Construction of the electric line through the Cahuenga Pass.
BYE-BYE BOOM TOWN
The drawbacks of independence surfaced for Hollywood with drainage problems. The wealthy may have flocked here for winters, but during the wettest seasons, the city was ill-prepared for rain. Torrents of water washed down the hillsides across the plain. Natural water flow made no concession for property lines or streets. Silt-covered tracks made rail transportation useless at every major intersection, interrupting service for days. Discussions with Colegrove as to where to run a drainage ditch proved futile, so Hollywood built its own ditch at south Beachwood Drive. The ditch dumped rain water into Colegrove. Senator Cole had to sue them to stop it.
At the Board of Trade’s annual banquet at the Hollywood Hotel, General Otis spoke on “How Best to Unify Hollywood.” His solution was real estate development. Whitley gave a pep talk about Hollywood’s future, knowing the city faced serious problems. Water shortages had begun again. Sewage problems also arose when surrounding owners deemed their property too valuable for sewer farms or septic tanks.
Whitley knew the big money backed Los Angeles city engineer, William Mulholland, who worked feverishly to drain every drop of water from Owens Valley two hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Local capitalists bought options on thousands of acres in waterless San Fernando Valley. Whitley participated in the largest purchase, buying 47,500 acres with General Otis, Moses Sherman and Harry Chandler. When the Owens Valley water arrived with the aqueduct, they all became richer.
Although the Owens Valley water arrived on schedule, many lamented the end of the pure soft rainwater from local wells. Mulholland had delivered them hard water loaded with salt.
Dr. Palmer was unwilling to call a truce on the Cahuenga Pass. With partners in Sherman-Clark rail investing in Highland’s development, Highland got the first railroad franchise to the San Fernando Valley. It began running on a notched shelf in the Pass in 1908. Palmer tried to interest Southern California urban-transit magnate H.E. Huntington in building a railway up Cahuenga Boulevard to the San Fernando Valley. Palmer thought a tunnel would be most cost effective. He secured rights of way from Ivar Weid and even collected some money from Colegrove residents. Daeida Beveridge totally supported a rail system through her property and offered to pay half the cost. Palmer’s correspondent bank, however, advised him not to borrow money due to an anticipated depression. Cahuengans had to settle for the Toluca stagecoach that still ran frequently from Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevards into the valley.
Palmer arranged for rail transportation along Franklin Avenue. No one doubted that future development in the hills would bring shoppers to Hollywood and Cahuenga. Moses Sherman, with a partner, had recently bought a large chunk of land in Beachwood Canyon. He proposed a housing development (eventually Hollywoodland). Sanford Rich, with fellow investors, subdivided the Andrada Ranch at Franklin and Bronson Avenues. There was real estate gold in the hills as long as water flowed.
Developers graded Beachwood Canyon for the Hollywoodland tract. The Beachwood Market now stands at the lower left.
By 1909, everyone knew the City of Hollywood was dead. Attitudes toward annexation to Los Angeles began to change. Los Angeles, with its first nine-story high rise at Sixth and Main Streets, was clearly visible from Hollywood Boulevard. The improved road along Sunset to Hollywood replaced the Old Pass Road (Camino Real), now chopped into subdivisions. Sunset offered a quick and easy commute downtown by automobile even though Hollywood had more stables than garages.
In September of 1909, Hill Street Tunnel Day celebrated the streamlining of the rail from downtown, reducing traveling time to Hollywood by twelve minutes. H.E. Huntington had absorbed the Sherman-Clark lines into the Pacific Electric rail empire. Hollywood managed a last hurrah, with five brass bands playing for the occasion. All of Hollywood’s showplaces were open, the main party occurring on de Longpre’s lawn. Unknowingly everyone was celebrating the end of the City of Hollywood.
Joyriders on Hollywood Boulevard, 1909.
Other populated areas in the county rushed to become part of Los Angeles. In October 1909, Colegrove folded as an independent city.
In November 1909, the Hollywood Board of Trade informed the city of ten thousand that Hollywood could not solve its sewage problems. Additionally, the city of Los Angeles refused to share any Owens Valley water with the community unless they became a part of the larger city. Most in Hollywood felt that annexation to Los Angeles was the only choice. The city’s second mayor, the now-seated George Dunlop, pushed for annexation even though it meant he would lose his job.
In February 1910, Hollywood voted itself out of existence. It became a district of Los Angeles. To keep the large population of prohibitionists happy, the alcohol ban continued in the area.
H.J. Whitley departed for his new townsite, Van Nuys, where, as general manager, he busily planted trees and shrubbery. Soon Van Nuys had railroad service, miles of improved streets, beautiful homes, one grammar school, two churches and a street named Whitley. (Whitley later lost his accumulated fortune in farmland speculation.)
Mary Moll circulated petitions that, in 1910, officially changed Prospect Avenue to Hollywood Boulevard. Street numbers were altered to what exists today. The east end of Hollywood Boulevard was curved southward to meet Sunset, the main road to Los Angeles.
Looking southeast into a Hollywood that was now a suburb of growing Los Angeles. The smaller photo at the upper right indicates landmark structures.
In hindsight, Hollywood’s lost independence removed any protection from the blight that consumed Los Angeles at the end of the twentieth century. Local cities that retained independence from Los Angeles found their own urban solutions to water, sewage and blight. These cities included Pasadena, Burbank, Glendale, Beverly Hills, Culver City, and Santa Monica.
Being part of Los Angeles proved no panacea. Taxes and assessments kept rising, as if to punish those who relished their escalating property values. The gnawing question for every land owner was when to subdivide, now or when land values rose higher. Citrus men who loved their work felt hounded for their property. Valuable real estate made farms and orchards impractical. Ten acres of lemon orchard divided quickly into thirty-five home lots. O.E. Roberts was one of Hollywood’s first orchardists to subdivide his land (north of Franklin Avenue between Vine and Gower Streets), opening his real estate office on Cahuenga Boulevard.
If anyone in Hollywood had any apprehensions about the future, at least they could forget their cares by going to the movies.
The Squaw Man goes on location near Hollywood, 1912.
There is a town of make-believe
Where Hollywoodians live.
In seeming something they are not
Their time to give.
A stranger in this funny town
Will think he’s had a dream
Until he looks around to find
Things are not what they seem.
E.O. Palmer, 1915
CHAPTER 3 “NO DOGS, NO MOVIES”
Making a movie at Vitagraph Studios, 1914.
IRIS IN
From their invention in 1895, it took fifteen years for movies to reach rural Hollywood. Hollywood’s first movie theater, The Idle Hour, opened in 1910 on the northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Hudson Avenue. It was a tiny wooden store with little signage, a projector, a screen, and some chairs and benches inside. Hollywood had lagged the rest of the country in getting a movie theater, and most Hollywood residents avoided it. Few considered idleness a virtue. Three years later, the owner got the message and renamed the theater the Iris.
Movie production had arrived in Los Angeles in 1907. Chicago-based Selig Polyscope Company came, as did later movie crews, to avoid the bitter Eastern winters.
Mary Pickford, America’s sweetheart.
De Longpre garden gate on Hollywood Boulevard, 1910.
In 1910, New York’s Biograph Film Company leased an acre of land in downtown Los Angeles and filmed one-re
elers around the basin. Biograph shot the first movie made in Hollywood, Love Among the Roses, in one day in Paul de Longpre’s garden. The director and producer was a novice moviemaker named David Wark (D.W.) Griffith. The star was fifteen-year-old Mary Pickford.
The pressed-lip American Gothics of Hollywood looked frostily on movie people and their hijinks. The visiting film companies headed more often to Los Angeles, mostly avoiding Hollywood early on. Hollywood Boulevard corners at Cahuenga and Wilcox, however, appeared as backgrounds in many early silents.
Paul de Longpre and daughter in his garden, 1909.
Dr. Schloesser’s Glengary Castle stood on the northeast corner of Franklin and Argyle Avenues, 1910 (demolished).
THE CURIOUS DOCTOR SCHLOESSER
Who needed movies in Hollywood when real estate speculation offered such great thrills? With lots fronting Hollywood Boulevard steadily increasing in value, the prospect of wealth seemed imminent to many. Once an owner graded a road through the middle of his property, the City of Los Angeles had to maintain it. On the negative side, property taxes went for sidewalks and streetlights, eating into profits. Owners who needed money and sold lots too soon resented the people who lived in the new homes.
The man who led the crowd removing lemons for lots first arrived in an ornamental carriage. Dressed in a frock coat and white gloves, Dr. Alfred Schloesser was an ornament himself, with fat, bluish cheeks and bright red lips. Cinched into a whalebone girdle that creaked when he walked, he came to inspect Hollywood. He was a retired physician from Chicago who had recently made money in California mining. Trying real estate, he bought eight acres at Franklin and Argyle Avenues from O.E. Roberts. Franklin Avenue was still a narrow, winding dirt lane arched with pepper trees.
Immediately, Dr. Schloesser removed the lemon trees. He then opened a one-room real estate office on Hollywood Boulevard, from which he took prospective buyers on traditional sightseeing tours of the area. These included private visits to de Longpre’s studio. After selling his lots for a profit, he left for Europe.
He returned a year later. Schloesser had found no place that compared to Hollywood. A fanatical abstainer who would never allow liquor in his home, he bought back all of his land along with some freshly built houses, paying everyone a profit. He then built Glengary Castle.
Until its final stages, the house looked like all the others in the district, except that its twelve rooms seemed larger than most. Suddenly, in one week, it transformed into a thick-walled medieval castle. Schloesser informed the curious that his wife’s ancestral home was Glengary Castle in Scotland. He had managed, however, to cross-pollinate it with a Gothic German castle to suit himself. The castle looked more stucco than stone.
The tour inside made jaws drop. A huge medieval reception room with a baronial fireplace loomed over visitors with a display of swords, shields, and armor. The hall had distant walls that appeared to be massive stone, although closer inspection revealed trompe l’œil painting. The doctor decorated the sitting room in gleaming white and gold French Renaissance. With as much stained glass as a church, the house contained five upstairs bedrooms with modern disappearing beds and two bathrooms. It had taken four months to build.
Dr. Schloesser plopped two imported Carrara marble lions out front and moved in with his wife, his son, a butler, and a maid. Building a substantial real estate office for himself at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, he became a community fixture by walking to work along Hollywood Boulevard, dressed in top hat, and gloves and always wearing makeup.
EL CAMINO REAL ESTATE
With one million dollars’ worth of new homes going up by 1911, C.E. Toberman had found success acquiring other people’s failed residential subdivisions and reviving them. He had successfully reorganized a large tract along Hollywood Boulevard at Martel Avenue. He rescued a housing development at Poinsettia Place and Hawthorne Avenue, where he proudly built the area’s first Swiss chalet. By 1910, he showed buyers his subdivisions in a new Cadillac touring car.
Toberman teamed with Dr. Palmer in a Cahuenga business improvement. (Toberman had established warm relationships with both Dr. Palmer and Palmer’s banking rival, George Hoover.) Using uncle John Toberman’s vacant lot at 6418 Hollywood Boulevard, adjacent to Dr. Palmer’s buildings, they financed a two-story, brick commercial structure.
Briefly, the upstairs meeting room, known as Toberman Hall, housed the Hollywood Woman’s Club, the Odd Fellows, and the newly arrived Theosophists (and later the American Legion). On the ground floor, Mr. Heywood pioneered selling drygoods in Hollywood. In 1922, Woolworth took over Heywood’s store, operating there until 1997.
In partnership with his bank directors, Dr. Palmer bought and razed the Sackett Hotel. The building that replaced it still stands on the southwest corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga. Although originally two stories, it had sufficient foundation and steel for two additional stories that went up in the ‘30s along with a facade remodel. When completed, bank director J.P. Creque bought the place. Palmer moved his banks to the Creque’s downstairs marble-lined corner office. He opened his medical offices on the upper floor.
Dr. Palmer rejoiced that Pacific Electric planned a Cahuenga Boulevard rail through the Pass to Lankershim and points north. With all the businesses he had generated, plus his private medical practice, he felt overwhelmed. He consulted with his partner-neighbors in the Hollywood Citizen and decided to sell the newspaper. The rival Cahuenga Valley Sentinel was ready to fade out anyway, with such advice as “your cow will devour ill-formed melons.” An outside party bought both presses and retired the Sentinel.
Immediately another newspaper appeared. With high moral tone, it published for many years as Holly Leaves (originally the Inquirer) from the Hollywood Print Shop at 6727 Hollywood Boulevard. With articles numbering the drunkards in America and urging the election of city officials who would close saloons, the editors knew their readers. The year Holly Leaves began, 1911, the California branch of the abolitionist Women’s Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) held its state convention at Hollywood Boulevard’s Methodist Church at Ivar Avenue.
Unhappy at losing the power of his published opinion, Dr. Palmer arranged to have a young relative, Harlan Palmer, eager for an opportunity, come to Hollywood in 1911 and buy back the Hollywood Citizen. Moving the press to Cahuenga Boulevard, Harlan entered USC Law School and became Hollywood’s first lawyer.
Hollywood Boulevard looking east past Cahuenga Boulevard. Right to left: Toberman Hall, the Creque Building under construction, Wilcox Hall, and Dr. Schloesser’s real estate office, 1910.
The de Longpre house facade, 1909 (demolished).
ONE DOOR CLOSES …
In June 1911, Paul de Longpre died after battling cancer for two years. His attending physicians had included Dr. Palmer. In his will, de Longpre thanked Daeida for her friendship. If he had a regret, it was that few local people had bought his paintings, preferring to borrow them instead for their art societies. Dr. Palmer’s bank served as trustee of the estate, with all the proceeds going to the artist’s family.
De Longpre’s wife, Josephine, wanted to sell the estate and return to France. Louis Blondeau, son of the Blondeau family, talked her into selling him the garden fronting Hollywood Boulevard where he planned, along with de Longpre’s oldest daughter, to build a set of commercial buildings. When the artist’s family left for France, the house and many paintings were still unsold. The de Longpre era of Hollywood had lasted ten years.
The first movie studio in Hollywood opened in the former Blondeau Tavern at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, 1912 (demolished).
The Mountain View Inn stood on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard on what is now the 101 Freeway, 1912 (demolished).
Hollywood’s fledgling businesses that owed their prosperity to the artist faced ruin. New hotels, like the Mountain View Inn, needed to reinvigorate Hollywood’s tourist trade. A change in attitude toward the movie business appeared among the commercial concerns.
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p; Colonel Selig had opened Los Angeles’s first official movie studio over the foothills in Edendale (Glendale Boulevard north of Echo Park) in 1909. By 1910 other major film companies had established permanent studios in Glendale, Santa Monica, Long Beach, and downtown Los Angeles.
Frank Hoover, George Hoover’s son, had been the art director of Hollywood’s May Day parades. He operated Hollywood Prints and Art Company Hoover knew that movies meant work. To the consternation of the parishioners at the Methodist Church, Frank Hoover recommended and abetted the lease of the vacant Blondeau Tavern to a movie company in late September 1911.
David Horsley, with his comedy director Al Christie, represented the Nestor Film Company from Bayonne, New Jersey. Horsley leased the entire property from Mrs. Blondeau for thirty dollars a month. This included the tavern, stables, and a carriage house. The rear garden of the roadhouse became Nestor’s backlot. The tavern became the office. The day after moving in, Al Christie took his troupe to an orange grove at Hollywood Boulevard and El Centro Avenues and filmed a comedy short.
Within three months, fifteen other film companies arrived in Hollywood. They leased land along Sunset Boulevard where prices were not as high as on Hollywood Boulevard. Soon, all four corners of Gower and Sunset had movie companies churning out comedies, westerns and melodramas.
The studios shot on outdoor platforms under large muslin sheets to filter the sun. Actors furnished their own wardrobes. Craftsmen brought their own tools. Everyone dressed the sets. On blustery days, interior scenes looked rather windy.
A successful Brooklyn film company called Vitagraph had outgrown its year-old Santa Monica City studio. In 1912, the company bought twenty-nine acres of sheep-grazing land at the eastern end of Prospect, where they built a sprawling studio.
The Story of Hollywood Page 7