

Workman was born in 1839 in New Franklin, Missouri to David Workman and Nancy Hook. His mother was from Virginia and his father from northern England. David Workman was a migrant to America in 1817 and settled in the earlier town of Franklin (washed out by floods later, which is why there is a "New Franklin") two years later. At this time, Missouri was the end of the United States and was a year away from statehood. David Workman was a saddler by trade and had a partnership and then went solo, finding plenty of work when Franklin became the original trailhead for the famous Santa Fe Trail, which opened in 1821 and led into New Mexico.

David married Mary Hook in 1825, but upon her death in childbirth, he married his widow's sister, Nancy. The two had three sons: Thomas (1832-1863), Elijah (1835-1906), and William Henry. The family remained in Missouri for over thirty years, but David's travels on trading expeditions took him to Mexico and Gold Rush California. He opened a store in Sacramento in 1852, but a fire destroyed 7/8ths of the town, including his new business. Dejected, David ventured south to visit his brother, William Workman, owner of Rancho La Puente in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. William convinced David to pull up stakes and bring his family to live with him at La Puente. Returning home, David gathered his family and they joined a wagon train to California, leaving in April 1854. The photo shown here is of William Henry just before they left Missouri.

For a little over a year, the Workman brothers were reunited, but, in late June 1855, David was killed in an accident while taking a herd of cattle north to the gold fields. His widow and three sons moved into Los Angeles and young William Henry worked with local newspapers and hauled freight by wagon until he joined his brother, Elijah, in a saddlery they ran together, off and on, for about twenty years. Elijah also was a long-time resident of Boyle Heights, living there from the 1880s until his death.

In 1867, William Henry married Maria Boyle and they lived on Andrew Boyle's ranch and raised six children. William Henry also became involved in local politics, serving on the Los Angeles School Board and City Council throughout the 1860s and 1870s. In 1872, he went to Baltimore as an alternate delegate to the Democratic Party national convention. Three years later, he made his only attempt at statewide office, losing in a bid for a seat in the California Assembly.

Later, William Henry won election as the mayor of Los Angeles, serving one two-year term in 1887 and 1888, which happened to be the peak of the well-known "Boom of the Eighties." Among the major projects carried out during his administration was the completion of a new city hall, the creation of a new city charter, and reform of the health department. He also served three terms as Los Angeles City Treasurer from 1901-1907, during which he was involved in the financing of bonds for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the project that allowed the city to grow far beyond the limits imposed by the local water supply. In the 1890s, Workman also served on the Parks Commission and was involved in developing Lafayette (Westlake) Park, Eastlake (Lincoln) Park, and others in the city.

His development of Boyle Heights in 1875 occurred at the peak of Los Angeles' frenzied first boom, which went bust when the bank co-owned by his uncle, William, collapsed in 1876 after the state's economy went sour amidst a national depression. For several years, the community languished along with the economy, but, in the 1880s, and especially during his mayoral stint, new life was breathed into Boyle Heights. Over the years, William Henry continued to run his real estate business, largely centered around Boyle Heights and was active until his death in 1918 at the age of 79.

By then, the community was changing. Newer communities and subdivisions on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley were drawing people away from Boyle Heights, including William Henry's widow and children, and immigrants and working-class families found the neighborhood to be affordable, close to jobs and, in the case of blacks and Latinos, one of only a few places they were allowed to live because of residential segregation.

There is actually one place where Workman family members "reside" today in Boyle Heights and that is Evergreen Cemetery, where William Henry and many of his family members are interred in a family plot marked by a large headstone.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri, Collections Manager, Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Andrew A. Boyle, Namesake of Boyle Heights: An Immigrant's Story

2009-08-26T17:35:00.001-07:00

The naming of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights in 1875 by William Henry Workman and his partners, Isaias W. Hellman and John Lazzarovitch, was in honor of Workman's father-in-law, Andrew A. Boyle, whose land was the basis for the community. Boyle's life was not particularly long, only fifty-two years, but he had a wide range experiences and adventures that took him from Ireland to Texas and, finally, to Los Angeles. If we think of the common thread of migration and immigration that links so many of us in the Los Angeles area, Boyle's immigrant story is certainly a notable example.

Boyle (pictured above) was born 29 September 1818 in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, Ireland to Hugh Boyle and Maria Kelly. He attended school in Galway, south of his hometown, but his mother's death led his father to migrate to America to make a living, while the eight Boyle children remained behind. In 1832, all of the children sailed to the United States to find their father, which they were not successful in doing, so they divided. In Andrew's case, he stayed in New York two years working as a lithographic map colorist. When a group of Irish colonists migrated to Texas in 1834, Boyle joined them, settling in the Mexican territory at a place called, naturally, San Patricio, on the Nueces River between San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

When the revolution started by Americans broke out, Boyle joined, in January 1836, the Texas Army. His unit was sent to Goliad, southeast of San Antonio, where that Spring, not long after the fall of the Alamo, it surrendered after an engagement with the Mexicans. Despite signed guarantees of their safety, over 400 Americans were shot execution-style, except for Boyle, whose life was spared because his sister and brother had housed a Mexican Army officer and his men at their San Patricio home during the conflict.

Soon after, Boyle left Texas for New Orleans. For a time, he went on trading expeditions to Mexico and also owned a store near Shreveport. Somehow reunited with his father, Boyle then returned to open a store in New Orleans. On 31 January 1846, he married Elizabeth Christie, a native of British Guyana in South America. There were two children, John, who died at eighteen months, and Maria Elizabeth, born in 1847.

Then, in the fall of 1849, Boyle, with 20,000 pesos to take to the eastern states, was attempting to board a steamer from a smaller vessel. The paddlewheel of the former caused the latter to capsize and Boyle lost his fortune and nearly his life. On hearing rumors that her husband had drowned, 23-year old Elizabeth Christie contracted brain fever and died on 20 October. After a short time, however, a boot and shoe manufacturer from Boston named Dunbar offered to give Boyle a stock of goods to take to San Francisco and open a wholesale store there.

Leaving his young daughter behind with his wife's family, Boyle took ship to California via Nicaragua. His journal of this exciting adventure is in the collection of the Homestead Museum, though it ends shortly before his arrival in San Francisco. Within two months of arriving, a large fire destroyed Boyle's consignment and another shipment was sent from Boston. Later, Dunbar's son-in-law, Hobart, joined Boyle in the business. Finally, in 1856, Boyle and his daughter were reunited after five years of separation.

In 1858, Boyle relocated to Los Angeles and, according to a 1919 account by his daughter, paid $4,000 to Jose Rubio for 22 acres, half on the Paredon Blanco or bluffs above and half in the flats adjacent to the Los Angeles River. It has also been said, however, that Boyle bought this property from the widow of Esteban Lopez. In any case, the vineyard had been planted in the mid-1830s to grapevines and the first grape crop Boyle harvested paid for the purchase of the property. He settled into an existing adobe house (built either by the Lopez or Rubio families), dug a well, added a windmill, and stocked about 75 head of cattle and horses. In 1859, Boyle bought 20 acres south of today's Fourth Street and planted grapes, oranges, walnuts, lemons, peaches and figs. Between 1860 and 1864, he built a brick house, the first east of the river within the city and included a wine cellar, because he'd just started making his own wine since under the name of Paredon Blanco.

Meantime, Boyle also opened a shoe and boot store in addition to his farming enterprises. In 1866, he was elected to the Common (City) Council and served three one-year terms. At the end of the third term, however, in November 1870 he developed liver trouble. After dictating his reminiscences of the Texas Revolution to the Los Angeles Daily News, Boyle's condition worsened and he died on 9 February 1871. His account of his experiences in Texas were published four months later.

To the Los Angeles Star, Boyle was "remarkable for his integrity and conscientious discharge of the office [of council member]--being conspicuous for his defence [sic] of the rights of the people, and his opposition to everything that was not for the best interests of the community." To the News, though, he was "impusive in disposition, [and] he made many warm friends and also did not fail to secure enemies." An 1889 history of Los Angeles County included a biographical sketch of Boyle and in it was "the writer of these lines has only pleasant memories of his visits to the Boyle mansion . . . Mr. Boyle was of a very genial, social nature . . ." When his only child, Maria, who married William Henry Workman in 1867, inherited Boyle's property, her husband was sure to honor his father-in-law when the community of Boyle Heights was developed four years after Boyle's death.

Almost 135 years later, few people in the neighborhood or in Los Angeles generally know anything about the namesake of this historic community.

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri Collections Manager Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Origenes: The Founding of Boyle Heights

2009-07-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

The neighborhood of Boyle Heights will mark its 135th anniversary in Spring 2010 with the founding of the community in Spring 1875 by William Henry Workman and his associates in honor of Workman's father-in-law, Andrew Boyle. There'll be more on this blog about the founders of Boyle Heights in coming weeks, but this entry focuses on newspaper documentation about the origins of the subdivision.

The April 8, 1875 edition of the Los Angeles Evening Express announced the formation of the community in a short article:

"Boyle Heights" is the very choice name given by the proprietors to the new addition to our city just laid out across the river, this side of Wm. H. Workman's place. There was seventy acres in the tract. They have been divided up into fine, large building lots, and will be put in the market on the installment plan, as soon as water has been introduced in pipes through the grounds. The pipe is now being made as rapidly as possible at the works of the Los Angeles Water Company. This tract occupies a very inviting and commanding position, with a splendid view of the entire valley, and sufficiently adjacent to the center of the city to make it valuable for residences. The promoters of the subdivision are Messrs. W. H. Workman, I. W. Hellman, and J. Lazzarovitch.

This was followed a little less than a month later by a short note in the Los Angeles Herald of May 4 that "in a short time the City Water Company will have their pipes laid to Boyle Heights, which Wm. H. Workman and others have liad out in city lots."

Another month or so brought a further update from the Express, in its June 12 edition:

Everything conspires to render the Boyle Heights addition to the city across the river one of the most desirable residence tracts yet placed upon the Los Angeles market. The Messrs. Workman & Co. have laid out a splendid series of streets, and the water will be introduyced in pipes from the City Walter Works to every part of the tract. We learn the pipe-laying will be commenced next week. The new street railroad franchise, granted by the Council at their last session, is in the hands of enterprising and capable men; and no time will be lost in connecting the tract by rail with the heart of the city. When the proprietors of Boyle Heights are ready to place their lots in market, we believe they will meet with a warm acceptance from the public.

The problem was that the public was soon confronted with crisis. Not unlike recent events in our time, 1875 was a year in which a growth boom in Los Angeles reached its pinnacle and also crashed spectacularly back to earth. Local speculation in real estate, in particular, was rampant and statewide a stock bubble centered in the silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada [near today's Reno] burst, causing the Bank of California, based in San Francisco and the state's largest bank, to collapse.

On August 24, when the thermometer reached a scorching 108 degrees, the telegraph relayed the news of the economic disaster to Los Angeles, precipitating a panic that drove depositors to the town's two commercial banks: Farmers and Merchants, run by Workman's Boyle Heights partner, Isaias W. Hellman and Temple and Workman, co-owned by Workman's uncle and namesake, William Workman. To stymie the demands of depositors, the banks suspended business and sought to regroup.

Farmers and Merchants, ably managed and well capitalized, survived and went on to flourish for decades to come. Temple and Workman, a private bank that was poorly managed and awash in bad mortgages and risky investments (hmmmm . . . sound familiar?), was unable to survive after a loan from San Francisco capitalist and Virginia City mining magnate Elias J. "Lucky" Baldwin was secured.

The failure of Temple and Workman worsened the economic malaise and, for the only time in its history, the population of Los Angeles declined. Like other mid-1870s boom towns, such as Pomona and Artesia, Boyle Heights struggled during these lean years, only to emerge with new life in the famous Boom of the Eighties, which brought another period of intense growth after a direct transcontinental railroad link to Los Angeles was finished in 1885. William H. Workman happened to be mayor of the city during the peak boom years of 1887 and 1888 and profited handsomely from the growth of Boyle Heights, even though this boom also crashed in a dramatic and emphatic fashion.

Still, for a couple of decades in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, Boyle Heights was, in the words of the one of the articles quoted above, "one of the most desirable residnece tracts" in Los Angeles. While conditions have certainly changed, Boyle Heights continues to be a dynamic and vibrant part of the city.

The map above is from 1877 and is a detail of the area in and around Boyle Heights. The streets laid out at an angle are those of the tract and include Wabash, Brooklyn (now César Chavez), Louisiana (4th Street), Stevenson (Whittier Boulevard), and Hollenbeck (Olympic Boulevard). The double line to the left is the Los Angeles River and the straight single line at the right and at the bottom are city limits (Indiana Avenue being the easterly limit today.) The dashed line at the top is the road to San Gabriel.

In coming weeks, look for entries concerning neighborhood namesake Andrew Boyle and founders William H. Workman, Isaias W. Hellman, and John Lazzarovitch as the heritage of early Boyle Heights is explored in anticipation of its 135th anniversary next Spring!

Contribution by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Collections Manager
Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum

Welcome!

2009-07-06T22:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the inaugural post of the Boyle Heights History Blog sponsored by the Boyle Heights Historical Society. Please join us in the exploration, celebration and preservation of the rich and vibrant history of this wonderful community.