Wilcox sold five acres across from Casa Cahuenga to the La Baig’s French friends, the Blondeaus. The Blondeaus built their home and lived there for two years before deciding, in 1889, to build an addition to serve meals and, to Harvey Wilcox’s horror, liquor. The Blondeau Tavern served truck farmers and farm hands who did not share Wilcox’s distaste for alcohol. On Saturday nights they faithfully came. Because of the severity of Wilcox’s financial situation, he tempered his anti-liquor fervor. But he never stepped inside the tavern nor did he sample Madame Blondeau’s pigeon-and-rum omelet dinner that was popular with smart traveling parties of Angelenos.
A bright spot was Daeida’s fig business. She had perfected a drying method and her figs were popular.
General Otis built his “Outpost” retreat near Casa Don Tomas, 1912 (demolished).
General Harrison Gray Otis, who owned the Los Angeles Times, had acquired the deed to Casa Don Tomás. While relatives of the dispossessed Californios muttered about the thievery of Americans, Otis made the place his getaway from the city. To entertain his friends, he built a clubhouse nearby, romantically naming it “The Outpost.”
A view of Hollywood from Laughlin Park at Franklin and Western Avenues in 1900.
Otis still stressed in his newspaper the positive aspects of the Los Angeles basin. Since everybody now knew you could lose a fortune in real estate, Otis focused on the area’s health benefits. When Harry Chandler, a young victim of tuberculosis, got evicted from his boarding house in Los Angeles, he recuperated at a small Holly Springs’ health resort in the Weid family canyon. Though Otis would eventually resent the number of migrating sick in the next decade, Chandler recovered and began working for the Los Angeles Times. He also married boss Otis’s daughter.
Hollywood was only a fair success. The strain of the situation proved too much for Harvey Wilcox. He died in 1891, land poor, in his modest Hollywood farmhouse. His twenty-nine-year-old widow received the land and the home, but little else. Daeida was as determined as her husband had ever been. She would continue Harvey’s dream for a city of homes. Hollywood would be her town because she owned it.
The Wilcox house in Hollywood (demolished).
Hollywood in 1904 viewed from Whitley Heights. Cherokee Avenue runs diagonally through the center of photo.
Dear Hollywood we loved you best,
A little hamlet in the West:
Your hills were then as God had made,
Not marred by man’s huge pick and spade
Aldis E. Sage, 1928
CHAPTER 2 A CITY OF HOMES
Grass residence, Hollywood Boulevard and El Cerrito Avenue (demolished).
1900
Hollywood Boulevard, still called Prospect Avenue, remained a quiet, country road with blocks of orchards, open vegetable fields, and an occasional clapboard cottage next to a garden. Harvey Wilcox’s pepper trees, nearly full grown, dappled the dirt streets with shade. Deer foraged on the avenue in the early mornings. Quail and doves were plentiful. Over everything floated the perfume of lemon blossoms.
The old Pass Road still followed its path through Hollywood. At Cahuenga and Santa Monica Boulevards, the local orchardists had a huge barn for the Cahuenga Valley Lemon Growers’ Exchange, a cooperative from which they shipped two-hundred railroad cars of lemons a year.
The Lemon Exchange, southeast Santa Monica and Cahuenga Boulevards (demolished).
On the southeast corner of Sunset and Cahuenga, a German named Knarr built a fully equipped stable with horses, buggies, and larger coaches called tally-hos. Knarr also had a blacksmith shop. The immediate vicinity was so rural: Knarr’s horses grazed without a corral. Across Cahuenga from Knarr, Mr. Drouet operated his harness shop and lived next door.
A camp at Bronson and Franklin Avenues in 1905.
Farther north at Cahuenga at Prospect, on Wilcox property, the Sackett Hotel, stood as the tallest building in the area. Besides adding an ice cream parlor, the hotel became a hangout for local bachelors. From Prospect, the old road passed the Wilcox house and disappeared into the hills.
Daeida Wilcox had faced tough times after her husband’s death. Money had been scarce. For a while she had found herself without water when her well went dry during a long drought. Her other close water source, Holly Springs in Holly Canyon, contained so much sodium sulphate that when the stream ran, it was bottled and sold as a laxative.
The Hollywood Bicycle Club in front of the Sackett Hotel.
Personally, Daeida had rallied. She had married Philo Judson Beveridge three years after Harvey’s death. A strapping 6’2” blond, Philo had come to Hollywood in 1893. The son of former Governor of Illinois John Beveridge, forty-three year old Philo was apparently a bon vivant. Having run through a succession of jobs, he had just folded a water heater business. Less than one hundred days after his arrival, he married Daeida Wilcox. A year later, his father moved to Hollywood, lending a prestige to Hollywood that rivaled Senator Cole in Colegrove. With Philo, Daeida had four children. Two would die in childhood.
When property values started to rise, Philo and Daeida opened a real estate business, Beveridge & Beveridge, in a little brown real estate office on the northeast corner of Prospect and Cahuenga. They sold lots mostly to conservative Midwesterners who strongly agreed with Harvey Wilcox’s hatred of alcohol. Philo tried to buy 15 acres north of Yucca Street for a golf course, but failed.
Another of Daeida’s associates appeared at this time. After practicing medicine in New York for three years, Dr. Edwin O. Palmer came to the Cahuenga Valley in 1900 to recover from a pulmonary hemorrhage. He stayed three months with a friend near Hollywood before moving to the Sackett Hotel. His five-dollars-a-week board included an office. For twenty-five cents, he rented one of Sackett’s old mares to make his rounds.
Becoming the village physician (and later its historian), Dr. Palmer made his first impression when his horse bolted, carrying the doctor the full length of Prospect Avenue, scattering his medical supplies along the way. A sizable crowd witnessed the spectacle. E.O. Palmer became the Beveridge family physician and, eventually, Daeida’s advisor, a local bank president, and a Hollywood developer.
The Wakeman Ranch on Hollywood Boulevard and Serrano Street (demolished).
Caroline Wakeman in 1932.
PROSPECTING PROSPECT
New arrivals loved Nopalera’s rural charm. Few, however, harbored any delusion that it would remain unchanged. Most bought land for speculation. Even Cahuenga Valley residents who pursued nine-crops-a-year lemon businesses saw the future as more people, more homes, more commerce, and rising property values.
Caroline Wakeman had been a suffragette and a friend of Susan B. Anthony. She and her husband had made several trips to Nopalera before buying land in 1893. They bought ten acres on the north side of Prospect Avenue, between Serrano Avenue and Harvard Boulevard. For years, it was known as the Wakeman Ranch. One hundred orange trees already grew on the property, but the flesh of Hollywood oranges was deemed too light to be marketable. The Wakemans put lemons on the rest of their land. Following Wilcox’s lead, they planted pepper trees around the ranch’s perimeter that Caroline watered from a ground pump.
Unlike Harvey Wilcox, Caroline Wakeman could take a shot of whiskey and suffer no regret. Later, as a widow, she became an icon for Hollywood’s first settlers, devoting herself wholeheartedly to subdividing her ranch. She named the two streets she created Loma Linda and Russell Avenues. Living past one hundred, the matriarch became known as Grandma Wakeman and her birthday parties were community events. Her house, that originally stood back from the street, was at 5340 Loma Linda upon her death in 1936.
Taken from the second story of the Sackett Hotel in 1901, the photographer aims his lens northeast across Hollywood (Prospect Avenue) and Cahuenga Boulevards.
J.F. Grass came to Hollywood in the early 1890s. A successful New Orleans shoe merchant, his stepson’s illness required a change of climate. Grass first bought acreage along Prospect Avenue between La Bre
a and Fuller Avenues, where he planted a lemon orchard. He subsequently bought six acres at Prospect and Las Palmas Avenues for a vegetable farm. Then he bought five acres on the south side of Prospect between Cherokee and Las Palmas Avenues for another lemon orchard. On a triangle of land north of Prospect at La Brea Avenue, Grass built a southward-facing home with views to the ocean.
The unfinished house of a failed orchardist on Wilcox Avenue near Hollywood Boulevard. The Sackett Hotel is in center background.
In the early part of the twentieth century, Grass subdivided his orchard near La Brea into the residential Poinsettia Tract. He also developed his land west of Cherokee Avenue into one of Hollywood Boulevard’s first business blocks. After his death in 1918, his wife and children managed his investments and real estate.
Alfred Z. Taft was born in Los Angeles in 1864. His father had come by ship around the Horn. His mother, Mary, had crossed the plains in a covered wagon. Taft grew up where downtown’s Pershing Square now stands. His father actively bought Southern California land. A.Z. Taft came to Hollywood in 1893 with his father. They bought ten acres on Prospect’s north side, west of Lemona (Wilton) Avenue. and built a farmhouse in a lemon orchard. The Tafts bought more lemon orchards on the western side of town from Jacob Miller. A.Z. became a founder of the local lemon exchange. He also started Taft Realty in an outbuilding behind his house, eventually giving up his job as a clothier downtown to run it. Taft Avenue eventually ran through the middle of their lemon orchard.
A.Z. Taft was one of Hollywood’s most ardent Prohibitionists and the leading force in making Hollywood dry. Thirteen years after arriving in Hollywood, his health failed and he moved to Arizona. His son A.Z. Taft, Jr. interrupted his studies at UCLA (when it stood at Vermont and Melrose Avenues) to take charge of the family’s sizable Hollywood real estate holdings. A.Z.’s mother, Mary Taft, remained in the farmhouse on Prospect with her missionary daughter, Gertrude. Mary Taft came second to Caroline Wakeman in Hollywood’s oldest old-lady salutes during the ‘30s.
Daniel Penman, Scottish stonemason from San Francisco, raised a truck garden with Chinese labor on a tract at Los Feliz Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. When Penman sold that land for a profit, he accumulated twenty-eight acres at Prospect and Highland Avenues, on the south side of the street to La Brea, where he grew strawberries.
The Taft residence once stood on Prospect Avenue west of Taft Avenue.
Mary Moll’s farmhouse stood on Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue (demolished).
Penman’s daughter, Mary Moll, lived in a farmhouse next to the strawberry field. She taught at the Pass School on Sunset Boulevard. After her husband’s death, she successfully subdivided the property over the next two decades. She built a commercial block at Hollywood and Highland and the Bonnie Brier housing tract.
Moll took her development work seriously. A founder of the Hollywood Business and Professional Woman’s Club, she demolished her farmhouse for a commercial building and built a craftsman-style house for herself farther west where the Roosevelt Hotel now stands.
Mary Moll’s donation of a strip of land through her property made Highland Avenue official. It was graded, but not paved, in 1901. Highland was the name of the local smith’s wife, Highland Price, who lived with her husband near Fountain, the only house on the new street. As the first person buried in the Hollywood Cemetery when it opened in 1900, Mrs. Highland Price got a street named in her honor.
Mary Moll built her Craftsman-style house at 7002 Hollywood Boulevard (demolished).
In 1900, H.J. Whitley bought the Hurd home at Wilcox and Prospect Avenues. (Hurd had died a few years after Harvey Wilcox.) Canadian Whitley was forty years old and eager to develop the Cahuengas with the intention of making a quick fortune. Whitley relocated from a home near his downtown jewelry store. He formed a development company with men of Los Angeles finance, including General Otis, Harry Chandler, Colonel Griffith, Moses Sherman, and others.
A section of the Whitley tract looking northwest from Hollywood Boulevard (Prospect Avenue) and Orchid Avenue, 1907.
Highland and Franklin Avenues, looking southwest.
Whitley tried to buy the Wilcoxes’ Hollywood tract, but Daeida refused his terms. He then turned his attention westward, buying Hancock land from Wilcox to La Brea Avenues north of Prospect. Previously leased to farmers, the land under Whitley’s management became Ocean View Tract, a high-priced subdivision with no apartments and, to appease his Hollywood neighbors, no liquor.
Whitley worked long hours directing the heavy grading equipment. He took out the smaller hills and built streets with curbs. Within two years, town lots in Whitley’s Ocean View were ready. He named streets and planted them according to tree species: palms on Palm Avenue (Las Palmas), pine on Pine (now Whitley), magnolias on Magnolia (now Cherokee), olives on Olive (now Orchid), sycamores on Sycamore. He left the pepper trees along Franklin Ave.
Whitley’s work on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard is still evident; most of his streets do not meet on the south side. While Whitley graded, property owners along the south of Prospect Avenue kept their lemon orchards. Thomas Hudson grew lemons from Hudson to Cherokee Avenues. George Stevenson had a home and lemon orchard where the Egyptian Theater now stands.
TOURING THE TOWN
At first, everyone united along Prospect Avenue. The Beveridges and H.J. Whitley joined the Cahuenga Valley Improvement Association that, in 1900, graded the avenue for a mile and a half, surfacing it with gravel. Telephone line, gas, and electric lines were expected any day. The first electric train made its maiden trip down Prospect Avenue on January 27, 1900.
Moses Sherman and E.P. Clark had bought the Wilcox line in 1898. With the cooperation of Whitley, Col. Griffith, the Beveridges, and Caroline Wakeman, who badgered dawdling officials, they ran the rail up Vermont Avenue from Santa Monica Boulevard to Prospect. It then traveled west to La Brea Avenue, and diagonally southwest to Fairfax Avenue. There it joined the Santa Monica line that Moses and Clark had built from Col. Griffith’s and Senator Cole’s abandoned rail. Passing through the new town of Sherman (West Hollywood), the cars continued to the beach. Though the route down Prospect Avenue lengthened the running time as compared to traveling straight along Santa Monica Boulevard, the Beveridges and Whitley raised an extra $20,000 to provide future Hollywood residents with transportation downtown. Pacific Electric used this route for nearly five decades.
The line proved to be a boon. Cars ran service with one or two flat cars attached for freight. Flocks of people traveled down Prospect Avenue, creating the first tourist business in Hollywood.
Grading Prospect Avenue, 1899.
Hollywood Boulevard (Prospect Avenue) east from Gower Street in 1900. The house of Hollywood’s first mayor, Sanford Rich, is on the far right.
Cahuenga Water Gardens at Franklin and Western Avenues provided exotic plants for Hollywood estates.
An enterprising man met visitors at the new depot on Prospect near Ivar Avenue. He sold them a tally-ho tour of the “modern Garden of Eden.” After lemon groves, the Outpost of General Otis, and the pineapple and avocado orchards, the tour finished at the Glen Holly Hotel, a rambling structure built in 1895. After admiring the valley view and the hotel’s splendid rose garden, guests ate chicken dinners and went home.
The Glen Holly Hotel, southeast corner of Franklin and Ivar Avenues, a Hollywood landmark for years (demolished).
The tour grew in the next years to a large circle of the Los Angeles basin. Cars went to Hollywood in the morning, then down to Playa del Rey and Venice and back to Los Angeles by nightfall. Called the Balloon Excursion Route after the shape of the track traveled, at its peak, eighteen packed cars made the trip each day. The local real estate interests adored it and quickly subdivided smaller lots for tourist sales.
The water problems had been solved, at least temporarily. A pipe ran from Burbank to Los Feliz Boulevard, skirting the foothills near Franklin Avenue, then went west along Prospect from Bronson
Avenue to Gardner Street and then southwest to the Soldier’s Home in Westwood. Additionally, the first few years of the new century had ample rainfall. This helped two property owners at Franklin and Western Avenues. Laughlin, who sold dry goods in Los Angeles, had bought the large hill there for his subdivision, Laughlin Park. He planted it with bamboo, banana and pine trees that the rain made lush. Laughlin sold a large section at Western Avenue to Edmund Sturtevant who created the Cahuenga Water Gardens. Selling rare South American water lilies and all varieties of lotus to new Cahuenga residents, Sturtevant created another tourist attraction.
The de Longpre residence as seen from the northwest corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards (demolished). The Beveridge house is on the far left.
LE ROI DES FLEURS
Daeida Beveridge proved the winning promoter when, much to the gratitude of everyone, she established Hollywood’s first celebrity draw, Paul de Longpre, the “King of Flowers.”
Born in France in 1855, de Longpre started painting flowers on fans when he was twelve. A bank failure in Paris brought him to New York in 1886, where he began again with an exhibition of floral paintings. Flowers were expensive and there was not a great variety in New York. In 1889, de Longpre moved to Los Angeles with his wife and three children.
De Longpre loved bicycling around the area, looking for flowers. He found the most exotic, year-round supply in Hollywood.
The Story of Hollywood Page 4