Chronicles of Old Los Angeles

by James Roman

  At the end of his life, the severe, implacable Collis P. Huntington reminisced, “I have never failed to do anything I set out to do.” Buried in a grand mausoleum in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery, he is also remembered as a fierce Abolitionist and a generous philanthropist who served on the Board of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for much of his life. He encouraged his nephew Henry Huntington in the ways of philanthropy, too. The Huntington scion would soon change the face of Los Angeles—and line his pockets, too.

  Ironically, in 1996, the Southern Pacific was sold to the Union Pacific, uniting the two railroads once more. Today, the Union Pacific remains the largest railroad in the west.

  IN THE MOVIES:

  The Southern Pacific Railroad can be seen in Hitchcock’s classic North By Northwest (1959), as well as in The Defiant Ones (1958), Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955), and the Gene Autry television show (1950).

  SELLING SUNSHINE

  Frank Wiggins

  In 1886, Frank Wiggins was supposed to die of tuberculosis in Richmond, Indiana. When his doctor told him to seek his death or his cure in the California climate, Wiggins boarded a train to Los Angeles. Soon his disease was in remission. According to Wiggins, within months the dry, sunny climate and the locally grown oranges cured him, turning grateful Wiggins into an evangelist for Los Angeles. For the next 36 years, Wiggins praised the orange.

  In 1890, to attract new residents to the under-populated land of sunshine, he launched a bold new idea at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. “California on Wheels” was an exhibit that traveled through America’s heartland on railroad cars, fragrant with citrus, promoting LA’s healthy climate.

  Boxcars laden with oranges, grapes and melons became a staple at every major fair in the Midwest. Trains departed every week at Wiggins’ behest, along with literature that proclaimed the wonders of Los Angeles. At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, nearly 10 million people learned about the paradise that was named for the angels, then tasted its fruits. Brochures promoted “The Land of Sunshine” as a place where the environment was “bracing and full of electricity, a climate that makes the sick well and the strong more vigorous.”

  Illustration on a pamphlet entitled “The Land of Sunshine”

  In 1897, Wiggins topped his efforts. Now serving as Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, he organized the Southern California Fruit Growers Exchange. Bearing the name “Sunkist,” the collective synchronized harvesting, packaging, shipping and promoting California oranges in partnership with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The first campaign targeted Iowa but soon expanded to communities everywhere, eventually reaching Atlantic City. Train cars draped with banners reading “Oranges for Health, California for Wealth” appealed to farmers and tradesmen of all stripes. Leaflets from the Chamber of Commerce promoted LA’s “clean industry,” featuring “a smokeless, sootless” environment. Who could argue? Movies, LA’s primary export, featured some of the healthiest looking people on the planet.

  Across America, the demand for oranges increased exponentially. Starting in 1908, Sunkist ads convinced Americans that the healthiest part of everyone’s breakfast came directly from California. Meanwhile, the population of Los Angeles increased exponentially, too. It blossomed from 100,000 in 1890 to 1.6 million in 1924, when Wiggins finally died.

  Now Wiggins’ campaign spins on a life of its own. The nation still views Los Angeles as the center of America’s health consciousness, and Sunkist remains a not-for-profit cooperative of citrus growers. Wiggins’ first handbills helped to spawn entire health-related industries, attracting everyone from personal trainers, body builders and supplement salesmen to vegans, vegetarians and yogis to Los Angeles. The California Cure remains as alluring and authentic today as it was when Wiggins recovered his health.

  CHAPTER 6.

  OIL!

  DOHENY, CANFIELD, AND THE OIL QUEEN OF CALIFORNIA

  1890s

  The City of Los Angeles had a problem. As downtown real estate was parceled into lots, what should be done with the putrid puddles of tar that bubbled up throughout the region? Sure, the climate was ideal for the burgeoning citrus industry throughout LA County, but these gooey black pools near downtown LA hindered growth. That land was useless.

  In 1892, Edward L. Doheny solved LA’s problem with a lucky hunch. It also made him the wealthiest oilman on earth.

  At age 18, dreaming of prosperity from stories he heard around a campfire, Doheny set out from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to prospect for silver in the New Mexico Territory. Working with a pick and a shovel for over a decade, he lived a rough-and-tumble existence during the 1880s. At the poker tables in Kingston, New Mexico, he met two lasting, life-altering friends: Albert B. Fall, the future Secretary of the Interior (in President Harding’s cabinet; more about him later), and Charles Canfield, who would soon become Doheny’s business partner.

  It was Canfield who had the smarts to give up prospecting so that he could speculate on Los Angeles real estate instead. Doheny sold his mining claim too, then followed Canfield to Los Angeles in 1891, where, assuredly, their fortunes beckoned.

  Instead, life at the Bellevue Terrace Hotel on Sixth and Figueroa Streets in downtown Los Angeles was dire. Canfield promptly lost all his money when LA’s real estate boom went bust. A penniless 36-year-old Doheny wandered the streets looking for work, or at least an inspiration.

  Albert B. Fall and Edward L. Doheny, 1926

  That inspiration arrived on a spring morning in 1892. Doheny watched from the hotel steps as a wagon passed, transporting a pungent black cargo. When he called out, “What are you hauling?” the Mexican driver replied, “brea,” the Spanish word for “pitch,” the problematic tar that blemished the land around them. At the brea source, Doheny soon learned that the slimy stuff could replace coal as a more efficient fuel. As Doheny would later recall, “I had found gold and I had found silver, but this ugly looking substance was the key to something more valuable.” It was the lucky break he’d sought for nearly two decades.

  With Canfield as his partner, they borrowed $400, then leased three undeveloped lots on Patton Street (not far from today’s Dodger Stadium) that were swampy with brea. As experienced miners, they hitched a horse to a pulley that raised and lowered their buckets into the slime, then they went to work with picks and shovels once more.

  The noxious fumes could have killed them. Ignorant of the dangers they faced, toiling manually for months, gasping for air in the reeky tar, they burrowed to an incredible 155 feet beneath the earth’s surface. When their shovels finally hit hard shale, another loan secured them a drill. Suspended from what would soon be known as the first oil derrick in Los Angeles, the drill bored for seven days, to a level of 200 feet. That’s when the hunch paid off: The partners struck oil. On April 20, 1893, the hole on Patton Street became the first free-flowing oil well in Los Angeles. Canfield and Doheny would prosper for the rest of their lives.

  They followed the brea, eventually establishing 81 wells in Los Angeles. Over the next decade, however, Canfield and Doheny disappeared for months at a time while their business flourished. They made their greatest fortune in Mexican jungles, creating the Mexican Petroleum Company with the blessings of Mexico’s long-term president, Porfirio Diaz. Their big win came on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1904, as oil gushed sky high when their drill bored 1,450 feet below the Mexican surface. The drill tapped into an oil deposit of unfathomable magnitude. “Mexican Pete” became the most prolific oil-export on earth, generating more than 100,000 barrels per day. In a land of unpaved roads, the formerly destitute partners soon found themselves masterminding an international oil enterprise: They built a network of pipes to transport the crude oil to their refineries, then into their tankers for overseas shipments. The global demand for oil during World War I increased production and profits exponentially, attracting ambassadors, entrepreneurs and influential politicians as investors. For a time, it was estimated that Los Angeles resident Edward L. Doheny was wealt
hier than John D. Rockefeller himself, the owner of Standard Oil and Doheny’s primary competitor.

  Signal Hill in Los Angeles County, c. 1923

  Meanwhile, central Los Angeles was now a boomtown for oil. Miners and speculators descended; motivated homeowners tore down their houses to make way for oilrigs. In the 160 acres surrounding Doheny’s first field on Patton Street, dozens of start-up companies drilled more than 300 wells. Teams of mules, sometimes four abreast, rutted the roads and destroyed the lawns as they dragged oil tanks and equipment to yet another site. Neighbor was pitted against neighbor as the “Law of Capture” permitted individuals to draw oil from under an adjoining property if the underground deposit flowed across the property line. The neighborhood became an incongruous collection of residences shoehorned between oil derricks. The stench was everywhere and the noise was nonstop. Every amateur dreamed of becoming the next Doheny, winning an accidental fortune by drilling into a lucky puddle of brea.

  Emma summers

  Even the local piano teacher joined in the speculation. Mrs. Emma Summers, a graduate of Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, invested $700 for half-interest in a well near her house at 517 California Street. (Today it’s the 101 Freeway, not far from the Music Center.) By day, she learned how oil equipment worked and did the bookkeeping; in the evenings, she continued to teach piano. But Emma Summers soon became a cunning and wealthy entrepreneur, buying stakes in more wells, putting competitors out of business and consolidating her industry through economies of scale.

  Although Doheny and Canfield initially convinced executives at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad to convert their locomotives from coal to oil, it was Emma Summers who provided the steady oil supply to California’s railroads. Her enterprise soon expanded to include trolley companies too, then downtown hotels, laundries, machine shops and even the Pacific Light and Power Company (the forerunner of today’s Southern California Edison). By 1900, her oil wells were producing 50,000 barrels per month. Summers expanded her enterprise to include new oil strikes in nearby Long Beach, Torrance, and Inglewood. She diversified her investments, creating the Summers Paint Company that was run by her brother; she opened a blacksmith shop, bought theaters, ranches and apartment buildings, all financed by her oil exploits. Satisfied customers proclaimed Mrs. Summers “the Oil Queen of California.” She exploited that title, too, erecting a hotel at 529 California Street, aptly named Queen, then made it her residence.

  The oil boom was impossible to maintain. There were simply too many companies with too many wells operating within a concentrated location. In 1895, oil from Los Angeles accounted for half the production in the entire state of California, but that output crested in 1901. With 1,150 wells pumping oil for more than 200 separate companies, they drained the oil reservoir and diminished its pressure, making extraction more difficult. The price of oil fluctuated wildly, from a high of $1.80 per barrel in 1901, plummeting to 15¢ per barrel in 1903 due to the overabundance of oil on the market.

  With no regulatory agencies and practically no record keeping, lawlessness prevailed. Desperate thieves drained tanks, stole equipment and sabotaged the wells of competitors. As wells went dry, they were simply abandoned. In 1961, the Los Angeles Urban Renewal Association restored most of the oil producing acreage to residential use. However, the supply is not depleted completely. A few remaining oilrigs scattered throughout Los Angeles continue to extract the remaining fossil fuel today.

  Epilogue:

  When the Queen Hotel was demolished to build the 101 Freeway, Emma Summers moved her residence to the Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square. She died in 1941 at age 83. But Edward Doheny? His next chapter crackles with bribery and repentance, a messy Senate investigation, an Act of Congress and some lurid deaths. Read on!

  The Queen Hotel, c. 1940

  CHAPTER 7.

  TAKE A RIDE ON THE RED CARS

  LA SPRAWLS WITH AN ELECTRIC RAILWAY

  1901—1961

  Gertrude Stein’s famous line, “There’s no there there,” turns up (too often) when comedians mock LA’s sprawl. That’s when Angelenos recite this mantra: “LA was once united by a magnificent network of streetcars, but the routes were bought by General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone Tires, then dismantled to be replaced by cars and buses.” That mantra reached such a crescendo by 1988 that Hollywood screenwriters actually turned it into the plot for the classic animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The truth is darker than that mantra; the streetcars were doomed long before General Motors enters this chronicle.

  The story starts and ends with Henry E. Huntington, a multi-millionaire who was groomed to run a railroad by his uncle Collis Huntington, a founder of that famous “octopus,” the Southern Pacific Railroad. Young Huntington worked for more than a decade on the Southern Pacific, and thought he’d inherit the railroad when the old man died. Instead, its Board of Directors voted him out.

  Unfazed, Huntington envisioned an enterprise of his own. Huntington Sr. bequeathed $15 million to 50-year-old Henry Huntington, and the rest to his second wife, Arabella. Fifteen million dollars in 1900 equals about $400 million today, enough to build … a railroad!

  Henry (1907) and Arabella Huntington (1905)

  Huntington knew from experience that real estate prices soar when the railroad comes to town. Now that the Southern Pacific had turned Los Angeles into a major railroad hub on his watch, it was the time to buy property, thousands of acres of property. Then, he’d sell it in small parcels and watch his real estate profits soar by bringing the railroad to one community after another.

  Unlike large-scale railroads with steam-powered locomotives, fueled by coal or oil, streetcars are powered by electric traction. Every destination for Huntington’s streetcars needed a steady supply of electricity first. To guarantee that steady supply, he formed the Pacific Power and Light Company to generate energy for his railroad and the communities it served. At the same time, he pieced together a streetcar network by purchasing five fledgling electric railways, then merged their routes to create the Pacific Electric Railway.

  It was genius. He inverted the business model for railroads. Instead of connecting existing communities, he installed the railroad and electricity first in undeveloped territories where the property was dirt cheap, then marked up the price, and the community followed. Since he owned the railroad, the real estate and the electricity, another Huntington stuffed his pockets in LA.

  It was also a disaster. Most cities develop from one central core, then logically build in rings emanating from its center. Not in LA, where city planners were myopic, where Huntington was welcomed as a philanthropic hero with the freedom to put his trolleys just about anywhere. For a few thousand dollars (that Los Angeles desperately needed in the era before income tax) he would propose a route, face little opposition, then acquire the right-of-way to another far-flung real estate tract. City planning in early twentieth-century Los Angeles meant opening a new streetcar route wherever Huntington planned. He ran the streetcars on Broadway and Main Street, but Huntington had no particular loyalty to a central core. He installed trolley tracks to the places where he landed the best deals, eventually rambling across four counties. New communities sprang up anywhere.

  The Pacific Electric never made a profit, though it was hailed for decades as a success. Its network was efficient, affordable and fast; a pleasant ride past fragrant orange groves on the way to the ocean, mountains or city. There were discounted routes like the pre-dawn Fisherman’s Special, and on Sundays: A Day for a Dollar. The Big Red Cars, as they were known, delivered the mail and the morning newspapers. They were even decorated as floats in the annual Festival of Flowers Parade.

  Never satisfied, Huntington purchased the West Coast Land and Water Company; he merged several small gas companies to form the Southern California Gas Company, and his Pacific Power and Light Company financed the largest hydroelectric-generating facility in the country. Huntington’s enterprises would now deliver the gas, electr
icity, transportation and even the water to new communities he was buying up like penny candy. From 1904 to 1913, Huntington opened more than 500 new subdivisions each year. He bought a town called Pacific City, renamed it Huntington Beach, and built a wharf into the Pacific enabling his streetcars to transport freight and produce by rail to the sea, competing directly with the Southern Pacific.

  The first Red Car that went to North Hollywood, 1911

  To keep up the building boom, Huntington and his friend Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, went on a media blitz with other “boosters” to attract more settlers to Los Angeles. They blanketed the Midwest with advertisements that promoted Los Angeles as a paradise: no smelly factories, just orange groves in a climate that allegedly cures almost any affliction. The pitch ended with a specially priced streetcar vacation package, luring many future residents to LA.

  Huntington Beach Municipal Pier, c. 1914; Pacific Electric Railway Car (upper left), concession stands (lower left), bandshell (right), and pier in background

  The population in turn-of-twentieth-century Los Angeles exploded thanks to Huntington and his remarkable rapid transit system. The boosters were so successful that, for a while, Long Beach was known as Iowa By The Sea because so many people from America’s heartland settled there. LA’s population doubled between 1910 and 1920 to almost a million-and-a-quarter residents, overtaking San Francisco as the largest city in the West. To keep pace, the Pacific Electric grew from 600 Red Cars carrying nearly a quarter-of-a-million passengers in 1910 to a network of more than 900 Red Cars on more than 1,100 miles of track in 1920 (that’s about 25 percent more track than New York City subways today).